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Raphael Sackmann

A 15th century Welsh version of Dares’s Trojan War: edition with translation and commentary

In all the surviving medieval manuscripts, the so-called Ystorya Dared, the Welsh adaptation of Dares Phrygius’s De excidio Troiae historia, is transmitted within a historiographic context, especially together with Brut y Brenhinedd, the Middle Welsh version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. Although Ystorya Dared is generally considered to be a mere prelude to the chronicles of the British rulers, it is obviously part of a medieval Welsh understanding of their world, and thus deserving of a closer examination.

Therefore, my thesis aims to provide a text edition with an appropriate English translation, as well as a commentary, to facilitate further reception of, and discussion on, this rather neglected version of the ‘Troy story’. The edition will be based on three later 15^th century manuscripts which contain a hitherto not edited recension of Ystorya Dared: NLW 7006D (‘Black Book of Basingwerk’, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales), Jesus College 141 (Oxford), and Peniarth 25 (Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales).