Reviewed by:

• Tales of Merlin, Arthur, and the Magic Arts: From the Welsh Chronicle of the Six Ages of the World by Elis Gruffydd
• Peter H. Goodrich

Among the most important (and lengthiest) works in the Welsh language is the universal history written by a professional soldier who spent most of his life in [End Page 102] Calais. As a trusted servant of Sir Robert Wingfield during Henry VIII’s reign, Elis Gruffydd nevertheless retained his fondness for his native tongue and homeland in north Wales. Although not a bard or university educated, he was distinctively literate, finding time among his duties to pen four works, the most important of which is the Chronicl Cwech Oes y Byd of over 2400 pages, completed in 1552 and excerpted in this new translation by Patrick K. Ford. For those who can read Welsh, it is available online from the National Library of Wales in two manuscripts: NLW MS 5276D and NLW MS 3045D.

Professor Jerry Hunter’s knowledgeable introduction provides a fine insight into Gruffydd’s life and work, providing not only the biographical facts but the flavor of what it meant to be a sixteenth-century Welshman of the lesser gentry. Professor Ford’s translation originated in a graduate reading group that was cut short by COVID-19. It is a canny selection of highlights that will be of special interest to Arthurians and those interested in British folklore. Like Ford’s earlier translations, such as the The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales (1977), which I assigned several times as a course text, this slender new volume is both clear and direct in style, while remaining faithful to the flow and even quirks of Gruffydd’s composition. Many Arthurians and Celticists have long wished for such a book.

Gruffydd spent untold hours using ‘a dizzying combination of sources [some no longer extant] in a variety of languages’ (p. 2), adding personal comments and recollections. As Ford notes, the Chronicle was inscribed in Gruffydd’s spare time— sometimes hastily—and presents the reader with difficulties beyond just length, such as non-normalized spelling, scarce punctuation, haphazard capitalization, and vagaries in pronoun reference. Both Hunter and Ford are to be commended for their scholarly stubbornness in persisting with the study of the author’s entire oeuvre and making at least this small portion of it available to modern English readers.

The translated texts are divided into three sections: ‘Earliest Times, Biblical and Ancient’ ending with ‘The Origins of Britain’; followed by ‘Merlin and Arthur’; and lastly by miscellaneous ‘Tales of Magic, Prophecy, and the Supernatural’ which include two on Gwion Bach-Taliesin that supplement Ford’s still-in-print Mabinogion volume. Ford does not always follow manuscript order, but occasionally groups related texts, for example those featuring Gwerthyrn/Vortigern. He also situates the Sword in the Stone story after Arthur’s early battles to consolidate his kingdom and Merlin’s demise before the remaining Arthurian material despite its placement later in the manuscript. One of the Arthurian texts is unique, in which Arthur gets the worse of a rivalry with the writer Gildas’ brother Huail and cross-dresses to dance with a desirable girl. Drawing from a welter of sources, Gruffydd occasionally gets something clearly wrong, as when, faced with competing versions of Merlin’s death, he writes about the Lady of the Lake that ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth says that from fear of her life she fled from the island to Gascony, from fear of the people who kept calling about Merlin’ (p. 91).

Because he employs abundant Welsh and early medieval material, it can be easy to forget that Elis is a Tudor-era chronicler, heir to rich, varied, and long-standing traditions in universal history, Arthurian legend, and early modern folklore. His [End Page 103] texts often remind us of this, as when he expresses rational skepticism regarding Merlin’s construction of Stonehenge or...

审阅者：

• 梅林、亚瑟和魔法艺术的故事：来自世界六个时代的威尔士编年史，埃利斯·格鲁菲德 (Elis Gruffydd)
• 彼得·H·古德里奇

最重要（也是最长）的威尔士语著作之一是由一位职业军人撰写的世界历史，他在加莱度过了大半生。[完第 102 页]作为亨利八世统治期间罗伯特·温菲尔德爵士值得信赖的仆人，埃利斯·格鲁菲德仍然保留着对他的母语和北威尔士家乡的热爱。尽管他没有受过吟游诗人或大学教育，但他却具有独特的文化素养，在工作之余抽出时间写了四部作品，其中最重要的是长达 2400 页的《Chronic Cwech Oes y Byd》，于 1552 年完成，并在这部新译本中摘录。帕特里克·K·福特。对于那些可以阅读威尔士语的人，可以从威尔士国家图书馆在线获取该书的两份手稿：NLW MS 5276D 和 NLW MS 3045D。

杰里·亨特教授知识渊博的介绍为格鲁菲德的生活和工作提供了深入的了解，不仅提供了传记事实，还提供了十六世纪威尔士小贵族的风味。福特教授的翻译源于一个研究生阅读小组，该小组因 COVID-19 而中断。这是精心挑选的亮点，亚瑟王和那些对英国民间传说感兴趣的人会特别感兴趣。与福特早期的翻译一样，例如我多次将其指定为课程文本的《马比诺吉和其他中世纪威尔士故事》（1977），这本细长的新书在风格上既清晰又直接，同时忠实于流程甚至怪癖格鲁菲德的作品。许多亚瑟王和凯尔特人长期以来都希望有这样一本书。

格鲁菲德花费了无数的时间，使用“各种语言的令人眼花缭乱的资源组合[有些已不复存在””（第 2 页），添加个人评论和回忆。正如福特所指出的，这部编年史是在格鲁菲德的业余时间（有时是匆忙的）中撰写的，它给读者带来了超出长度的困难，例如非规范化的拼写、稀缺的标点符号、随意的大写以及代词引用的变幻莫测。亨特和福特都因其学术上的顽固而受到赞扬，他们坚持研究作者的全部作品，并至少将其中的一小部分提供给现代英语读者。

翻译文本分为三个部分：“最早的时代、圣经和古代”，以“英国的起源”结尾；其次是“梅林和亚瑟”；最后是杂项《魔法、预言和超自然故事》，其中两本关于 Gwion Bach-Taliesin 的故事，是对福特仍在印刷的《马比诺金》卷的补充。福特并不总是遵循手稿顺序，但偶尔会对相关文本进行分组，例如以 Gwerthyrn/Vortigern 为主角的文本。他还将《石中剑》的故事置于亚瑟王为巩固王国而进行的早期战斗之后，以及梅林的灭亡之后，才将其置于剩余的亚瑟王材料之前，尽管它后来出现在手稿中。其中一篇亚瑟王文本是独一无二的，亚瑟在与作家吉尔达斯的兄弟怀尔的竞争中落败，并变装与一位令人向往的女孩跳舞。格鲁菲德从大量资料中汲取灵感，偶尔会发现一些明显错误的地方，例如，当面对梅林之死的不同版本时，他在描述湖中女士时写道，“蒙茅斯的杰弗里说，由于担心自己的生命安全，她逃离了这座岛”到加斯科尼，因为害怕那些不断打电话来谈论梅林的人（第 91 页）。

由于埃利斯使用了大量威尔士和中世纪早期的材料，人们很容易忘记他是都铎时代的编年史家，是普遍历史、亚瑟王传奇和早期现代民间传说中丰富、多样和悠久的传统的继承人。他的[完第 103 页]文本经常提醒我们这一点，因为当他对梅林建造巨石阵或……表达理性怀疑时，