Texts

Ymddiddan a fv rhwng yr holwr a’r gigfran
verse beg. Dydd da i ti y Gigfran

  • Early Modern Welsh
  • verse

Versified Welsh version of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, attributed to Richard ap John of Scorlegan (16th century).

First words (verse)
  • Dydd da i ti y Gigfran
Author
Ascribed to: Richard ap John of Scorlegan
Richard ap John of Scorlegan
(fl. 1578–1611)
No short description available

See more
Manuscripts
Language
  • Early Modern Welsh
Date

1586?

Form
verse (primary)
Textual relationships
(Possible) sources: The buke of John MaundevilleThe buke of John Maundeville

Middle English version of an Old French text on the travels of one Sir John Mandeville in the Middle and Near East.

Related: Welsh prose MandevilleWelsh prose Mandeville

A Welsh prose rendition of The Buke of John Mandeville. Its source has been identified as Thomas East’s printed edition published in 1568.

Classification

Keywords

MandevilleMandeville
...

Travel literatureTravel literature
...

Sources

Primary sources Text editions and/or modern translations – in whole or in part – along with publications containing additions and corrections, if known. Diplomatic editions, facsimiles and digital image reproductions of the manuscripts are not always listed here but may be found in entries for the relevant manuscripts. For historical purposes, early editions, transcriptions and translations are not excluded, even if their reliability does not meet modern standards.

[dipl. ed.] Mittendorf, Ingo, and David Willis, Corpws hanesyddol yr iaith Gymraeg 1500–1850 = A historical corpus of the Welsh language, 1500–1850, Online: University of Cambridge, 2004–. URL: <https://www.celticstudies.net>. 
abstract:
The Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language 1500–1850 is a collection of Welsh texts from the period 1500–1850 in an electronic format. It is the result of a project to encode Welsh texts of the period funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB Resource Enhancement Award RE11900) in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge between 2001 and 2004. The project's Principal Investigator was David Willis, while Ingo Mittendorf was the project's Research Associate. The aim of the project was to begin to provide an electronically searchable resorce for use in linguistic, literary and historical research, of a kind similar to existing corpora already available for languages such as English, French, German and Irish. The Cambridge project dealt with the early modern Welsh period. Other projects at the University of Wales have provided or are providing similar materials for earlier periods. Although the project came to an end in 2004, it is hoped that resources will become available to allow future extension of the corpus.

The corpus is a planned corpus, and aims to reflect the rich diversity of the texts attested in Welsh during the period 1500–1850 by including texts and samples of texts from different stylistic levels and of varying geographical provenance. A number of the texts included are not available in adequate modern editions or are available only in modernised form, hence the corpus also provides access to a number of texts in an easily available form for the first time. It is hoped that this will encourage further linguistic, literary and historical research on these texts.

The corpus is encoded using Extensive Markup Language (XML) in a format that conforms to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This should ensure its long-term preservation, and also allows flexibility in the way the texts of the corpus can be displayed and used. The corpus files can be viewed online here, and are also available for download here in a number of formats: as plain XML files; as viewable HTML documents in two formats (diplomatic and edited); as corpus files designed for use with the Concordance software package; and as web-based indexes and concordances. Although the corpus contains no grammatical tagging, the XML files contain some encoding designed to facilitate the usefulness of the corpus as a source for linguistic research. This concerns mainly spelling and graphical variation. Original spelling is maintained, but tagging for scribal errors and extreme orthographic variation is included, and is used in the indexes and concordances. Other editorial conventions are documented here.

The corpus is arranged into different groups of text types in order to represent the stylistic diversity of the Welsh language, while allowing for differences in the specific range of text types actually available at different periods. The texts therefore include drama, personal letters, ballads, political (didactic) prose, scripture, historical narrative, narrative prose, and religious prose. For each text a representative sample of approximately 15,000 words is included. With texts whose total length is less that around 20,000 words, and also in the case of dramatic texts (the interludes) we have generally chosen to include the entire text. Overall the corpus contains around 420,000 words from 30 texts.
(source: Website (8 April 2018))
[‘Teithie Syr Sion Mandefyl’] Transcribed by Ingo Mittendorf from Peniarth 218. direct link
[dipl. ed.] Davies, William Beynon, “Siôn Mawndfil yn Gymraeg”, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 5:4 (1931, 1929–1931): 287–327.
Edited from NLW 1553A.
Translation wanted

Secondary sources (select)

Conley, Kassandra Leighann, “Looking towards India: nativism and orientalism in the literature of Wales, 1300-1600”, PhD thesis, Harvard University, 2014.  
Chapters: I. Building a Welsh vocabulary of wonder: the role of mirabilia in medieval Welsh prose -- II. Olion Cewri: Galfridian history and early modern Welsh identity -- III. The relics of British wonder in the Tudor landscape -- IV. The relics of British wonder in the new world -- V. The anxiety of travel in sixteenth century Wales: the cases of John Mandeville and Alexander the Great -- Epilogue.
abstract:

After the conquest of 1282, Wales increasingly fell under the dominion of England and in 1535, the first Laws in Wales Act officially annexed the country. During this period of political and legal instability, Welsh men and women fought to regain independence, a struggle that led to the development of a nascent national identity. For many authors, this identity was fundamentally rooted in the topography of Wales and the mythical histories concerning the cultivation of its land. This interest in native mirabilia corresponded with a period of increased availability of English and continental geographical treatises and travelogues that provided Welsh authors with a new vocabulary for discussing wonder. Medieval and early modern Welsh authors incorporated these exotic geographies into their accounts of native landscapes in order to differentiate Wales from England and argue for a sense of Welsh cultural exceptionalism based in its alterity.

Dash.harvard.edu – PDF: <link>
Davies, William Beynon, “Siôn Mawndfil yn Gymraeg”, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 5:4 (1931, 1929–1931): 287–327.
Contributors
Dennis Groenewegen
Page created
April 2022, last updated: June 2023