Texts in Transition: Intermediality in Peredur Son of Efrog and Cynan Jones’s Bird, Blood, Snow

Aleksander Bednarski

doi:10.18290/rh206811-2

Aleksander Bednarski John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7731-5850

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh206811-2

Keywords: Welsh writing in English, Cynan Jones, Bird, Blood, Snow, Mabinogion, Peredur

Abstract

This paper examines Cynan Jones’s novel Bird, Blood, Snow in the context of the medieval Welsh prose romance Peredur Son of Efrog, part of the collection of medieval Welsh tales called the Mabinogion. The provenance of the original tale has been widely debated as it survives in four versions and has parallels both with French literature (most notably Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval) and native Welsh storytelling tradition. This article focuses on the visual insets present in the medieval tale and Jones’s text, and demonstrates that the complex network of intertextual relationships between the multiple versions of “Peredur,” along with the trends in the academic debate centred around it, is reflected in Jones’s novel by means of the compositional devices characterised by the oscillation between the verbal and the visual.

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