From Storytelling to Sermons: The Oral Narrative Tradition of Wales

As someone whose main interest is storytelling in medieval Wales, orality, aurality, and performance are key issues in any analysis of the Middle Welsh prose corpus, especially in matters relating to style and structure. The tales reflect their sources in cyfarwyddyd (traditional lore), and as such give us an insight into the oral performances of the medieval Welsh cyfarwydd (storyteller). Ideas regarding the conventions of an oral performance can be explored by analyzing the narratives of twentieth-century storytellers collected by the Museum of Welsh Life, an area that needs further detailed study. Recently, there have been attempts to suggest the chronology of manuscript versions of certain medieval prose texts by recourse to their “oral ” features, and theories proposed regarding the changes that occur as an oral tale establishes itself in the new literary medium. However, more research needs to be undertaken before we can use features such as tagging conventions, conjunctive cohesion, and structure of formulae as benchmarks. A University of Wales project i