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The Book of Taliesin by Rowan Williams & Gwyneth Lewis

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The Book of Taliesin

Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain

by Rowan Williams & Gwyneth Lewis

Narrator David Sibley

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Length 6 hours 16 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the authors

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by David Sibley, best known for Henry V, War & Peace and Silent Witness. This definitive recording is translated by, and includes an introduction by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan William.

Taliesin's is one of the most important names in all Welsh literature - and one of its greatest mysteries. He has fascinated and inspired some of our greatest poets, including Tennyson and Robert Graves. He is a poet; a shapeshifter; a seer; a chronicler of battles fought, by sword and with magic, between the ancient kingdoms of the fifth- and sixth-century British Isles; a bridge between old Welsh mythologies and the new Christian theology; and a figure whose literary legend culminated with the compilation in thirteenth-century North Wales of The Book of Taliesin, an anthology gathering the work of some 700 years of anonymous hands.

In the first volume since 1915 to gather the The Book of Taliesin in its entirety, Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams's artfully accessible translation makes these outrageous, swaggering and joyful poems available to a new generation of readers.

© Gwyneth Lewis, Rowan Williams 2019 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Classics Poetry

Rowan Williams is the former Archbishop of Canterbury and currently Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. The author of many books from The Wound of Knowledge to The Tragic Imagination, he has published several poetry collections and is a contributor to the New Statesman.

Gwyneth Lewis is an award-winning poet and was the National Poet of Wales from 2005 to 2006. Her books of poetry in Welsh and English include Chaotic Angels, Sparrow Tree and Treiglo (Mutating) and, in prose, The Meat Tree: New Stories from the Mabinogion. She is freelance and teaches at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.