Preiddeu Annwfn

Preiddeu Annwfn or Preiddeu Annwn (English: The Spoils of Annwfn) is a cryptic poem of sixty lines found in Middle Welsh in the Book of Taliesin. The text recounts an expedition with King Arthur to Annwfn or Annwn, probably a British otherworld.

Preiddeu Annwfn is one of the best known of mediaeval British poems and English translations, in whole or in part, have been published by R. Williams (in William Forbes Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales), by Robert Graves in The White Goddess and by Roger Sherman Loomis, Herbert Pilch, John T. Koch, Marged Haycock, Sarah Higley. At some points it requires individual interpretation on the part of its translators owing to its terse style, the ambiguities of its vocabulary, its survival in a single copy of doubtful reliability, the lack of exact analogues of the tale it tells and the host of real or fancied resonances with other poems and tales.

A number of scholars have pointed out analogues in other medieval Welsh literature: some suggest that it represents a tradition that evolved into the grail of Arthurian literature. Haycock (in "The Figure of Taliesin") was the first to point out that the poem is "about Taliesin and his vaunting of knowledge," and Higley calls the poem "a metaphor of its own making—a poem about the material 'spoils' of poetic composition".