October 2019 | Local News
MYSTERIES OF THE GODODDIN Dumbarton was neither Scottish, Pictish nor English during the stormy years which followed the end of Roman rule – it was Celtic-British. Dumbarton People’s Theatre are venturing into creepy territory with a dramatisation of Liz Lochhead’s play about Mary Shelley’s creation of the book Frankenstein (which was the name of the mad scientist responsible, not that of the Monster as often supposed). It was the year after Waterloo, and Mary, her brilliant but wacky husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the outrageous Lord Byron got together in sepulchral surroundings to see who could come up with the best Gothic horror tale... and Frankenstein was the clear winner. The show runs from October 2 to 5 in Denny Civic Theatre, and tickets, priced £5, are available from McDermids Keystore in Dumbarton High Street, from members, or at the Box Office on performance nights.
As the burgh’s name makes clear the Rock was “fortress of the Britons”, and the kingdom’s language was a form of early Welsh spoken across large areas of southern Scotland and also Cumbria.
Strathclyde somehow held firm while Celtic-British kingdoms in what is now England fell to waves of Germanic invaders – only to be eventually subsumed within the emerging kingdom of Scotland.
Much of the period is shrouded in mystery (hence “the Dark Ages”), but we know that
The first written mention of Arthur – whoever he really was – is said to appear in the great epic early medieval poem Y Goddodin, which is the theme of the Lennox Heritage Society meeting on Wednesday, October 16. It tells of how a band (or small army) of elite warriors ventured south from their kingdom in southeast Scotland (next door neighbour to Strathclyde) to take on the invaders, only to be slaughtered.
The great epic is literally the stuff of legend, albeit one that perhaps conceals a rich seam of distinctly unglamorous truth. Speaker Gwen Jones-Edwards will be helping the audience to peer through the swirling mists of time to fathom what this famous epic poem can tell us about early medieval Scotland, and a realm which only finally began to take on the core of its modern form in the 9th century. Were these Gododdin warriors Christians fending off barbaric heathens, and were they the last custodians of the civil and military practices of the Late Roman Empire? Lacking solid information we have to guess at the truth behind high-flown poetic phrases which can be interpreted in different ways, and it is tempting to stray into “Da Vinci Code” fantasy territory – but the quest for the elusive reality is nevertheless fascinating and ongoing. Society meetings are at 7pm in the Concord Centre in Dumbarton, and annual subscription is £10 – or you can pay £2 for a single talk.
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