Y Gododin: A Poem of the Battle of Cattraeth

In the dying light of a forgotten kingdom, a Welsh bard named Aneirin raised his voice in grief. Y Gododin is one of the oldest surviving poems in British literature, a series of elegies composed in the shadow of catastrophe: in about AD 600, the warriors of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin marched to battle at Cattraeth against overwhelming Anglo-Saxon warbands. They knew they would not all return. Aneirin loved these men, chwyrn, fierce and brilliant, and his poem preserves their names, their valor, and their terrible fates in verses that cut across fifteen centuries. The poem is fragmentary, its language half-translated from the extinct Cumbric tongue, but its power remains undiminished: here is the sound of a bard weeping for friends who fought bravely and died young, for a world that ended on a single day. This is not triumphalism. It is sorrow. It is memory. It is what endures when everything else burns.