Red Book of Hergest - Definition

The Red book of Hergest (Welsh: Llyfr coch Hergest) is one of the most important medieval Welsh manuscripts. It includes both prose and poetry and was written around 1382-1410. It is now at Jesus College Oxford (MS 111), a gift of the Rev. Thomas Wilkins in 1701.

One of the several copyists responsible for the ms has been identified as Hywel Fychan fab Hywel Goch of Buellt. He is known to have worked for Hopcyn ap Tomas ab Einion (ca.1330 - after 1403) of Ynysforgan, Swansea, and it is possible that the manuscript was compiled for him. The manuscript's name derives from the fact that it is bound in red leather and from its association with Hergest Court (Plâs Hergest) in Herefordshire in the Welsh Marches, from about 1465 until the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The first part of the manuscript contains prose, including the Mabinogion, for which this is one of the manuscript sources (the other being the White book of Rhydderch), other tales, history texts (inlcuding a Welsh translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae), and other various texts including a series of Triads. The rest of the manuscript contains poetry, especially from the period of court poetry known as Poetry of the Princes (Welsh:Gogynfeirdd or Beirdd y Tywysogion).

J. R. R. Tolkien borrowed the title for the Red Book of Westmarch, the imagined legendary source of Tolkien’s tales.

Sources

• 'Red book of Hergest'. In Meic Stephens (Ed.) (1998), The new companion to the literature of Wales. Cardiff : University of Wales Press. ISBN 0708313833.
• Parry, Thomas (1955), A history of Welsh literature. Translated by H. Idris Bell. Oxford : Clarendon Press.

External links

• Red Book of Hergest (http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=jesus&manuscript=ms111), or Jesus College MS 111, is part of the Early Manuscripts at Oxford University digitisation project; reprints relevant section of Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on manuscripts in the Welsh language, vol. II part I, (London, 1902), describing the MS and its contents; Gives access to colour images of the entire manuscript.
• Mary Jones, Celtic Encyclopedia (http://www.maryjones.us/jce/hergest.html): Llyfr Coch Hergest