Kristen Mills presents “David Jones and the Medieval Welsh Past” at Dies Medievales

Kristen’s presentation at the Dies Medievales Conference, held at the University of Bergen on September 25-6, explores how the modernist poet David Jones’ Arthurian poem The Sleeping Lord draws on medieval Welsh texts to reimagine the contemporary British landscape as a sleeping ancestor while ‘mythologizing’ the ecological impact of industrialization on the Welsh landscape. The focus of this paper is on the depiction of the dead, buried and unburied, in the poem, and it considers how Jones' text adapts medieval concerns about burial, memory, and the physical integrity of the corpse to address modern concerns about environmental degradation and the impact of colonialism on Wales and Welsh culture.