The Taliesin Sourcebook

The story of the ancient Welsh poet Taliesin and his transformation from the lowly pot-stirrer Gwion Bach to the radiant-browed, omniscient Chief Poet of the West by the power of Ceridwen's cauldron of awen plays a central role in the spiritual lives of many thousands of modern Pagans and Druids. Individual poems from the corpus such as Preideu Annwfyn ("The Spoils of Annwfn") and Kat Godeu ("The Battle of the Trees") have assumed an almost totemic siginificance in the discussion of the origins of the bards and their craft and feed into many people's sense of belonging in the Pagan tradition. It is a pity then that so much of this discussion depends on out-dated and woefully inaccurate translations of the original Welsh texts. The main aim of this book, therefore, is to present modern, reliable translations of all the medieval poems assigned to or concerning Taliesin together with all three variant versions of the Early Modern prose tales known variously as Ystoria Taliesin ("The Story of Taliesin") or Hanes Taliesin ("The History of Taliesin"). Translations of medieval court poems with a bearing on the development of the Taliesin persona are also included in the appendices. An attempt has been made to return to the poems their unity as works of art, rather than regarding them as texts to be deciphered and dissected.