As someone who writes a great deal of heroic fantasy set in a Dark Age Britain (or an ‘early medieval’ Britain, as the scholars would have it now, but they have no ear for poetry) with the serial numbers filed off, it behoves me to have some idea of what those ages were actually like.

That’s not quite the same as historical knowledge pure and simple. If I could reel off a list of every major battle and every king or queen of significance from 600 to 1060 AD, it wouldn’t help me at all when it came time to sit down and start writing about men and women whose lives were vastly different to my own in just about every respect— and that’s even before I put the monsters in. Research, sadly, is a necessity.

But I don’t want to be overwhelmed by detail—learning about what these people ate, how they dressed and how they worshiped is all good, necessary and interesting in and of itself, but what I want to do is something not quite covered by the standard textbooks; I want to recreate the feel of an age.

Separated as I am from the objects of my study by ten centuries and a language they would no doubt regard as the alien tongue of an invader, that is no easy task.

Thankfully, I have the recently-published The Book of Taliesin. It’s a new translation of a thirteenth century book of Welsh poems; the Llyvyr Taliesin (or ‘Book of Taliesin’, for all those sadly burdened by the crushing inability to speak the language of Heaven). You can thank National Poet of Wales Gwyneth Lewis and ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (yes, really) for their hard work in translating it for a Saxon-speaking readership.

The poems themselves date from as early as the sixth century all the way to the twelfth. It’s quite a treasure hoard of riches. Here there are poems of praise, poems of prophecy, poems of lament, poems that boast of secret bardic knowledge and poems of praise for the Almighty—and all of it in words that are stark, clear, and, more often than not, rather breathtaking.

If Lewis and Williams have not reached into the mists of time and brought the old poet himself back into our day to sing his songs anew, they have done something quite like it.

Taliesin the man was probably an early British poet who lived and worked in the sixth century, who was transmuted by the centuries into a legendary, if not mythical, figure; a child transformed into a piece of grain, consumed, reborn, set adrift on the ocean, raised by Merlin and a bard of King Arthur himself.

When later poets performed under his name, they were not laying claim to a historical identity so much as they were claiming to inhabit a persona; as Lewis and Williams would have it in their introduction, a Celtic shaman filled with awen, or the gift of poetic inspiration. As the poet boasts in Poet’s Corner:

“I’m a cell, I’m a splinter – I’m a shapeshifter
A library of song – A sanctuary for the reader…”

Taliesin is a sage, a bard and a magician. He stands well above the common poets of the world. He’s the man that knows the secrets of the cosmos, as in An Unfriendly Crowd:

“I know all the levels
Between Heaven and earth…
Why silver glitters
And the brook runs dark,
Why breath is black
And the liver’s full of blood…”

This is strong, heady stuff. These poems come from a world very different from our own—a world in which the rivers, the forests and even the stones themselves all have their secrets. An enchanted world.

This sense of the magic and the sacred that lies behind the mundane does not result in a kind of esoteric detachment from ordinary life. If this is mysticism it is the mysticism of the masses. These are not words to be confined to a lifeless page, carefully studied and dissected, but sung before crowds, preferably slightly drunk after a draught of good, strong mead.

A considerable portion of these poems or songs are praise poetry. Poets would make a good living by finding themselves a patron—a warlord for whom they would be expected to sing songs of tribute extolling their bravery, generosity and skill in battle, as in Urien of Erechwydd:

“Leader supreme,
Most glorious king…
The strongest of fighters
The English know him…
Had death at his hands
And many afflictions:
Their houses burning,
Their chattels stolen…”

It may be objected that in such circumstances the poet could hardly be expected to provide an accurate picture of events or people; some might even go so far as to suggest that deceit was an integral part of flattering murderous brutes who lived at the edge of the blade. While this regrettably may be true, it has also provided us with some excellent poetry.

The historical background for these poems lies in the struggle between the Saxon invaders of Britain and the natives, in addition to the general chaotic violence that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire (sadly for the Celtic cause the British rarely needed a good excuse to fight amongst themselves). War, violence and death are a near constant theme, as in The Battle of Argoed Llwyfain:

“We shall raise up our ramparts higher than mountains,
And lift our faces above their ridge,
And raise our weapons above our men’s heads…
There, before Argoed Llwyfain,
An abundance of corpses,
Crows red with warriors’ blood…”

Savage pleasure in bloody victory over one’s foes does not exist without lamentation over defeat and loss; and considering who won the struggle between Saxon and Briton, it is remarkable there isn’t a great deal more of it in the collection. A fine example is the Lament for Owain, Son of Urien:

“…Rheged’s prince hidden deep under heavy turf…
An underground cell for this glorious hero –
His spear in flight like the wings of dawn,
You’ll find none to compare with him…”

But even in those bloody days life did not consist entirely of war. There are poems here praising the ordinary blessings of everyday life (mead and beer get a song apiece). My favourite would have to be The Sweetness of Taliesin. There is nothing particularly complex or ambitious about it—a simple catalogue of the sweet things of life, but I find a peculiar comfort in knowing that the basic pleasures of the world do not change a great deal, even as the centuries pass:

“Sweet is the sun on clouds in the sky;
Sweet, too, is light on the evening’s brow.

Sweet is a thick-maned stallion in a herd;
Sweet, too, is the warp of a spider’s web…

Sweet is the summer, the livelong day;
Sweet, too, is visiting the one I love…

Sweetest of all sweet things I can say;
Reconciling with God on Judgement Day.”

That final note of religiosity is no afterthought. Fear of God’s judgement and Hope of His mercy are found throughout the collection. Petitionary prayers for inspiration can be found at the start of boasting songs meant to demonstrate the poet’s skill and knowledge over his challengers. Paeans of praise to warlords include tributes to their Christian charity as well as their ability to slaughter their foes, take their chattel and burn their homes.

A fair number are purely devotional in nature, as in Lord of Heaven, Permit My Prayer to You—a poem that displays both a touching demonstration of faith and a brutal illustration of the sort of death all too many could expect instead of a peaceful end on one’s deathbed:

“And before I come to a bloody end,
And before my mouth becomes a foaming wound,
And before I’m made to touch a coffin’s boards,
May my soul receive His wholesome food.”

These songs come from an age of faith—faith in a loving, all-powerful God who supposedly had a marked interest in the well-being of His children. Some modern day readers may question the plausibility of this faith, surrounded as it was by seeming evidence to the contrary.

But that, I think, would be a grave error. We live in a far gentler and far more comfortable era. The same questions of God, good and evil (and, I would argue, the evidence available to us) have not changed a great deal in the intervening centuries, but there is one crucial difference—we take our religion or our atheism at our leisure.

The world in which the Book of Taliesin was written was one in which this leisure did not exist. Questions of life, death and salvation were not pale and lifeless topics of detached philosophical inquiry but urgent things that demanded answers—Pascal’s Wager with a blade to one’s neck.

There is much more I would like to talk about and quote to you from this wonderful book but frankly I would never be able to do it justice. Whether you have any interest or none at all in early medieval Britain, whether you read poetry or not, whether you enjoy heroic fantasy or not, I urge you to read it anyway and be transported to an enchanted land in the company of a true magician.

Harry Piper was born, brought up and currently lives in south Wales. With such a geographic and cultural background he knew early on he could only write in one of two genres—grim social realism or heroic fantasy. He chose the latter, and has been much happier for it. His story “The Thing in the Field” appears in Warlords, Warlocks & Witches. DMR Books will publish a collection of his tales later in 2020.