Cornish literature

Conventional definitions of Cornish literature refer to works originally written in the Cornish language, or Kernewek, a Celtic tongue indigenous to the British Isles. Broader conceptions of Cornish literature also include works written in other languages, including English, set in the Cornwall region of southwestern England. Scholars and researchers generally restrict their endeavors to the former definition.

The production of Cornish literature peaked during a linguistic period known as Middle Cornish, which began around the turn of the thirteenth century and continued until the beginning of the seventeenth century. After 1600, the language entered its Late Cornish or Modern Cornish period, during which the continued encroachment of English increasingly endangered the Cornish tongue. As a result, relatively few texts were written in Late Cornish, and even fewer have survived into the twenty-first century.

In the twentieth century, the Cornish language experienced a period of revival, which resurrected the language from near-extinct status. This revival inspired new generations of writers and authors to compose works in Cornish, leading to a resurgence of Cornish literature across diverse literary forms. Scholars have noted that the body of literature produced since the Cornish revival now exceeds the size of the surviving body of historical Cornish literature.

Background

The course of Cornish literature relates closely to the history of the Cornish language. Belonging to the Brythonic (Brittonic) branch of the Celtic language family, Cornish shares roots with Welsh and Breton. It began to diverge from Welsh around the turn of the eighth century, during the Early Middle Ages. Scholars generally mark this divergence as the beginning of the Old Cornish linguistic period.

Old Cornish remained dominant until about 1200 when the language entered a new phase of its linguistic history known as Middle Cornish or Medieval Cornish. A significant body of Middle Cornish literature has survived into the present, including religious texts, sermons, secular literature, and folklore. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Cornish came under increasing pressure from English, which continued to consolidate its position as the dominant regional tongue. Cornish language and culture became concentrated in an ever-shrinking corner of southwestern Great Britain, stoking rising regional tensions between the dominant English majority and the Cornish minority.

Cornish has traditionally been spoken in Cornwall, a historical region in what is now southwestern England, but for many centuries, functioned as a de facto separate nation within Great Britain. Much like Wales, Cornwall was historically considered culturally and linguistically separate from England. The Cornish population became increasingly defensive of their distinctiveness and independence during the reign of King Henry VII (1457–1509), which led to a 1497 episode known as the Cornish Rebellion.

During the mid-1490s, King Henry VII fought a military campaign in northern England to fend off a challenger to his crown, who was backed by James IV, King of Scots (1473–1513). King Henry VII attempted to impose a tax on the people of Cornwall to help finance his efforts, which the Cornish people refused to pay. This led to a military confrontation between approximately 15,000 Cornish rebels and King Henry VII's English army, fought near London in June 1497. The English forces defeated the Cornish rebels, who suffered approximately one thousand casualties, including the executions of multiple rebel leaders.

The Cornish Rebellion illustrates the increasing degree of cultural, linguistic, and political encroachment that England imposed on Cornwall during the era. English words and orthographies migrated into the Cornish language at an increasing pace after another contentious confrontation between Cornwall and England that followed the 1549 passage of the Act of Uniformity by English parliament. The Act of Uniformity required religious services in all territories claimed by England, including Cornwall, to be performed in the English language. With the Cornish people generally refusing to recognize Cornwall as part of England, resistance to the Act of Uniformity's enforcement in Cornish churches was strong. During an incident known as the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, approximately 4,000 Cornish protesters aligned in a public display of defiance toward the Act of Uniformity. The protesters and aligned rebel military forces were confronted and attacked by the army of the reigning English monarch, King Edward VI (1537–1553). Approximately 4,000 Cornish dissidents were killed, ending the Cornish challenge to the Act of Uniformity.

Scholars frequently characterize the effects of the Act of Uniformity as a major turning point in the decline of the Cornish language. With the imposition of English on Cornish church services, English words and orthographies began to penetrate Cornish at an accelerated rate. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Cornish had evolved into its Late Cornish phase. Late Cornish is marked by increasing levels of Anglicization, and Cornwall was fully absorbed into England over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Dorothy Pentreath (1692–1777) is recognized as the last person who spoke Cornish fluently as a native language. Cornish continued to be spoken in isolated pockets of Cornwall during the period of English assimilation, usually as a second language. By the nineteenth century, Cornish had become functionally extinct.

Early efforts to revive Cornish date to the turn of the twentieth century. Linguists began working to reconstruct Cornish using historical texts dating to the Middle Cornish and Late Cornish periods. The project attracted little attention until the 1970s, when interest in the Cornish revival began to grow as part of a broader and politicized cultural reclamation campaign. In 2002, the United Kingdom UK) government officially recognized Cornish under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for National Minorities. After a laborious debate among Cornish cultural leaders, a standard written form of the revived Cornish language was approved in 2008. By the mid-2020s, Cornish was taught in some public schools in Cornwall, through online programs, and in community initiatives.

Overview

Old Cornish Literature

Very few works written in Old Cornish survive, with Cornish notations to Latin texts and name lists in a volume of records known as the Bodmin manumissions comprising the earliest known examples. These documents date to the Early Middle Ages, with scholars generally placing them around the tenth century. The Domesday Book, a manuscript recording the efforts of King William I (ca. 1028–1087) to conduct a survey of his conquests in Great Britain, also contains entries written in Old Cornish. Another text, the Vocabularium Cornicum, dates to approximately 1100 and contains a glossary of Old Cornish vocabulary. The Vocabularium Cornicum contains the most complete surviving known compilation of Old Cornish words.

Middle Cornish Literature

Cornish literature flourished during the Middle Cornish period, with a substantially larger number of works surviving into the present. These primarily include religious and liturgical works, as well as religious dramas belonging to the broader tradition of morality and miracle plays, a major feature of European popular culture during the High Middle Ages. Examples of these works include the 259-verse poem Passhyon agan Aroledh (The Passion of Our Lord) and An Ordinale Kernewek (The Cornish Ordinalia), a religious drama dating to around 1400.

A 4,658-line Cornish language play, written in verse and composed in the early sixteenth century, constitutes what is believed to be Great Britain's only complete written history of the life of a saint. The work, titled Bywnans Meriasek (1504; The Life of Meriasek), recounts the life of the patron saint of the Cornish town of Camborne. It is also the longest surviving literary work from the Middle Cornish period.

In 2002, researchers discovered a Middle Cornish text known as Bywnans Ke (The Life of St. Kea) in a Welsh library. Surviving portions of the text recount folktales and legends from the Arthurian mythological tradition, and the work includes a significant number of Middle Cornish words that were not previously known or reflect alternate meanings for established words. Researchers continue to study the document, which is believed to have been composed around the same period as the Bywnans Meriasek.

Late Cornish and Contemporary Cornish Literature

Works from the transitional period between Middle Cornish and Late Cornish precede the decline in literary production that defines the pre-revival Late Cornish period. Examples include the Pregothow Treager (The Treager Homilies), which dates to the mid-sixteenth century and covers a collection of sixty-six sermons translated into Cornish from English by a Christian cleric who was a native speaker of Cornish. The Pregothow Treager represents one of the only known substantial classical works of Cornish prose. Another religious play, Gwrians an Bys (The Creation of the World), dates to 1611 but was transcribed from older works.

Most of the surviving literature produced during the proper Late Cornish period prior to the twentieth-century revival of the language cover compact formats, including short works of poetic verse, songs, letters, vocabulary compilations, and manuscripts. Literary historians note the incomplete and disconnected nature of the small body of surviving original Late Cornish literature, which is largely a product of Cornwall's cultural and linguistic assimilation into England.

Since the Cornish revival of the twentieth century, authors and writers have returned to composing original works in the Cornish language. Favored forms include multiple genres of prose fiction, along with a growing body of poetry that comprises one of the most robust and energetic areas of contemporary Cornish literary composition. Wilfred Bennetto, for example, was a celebrated contemporary Cornish poet who is largely credited with writing the first full-length novel in Cornish, An Gurun Wosek a Geltya (1984; The Bloody Crown of Celtia). He was active in the ongoing revival of the Cornish language and also sought to demonstrate the Cornish language could be used to write complex texts. Many contemporary works also include Cornish translations of various works originally written in other languages, including English.

Bibliography

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