King Arthur, according to legends, was a king of Britain. He is a folk hero and a central figure in the medieval literary tradition known as the Matter of Britain.
Jesus College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. It is in the centre of the city, on a site between Turl Street, Ship Street, Cornmarket Street and Market Street. The college was founded by Queen Elizabeth I of England on 27 June 1571. A major driving force behind the establishment of the college was Hugh Price, a churchman from Brecon in Wales. The oldest buildings, in the first quadrangle, date from the 16th and early 17th centuries; a second quadrangle was added between about 1640 and about 1713, and a third quadrangle was built in about 1906. Further accommodation was built on the main site to mark the 400th anniversary of the college, in 1971, and student flats have been constructed at sites in north and east Oxford. A fourth quadrangle was completed in 2021.
Peredur is the name of a number of men from the boundaries of history and legend in sub-Roman Britain. The Peredur who is most familiar to a modern audience is the character who made his entrance as a knight in the Arthurian world of Middle Welsh prose literature.
Sir John Rhŷs, was a Welsh scholar, fellow of the British Academy, Celticist and the first professor of Celtic at Oxford University.
Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson was an English linguist and a translator who specialised in the Celtic languages. He demonstrated how the text of the Ulster Cycle of tales, written circa AD 1100, preserves an oral tradition originating some six centuries earlier and reflects Celtic Irish society of the third and fourth century AD. His Celtic Miscellany is a popular standard.
Celtic studies or Celtology is the academic discipline occupied with the study of any sort of cultural output relating to the Celtic-speaking peoples. This ranges from linguistics, literature and art history, archaeology and history, the focus lying on the study of the various Celtic languages, living and extinct. The primary areas of focus are the six Celtic languages currently in use: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.
Richard John Carwardine is a Welsh historian and academic. He specialises in American politics and religion in the era of the American Civil War.
The Jesus Chair of Celtic is a professorship in Celtic studies at the University of Oxford within the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. The holder is also a Professorial Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. Just six people have held the chair since it was established in 1876, the first of whom was Sir John Rhys. The previous post-holder, Thomas Charles-Edwards, retired in 2011. An appeal to ensure the continuation of the chair successfully raised £3.25 million by the end of 2018, and in 2020 the post was taken up by its current incumbent David Willis.
David Ellis Evans FBA was a Welsh scholar and academic. Having lectured at the University of Wales, Swansea, he returned to his alma mater the University of Oxford, serving as Jesus Professor of Celtic from 1978 until he retired in 1996.
Sir Keith Vivian Thomas is a Welsh historian of the early modern world based at Oxford University. He is best known as the author of Religion and the Decline of Magic and Man and the Natural World. From 1986 to 2000, he was president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Colin H. Williams FLSW is a senior research associate at the VHI, l St Edmund's College, the University of Cambridge, UK. He was formerly a research professor in sociolinguistics, and later an honorary professor in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University.
Richard Sharpe,, Hon. was a British historian and academic, who was Professor of Diplomatic at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. His broad interests were the history of medieval England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. He had a special concern with first-hand work on the primary sources of medieval history, including the practices of palaeography, diplomatic and the editorial process, as well as the historical and legal contexts of medieval documents. He was the general editor of the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, and editor of a forthcoming edition of the charters of King Henry I of England.
Ralph Alan Griffiths is a historian and an emeritus professor at Swansea University.
Ingimundr, also known as Hingamund, Igmunt, Ingimund, was a tenth century Viking warlord. In 902, Irish sources record that the Vikings were driven from Dublin. It is almost certainly in the context of this exodus that Ingimundr appears on record. He is recorded to have led the abortive settlement of Norsemen on Anglesey, before being driven out from there as well. He appears to have then led his folk to the Wirral peninsula, where the English allowed him to settle his followers. Ingimundr's invasion of Anglesey may be the most notable Viking attack in Welsh history.
Daniel Huws FLSW is the world's leading authority of the last hundred years on Welsh manuscripts, with contributions that are held to represent a significant advance on those of John Gwenogvryn Evans.
Nancy Margaret Edwards, is a British archaeologist and academic, who specialises in medieval archaeology and ecclesiastical history. From 2008 to 2020, she was Professor of Medieval Archaeology at Bangor University; having retired, she is now emeritus professor.
Ymadawiad Arthur is a Welsh-language poem, some 350 lines in length, by T. Gwynn Jones. It won its author the Chair at the National Eisteddfod in 1902 but was several times heavily revised by him in later years. It portrays King Arthur's last hours with his companion Bedwyr at the battle of Camlann and his final departure for Afallon. Ymadawiad Arthur is a hugely influential work, widely held to have opened a new era for Welsh-language poetry, marking the beginning of the early 20th-century renaissance of Welsh literature.
"Gorhoffedd Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd", sometimes known in English as "Hywel's Boast", has historically been considered a poem by the mid-12th-century prince, warrior and poet Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd. However, some scholars now believe it to be two quite separate poems by Hywel which have become fused together in the process of manuscript transmission. It is his best-known work. In the first half the poet expresses his love of his native Gwynedd – its scenery, its men and women – and boasts of his own prowess in defending them; in the second he praises several Welsh ladies and tells us how many of them are sexual conquests of his. According to the writer Gwyn Williams, "The sharpness and clarity of the North Wales landscape has never been so well caught in words, nor have tenderness and humour been better mingled in the expression of love".
Helen Fulton is currently professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol.
