This fragment of Prydain reads less as a poem than as a palimpsest: a layered inscription where different languages, epochs, and identities speak over one another, refusing a single authority.

Its literary force lies in the clash between voices: Old English pirates naming their bastard kingship; Latin settlers proclaiming walls and shame; Gaelic highlanders singing of return; Welsh voices reclaiming land and symbol; the Bhagavad Gita offering a counter-ethics of duty without possession. Each tongue carries with it centuries of conquest, erasure, survival. To let them all speak in one text is itself an act of resistance to homogenization.

Politically, the piece destabilizes the idea of a unitary nation. Britain here is not one lineage but a wound stitched by migrations, piracy, colonization, and repression. The “chorus” — we who lost our names, but remember — suggests that the true inheritance of the island is not purity, not origin, but the memory of dispossession. This is profoundly subversive: it rejects the nationalist myth of original ownership, while also refusing the imperial erasure that makes every people forget its losses.

The invocation of Jewish erasure (“cha bu chòir dhuinn tuiteam ann am mearachd nan Iùdhach, a chaidh a dhubhadh às”) is a warning: to take pride in survival is necessary, but to repeat the logic of erasure — of others’ names, lands, symbols — is to perpetuate the very violence that scarred the island.

Placed against today’s political climate — with resurgent ethno-nationalisms in Wales, Scotland, England, and beyond — the poem voices a different politics: one of polyphony, where no voice is pure, no inheritance unbroken, but every wound remembered. The Sanskrit line seals it: you have the right to act, not to the fruits of your action. In other words, the ethical path for a scarred polity is not to seek restitution through domination, but to act responsibly without clinging to reward or revenge.

It is literature as warning, as prophecy, as refusal: a Britain imagined not as ownership, but as shared grief and unfinished song.