Heledd 2025

The Canu Heledd, ‘Songs of Helled’, are a sequence of over a hundred short verses – epigrammatic three-line poems of the kind called englynion in Welsh, one of the oldest forms of Welsh poetic composition. They date from (probably) the tenth century, but they imagine events from some three centuries earlier, in an age of border warfare: the main speaker, Heledd, laments the death of her brother Cynddylan, ruler of a small border territory somewhere near Shrewsbury, at the hands of marauding warbands. Repetitive, compressed, unrelieved, they are among the unchallenged masterpieces of medieval Welsh verse.

Their evocation of the human cost of violence is intensely contemporary. In these versions of the opening sections, I have removed the local names and relaxed the historical specifics a little. The ‘grey-headed eagles’ of the original lose their precise outline to suggest other kinds of predation (such as drones); the laments for ‘Tref Wen’, literally the ‘white’ or ‘shining’ or ‘blessed’ town, become laments for what was once simply a ‘good place to live’. The unyieldingly bleak repetitions in the verses of the first section are allowed to collapse and tentatively re-form. Without taking them totally out of their home territory, not much is needed to hear these verses in women’s voices from Sudan, Gaza, or Ukraine.

Tonight my brother’s home is dark.
The fires are out, Nowhere to lie down.
               I shall stop crying soon, I promise.

Tonight my brother’s home is dark.
The fires are out. The lights are off for good.
               God stop me going ...