They comprise the most famous of the early Welsh cycles of englynion about heroes of post-Roman North Britain.
As edited by Jenny Rowland, the contents of Canu Llywarch Hen are as follows:[1] The poems contemplate martial, masculine culture, fate, and old age from a critical standpoint.
It is usually assumed that they must have been accompanied by some kind of prose narrative, to which they provided emotional depth; but this is not certain.
[3] The poems are attested principally in the late fourteenth-century Red Book of Hergest.
They were also included in the White Book of Rhydderch, but are now lost due to damage to the manuscript.
However, they are attested in two later manuscripts descended from the White Book, Peniarth 111 (made by John Jones of Gellillyfdy in 1607), whose spelling is very close to the White Book's, and London, British Library, Add.
[5] The first copy, NLW 4973a, derives from a lost manuscript closer to the White Book than the Red.
The second copy, NLW 4973b, is more complex and may represent a conflation of multiple medieval sources, but seems to have at least some independent value as a witness to the lost archetype of the poems.
[6] Despite surviving first in fourteenth-century manuscripts and in largely Middle Welsh orthography, the poems are thought mostly to have been composed in Old Welsh and transmitted orally and/or in manuscript, due to their archaic style and occasionally archaic spelling.
Jenny Rowland judges that the two poems to Llywarch's son Gwên ('Gwên' and 'Marwnad Gwên') belong among the earliest stratum of saga-englynion, of the late eighth to the mid-ninth century, whereas some of the poems to his other sons are 'very late' (perhaps the twelfth century).
[7] Llywarch Hen himself may have been a historical figure—he appears in early Welsh royal genealogies, which situate him in sixth-century north Britain as a cousin of Urien Rheged (the subject of the stylistically similar Canu Urien).
[8] An example of the Canu Llyrwarch Hen is the poem entitled 'Gwên and Llywarch' by Rowland:[9]
Ny chollaf dy wyneb trin wosep wr pan wisc glew yr ystre.
Yr ergryt aghen rac angwyr lloegyr ny lygraf vym mawred.
Running is a wave along the beach; soon intentions break — ?a scant protection in battle — frequent is fleeing by big talkers.
Waves spread out around the bank of a fortress, and I intend that there will be a broken, shattered shield before I retreat.
When I was the age of the youth over there who wears his spurs of gold it would be swiftly that I rushed to the spear.