Y Gododdin

" There was food for the ravens, the raven there did triumph."

I'm sad to admit this is my first gamble into Celtic older reading. I tried to imagine this as a bard song, something sung at a community hall area where everyone is drunk on mead (beer) and telling stories.

And this is quite a story. So many deaths, so many widows. There is so much blood on the ground, you can almost see it all. The poem is well done but I"m sure there are about a 1000 other details I missed since I'm not used to reading like this.

I think the piece that kept me going was just imagining the Raven Boys digging through old poems of war and really digging all the references to wolves and birds of prey - and of course, Ravens.

The version I had (Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, editor) has extensive notes and a modern English translation of all the extant texts. However, the texts are so broken up with notes that I would not recommend this edition to people who just want to read the poem.

Y Gododdin: Britain's Oldest Heroic Poem (Welsh Classics)by A. O. H. Jarman: An excellent edition with Welsh and English on facing pages, this is the one I turn to first of the six versions I have. It includes 116 pages of introduction, a full glossary of Welsh words, and a list of the heroes' names.