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The Antipodes between Classical and Medieval Welsh and Irish Tradition

There is evidence for the uninterrupted preservation of classical learning on the Antipodes from antiquity right through to the later Middle Ages. Ultimately it stems from the systematization proposed by Crates, it was passed on by Macrobius and Martianus Capella, and then further mediated by Servius’ theory concerning the eschatological nature of these regions (itself dependent on Vergil and on Neoplatonic beliefs). Servius’ account, which was closely associated with other Neoplatonic models of the austral celestial hemisphere as the realm of Pluto and Persephone, was amalgamated, in due course, with insular (Welsh – with an off shoot in Breton – and Irish) traditional concepts of the Otherworld, finally resulting in a specific form of mythical geography and ‘ethnography’ of the Otherworld. This interaction of classical learning and native tradition exemplifies an overarching phenomenon, that of the cosmological interpretation of the location of the Otherworld, which arose through a specific hermeneutical procedure that clearly has its origin in antiquity. It should be noted, however, that the process we have observed is not confined to north-western Europe in the High Middle Ages, but is the manifestation of a much wider scholarly practice that is characterized by the use of this particular interpretative framework. At the same time, it seems that the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were a period when this exegetical tradition gained particular popularity in the British Isles or, perhaps more accurately, north- western Europe. During this relatively short period there appeared, within the confines of this region, a number of texts containing references to an antipodean Otherworld invoked in the context of native traditions: texts belonging to the Arthurian tradition (Étienne de Rouen and Chrétien de Troyes, together with Guillaume de Rennes), to which the Otranto mosaic needs to be added, also the accounts contained in the work of Welsh-Norman and Anglo-Norman clerical-courtier authors (Giraldus Cambrensis, Gervase of Tilbury, and Walter Map), various texts belonging to or stemming from Irish tradition, a twelfth-century Dutch/ German version of the Voyage of St Brendan, and, finally, perhaps also the Welsh ‘Preiddeu Annwn’, a work attributed to the mythical sixth-century bard Taliesin, but composed in an age when the interpretative strategies apparent in it were current in north-western Europe in particular and in medieval thinking more generally. As promised in the introduction, I have attempted to bring into sharper focus the testimonies suggestive of a cosmological interpretation of the location of the native Otherworld in medieval north-western European literature. In the course of the investigation it was possible to identify a hitherto unrecognized instance of the adaptation of traditional accounts of the Otherworld current in medieval Welsh lore to contemporary geographical learning concerning the region of the Antipodes. This adaptation appears in the work of the early thirteenth-century Welsh court poet Prydydd y Moch, the most probable author of a major part of the corpus of poetry attributed to the legendary sixth-century Welsh bard Taliesin. At the same time, my interpretation of the relevant passages from this corpus of poetry supports Marged Haycock’s persuasive attribution of these poems in the Book of Taliesin to Prydydd y Moch. Another hitherto neglected, but not entirely overlooked instance of a cosmological interpretation of the location of the Irish Otherworld could be identified in an episode belonging to the original twelfth-century Dutch/German recension of the Voyage of St Brendan. Whether a cosmological interpretation was already present in the author’s Irish source that located native underwater and subterraneous Otherworld(s) at the Antipodes, or it was the author himself who employed this hermeneutic framework, cannot be ascertained at the moment. The parallel case of Prydydd y Moch/Taliesin would make the latter a more probable explanation, since the author of the original Reise version of this text was writing in an age when such interpretative strategies were current both in his immediate geographical/cultural surroundings and in Christian Europe as a whole.

Antipodes, Classical, Medieval Welsh, Irish

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