Welsh literature

“ The sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political, social life of Wales, the better; the better for England, the better for Wales itself. Traders and tourists do excellent service by pushing the English wedge farther and farther into the heart of the principality; Ministers of Education, by hammering it harder and harder into the elementary schools. Nor, perhaps, can one have much sympathy with the literary cultivation of Welsh as an instrument of living literature ”

“ A selective bibliography of poetry, drama, and fiction in English by Welsh writers, of some works set in Wales by foreign authors, and of studies of Anglo-Welsh literature. Since only works utilizing a Welsh locale, characters, or idiom are included, many important plays and fictional works by Welsh writers are omitted. (The requirement for Welsh content is less strictly applied to poetry.) Entries are organized in three parts. The list of primary works includes sections for anthologies and individual authors. ”

“ By nature he was more a critic than a poet, and his influence as such has been deeply impressed upon modern Welsh literature, his grammars having long served as the text-books of the humbler school of Welsh writers, while at nearly every eisteddfod of importance held during the last twenty years of his life he served as one of the adjudicators. ”

“ The multiplication of small States is now, no doubt, an evil; but the same cannot be said with confidence about the Middle Ages. The {99} assertion of writers, unable themselves to read a line of Welsh, that the culture of England in the latter half of the thirteenth century was superior to that of Wales is certainly untrue. Indeed the direct contrary is the fact. Welsh literature, both prose and poetry, was far ahead of that of England; and the Welsh language had attained a decidedly higher stage of development. ”

“ If we except the various pursuits by which they gain their livelihood, the Welsh-speaking portion of my countrymen have few proclivities apart from religion. Their reading is almost purely religious reading; their music, psalmody; their social gatherings, for the most part, clerical meetings, religious camp meetings, and the assembling of Sabbath schools. Their periodical literature consists almost wholly of religious magazines. Secular knowledge, secular music, and well nigh everything approaching to fiction, are by many of them deemed not only valueless but sinful. ”

“ Next to its unity, a characteristic of modern Wales is its democratic feeling. It is a country with a thoughtful and intelligent peasantry, and it is a country without a middle class. There is a very small upper class—the old Welsh land-owning families who once, before they turned their backs on Welsh literature, led the country. They have never been hated or despised, they are simply ignored. Their tendency now is to come into touch with the people, and they are always welcomed. ”

“ Though their land has been many times invaded, the Welsh have never been conquered. Powerful tribes, like the Romans, Saxons and Normans, have tried to overwhelm them. Even when English and German kings attempted to crush their spirit and blot out their language and literature, the Welsh resisted and won victory.
Among the bullies that tried force, instead of justice, and played the slave-driver, rather than the Good Samaritan's way, were the Normans. These brutal fellows, when they thought that they had overrun Wales with their armies, began to build strong castles all over the country. ”

“ All these terms should, strictly speaking, have gwr—gwr hyspys, gwr cynnil, and gwr cyfarwyđ—but for the fact that modern Welsh tends to restrict gwr to signify ‘a husband’ or ‘a married man,’ while dyn, which only signifies a mortal, is made to mean man, and provided with a feminine dynes, ‘woman,’ unknown to good Welsh literature. ”

“ English authors important to Welsh culture; music—in short, just about anything of significance to Welsh literature. Entries emphasize factual information rather than interpretation, and many cite standard scholarly works; author entries focus on biographical details and major works but do offer occasional evaluative comments. Concludes with a chronology of Welsh history. Although some entries have no discernible connection with Welsh literature, the New Companion is an essential work for quick reference. A revision of The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, ed. ”

“ Now, suppose that in a society permeated by the crude kind of notions of which one finds traces in the Mabinogion and other old Welsh literature, a man arose who had a turn for philosophizing and trying to think things out: how would he reason? ”

“ It is clear, on the one hand, that every one should learn English, the language of the Empire and of commerce. It is also clear that, on account of its own beauty as well as that of the great literature it enshrines, Welsh should be taught in every school throughout Wales. ”

“ You have to avoid the danger of giving offence to practical men by retarding the spread of the English language in the principality. I believe that to preserve and honour the Welsh language and literature is quite compatible with not thwarting or delaying for a single hour the introduction, so undeniably useful, of a knowledge of English among all classes in Wales. You have to avoid, again, the danger of alienating men of science by a blind partial, and uncritical treatment of your national antiquities. ”

“ Cease to do evil, learn to do good, was the upshot of its exhortations to the Welsh; by evil, the Times understanding all things Celtic, and by good, all things English. ‘The Welsh language is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence, and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation of their English neighbours. An Eisteddfod is one of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated. It is simply a foolish interference with the natural progress of civilisation and prosperity. ”

“ The landed gentry were ruined or crippled, and the prosperity of the country greatly thrown back. It is said that the native language took some hold again of the upper classes from the fact of their poverty keeping them at home, whereas they had been accustomed to flock to the English universities and the border grammar schools, such as Shrewsbury, Chester, or Ludlow. Welsh poetry and literature expended itself in abuse of that Puritanism which in a slightly different form was later on to find in Wales its chosen home. ”

“ From these last mentioned dates poetry, music, and every species of Cambrian literature hastened rapidly to decay, nor were any efforts made to arrest their decline, and re-string the lyre, until the year 1771. At this period societies were formed in London for the restoration of the Welsh language to its former purity, and the encouragement of Welsh literature generally. The Gwyneddigion society extend their patronage to p. 157the inhabitants of North Wales. ”

“ Two indexes: settings; persons (excluding authors of studies of individual writers) . Although its value as a record of twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh literature is seriously marred by the ill-considered editorial policy that excludes works lacking a Welsh background, this work remains a useful pioneering effort. It must be supplemented, however, by other sources such as vol. 4 of Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (M2467) , New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (M1385) , Explore the British Library (E250) , and WorldCat (E225) . ”

“ Each volume is made up of essays by major scholars on important works or writers, forms, genres, and historical background; each essay concludes with a highly selective bibliography of editions and studies. Indexed by persons, titles, and subjects in each volume. The failure to identify sources of passages and references to scholarship renders the Guide less useful than it might be. Although frequently offering more detailed analyses than Parry but lacking his continuity and breadth, Guide to Welsh Literature complements rather than supersedes his History of Welsh Literature (P3140) . ”

“ This poem, which is generally considered by the Welsh as the brightest ornament of their ancient language, was composed at Donnington, a small hamlet in Shropshire, on the north-west spur of the Wrekin, at which place, as has been already said, Gronwy toiled as schoolmaster and curate under Douglas the Scot, for a stipend of three-and-twenty pounds a year.’ [28]
The prose literature of Wales is by no means so extensive as the poetical ”

“ A romantic literature, which was destined to leaven the fancy of western Europe, had grown up among this wild people and found an admirable means of utterance in its tongue. The Welsh language was as real a developement of the old Celtic language heard by Cæsar as the Romance tongues are developements of Cæsar's Latin, but at a far earlier date than any other language of modern Europe it had attained to definite structure and to settled literary form. No other mediæval literature shows at its outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the Welsh. ”

“ The Welsh, too, share, it seems to me, with their Saxon invaders, an inaptitude for show and spectacle. Show and spectacle are better managed by the Latin race and those whom it has moulded; the Welsh, like us, are a little awkward and resourceless in the organisation of a festival. The presiding genius of the mystic circle, in our hideous nineteenth-century costume, relieved only by a green scarf, the wind drowning his voice and the dust powdering his whiskers, looked thoroughly wretched ”

“ But the Welsh had their own national traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into contact with the old British literature in two places: in the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the population is of Cymric race and spoke, and still to some extent speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh. ”

“ If it is desirable that the Welsh should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them in a loving fondness for their old language. Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance. ”

“ Accordingly, to this time, to the sixth century, the universal Welsh tradition attaches the great group of British poets, Taliesin and his fellows. In the twelfth century there began for Wales, along with another burst of national life, another burst of poetry; and this burst literary in the stricter sense of the word,—a burst which left, for the first time, written records. It wrote the records of its predecessors, as well as of itself, and therefore Mr. Nash wants to make it the real author of the whole poetry, one may say, of the sixth century, as well as its own. ”

“ There is much mire in the street; immense swine lie in the mire, who turn up their snouts at you as you pass. Women in Welsh hats stand in the mire, along with men without any hats at all, but with short pipes in their mouths. They are talking together; as you pass, however, they hold their tongues, the women leering contemptuously at you, the men glaring sullenly at you, and causing tobacco-smoke to curl in your face. On your taking off your hat, however, and inquiring the way to the Monachlog, everybody is civil enough, and twenty voices tell you the way to the monastery. ”

“ Evidence of the indebtedness of story-tellers in Wales to their brethren of the same profession in Ireland is comparatively scarce; and almost in every instance of recent research establishing a connexion between topics or incidents in the Arthurian romances and the native literature of Ireland, the direct contact may be assumed to have been with the folklore and legend of the Goidelic inhabitants of Wales, whether before or after their change of language. ”

“ The religion of Wales is more emotional and sentimental than English Puritanism; Romanism has indeed given way to Calvinism among the Welsh,—the one superstition has supplanted the other,—but the Celtic sentiment which made the Welsh such devout Catholics, remains, and gives unction to their Methodism; theirs is not the controversial, rationalistic, intellectual side of Protestantism, but the devout, emotional, religious side. Among the Germans, Protestantism has been carried on into rationalism and science. The English hold a middle place between the Germans and the Welsh ”

“ The Welsh character is the echo of natural feeling, and acts from instantaneous motives. The fine arts are strangers to the principality; and the Welshman seldom professes the buskin, or the use of the mallet, the graver, or the chisel ”

“ A characteristic expression of the homelier moral humor of the Welsh is to be had in the 'Canwyll y Cymry' (Candle of Wales) , by Rhys Pritchard, the famous Elizabethan vicar of Llandovery, which for two centuries was the most popular book in Wales after the Bible. Its simple rhymed didactics do not often rise into poetry; but they are full of human feeling, expressed in a terse and proverbial way, with distinct individuality. The book easily leads one on to the very remarkable band of hymn writers, from Anne Griffiths to Williams Pantycelyn, who have flourished in Welsh. ”

“ II.—The Sleeping Bard; or Visions of the World, Death, and Hell. By Elis Wyn. Translated from the Cambrian British by George Borrow. London, 1860.
The Welsh style themselves Cymry or Cumry, a word which, in their language, means a number of people associated together. [20] They were the second mass of population which moved from Asia into Europe. They followed and pushed forward the Gael or Gauls ”