Insults and Compliments in Medieval Welsh Prose Tales: A Case Study

Abstract

The Welsh prose tales present a society where a person’s honour could be impaired by way of insults and consequently cause shame, an action that, according to the Welsh laws, demanded recompense known as sarhaed (‘insult price’). This agreement between law and prose provides grounds for the mutual influence between these two categories, not in the least as some of the passages within the laws appear almost verbatim in the prose tales. The similarities between the genres of prose and law, as well as the possibility to insult a person and therewith cause a loss of status, have given rise to the main question whether the insults and compliments in the prose tales are derivative of actual societal norms and values as specified by the laws. And where the laws give examples of insult, contemporaneous Welsh praise poetry provides a baseline for specific commendable characteristics such as generosity, wisdom, and beauty, which occur to some degree in prose as well.