What is a Welshman?

One more post before I go to bed. I've often been intrigued and irritated by the late R.S. Thomas' line on what it means to be Welsh. You are only Welsh, he told us, if you speak Welsh. Well, a lot of Welsh speakers feel the same way, and the words in Welsh for a Welshman or Welshwoman are Cymro and Cymraes respectively, and these usually refer to someone who speaks Welsh. I remember someone my Welsh-speaking landlord in Aberystwyth saying about me, "He comes from Cardiff, but he's English." I glared at him and he added, "oh... English speaking..."

Well, that's how things are, but R.S. took this to an illogical degree, denying Welshness to anyone who couldn't speak Welsh, despite being a Welsh learner himself. I shall have more to say about R.S. at another time.

So, links: Here's an obituary from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/942723.stm
An excerpt: "There is no such thing as an Anglo Welshman...you have to make a stand, and that is the stand I have chosen to make," he said.

Then two pages also from the Beeb, one in Welsh and one in English. They are a part of a series, Cymru Ar Yr Awyr/Wales On the AIr, which feature audio and visual clips of all sorts of Welsh culturl figures, including, nationalist Gwynfor Evans, poet Waldo Williams and poet and nationalist Saunders Lewis. Plus Nansi Richards on triple harp.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/walesonair/database/rsthomas.shtml
is the English page, and it features an audio clip of Thomas talking about the Vietnam War

I was surprised to hear that his accent at this point was completely English--educated, middle class English. Later he acquired a slight North-Walian timbre to his accent.

Then the page in Welsh, http://www.bbc.co.uk/cymru/cymruaryrawyr/database/rs2.shtml
has a clip of R.S. reading his essay Abercuawg. The essay is about romantic longing, but his delivery of it in Welsh is stilted and preacherlike.

Hearing him speak in English mademe think that, because he had no expression of Welshness in his English-speaking life, he had to maintain that noone else could either.

Well, that's enough for now.

Further along in my browsings, I came across sites related to the work of Simon James. Four years ago he published a book titled 'The Atlantic Celts', which argued that the term 'Celt' is inconsistent and unhelpful.

First of all I came to http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~fealcen/celtdefn.htm "Defining 'who are or were the Celts'"
Simon James' own site is at http://www.ares.u-net.com/celtindx.htm

And there's an interview with him at http://www.cyberstudia.com/celtic-cultural-studies/interviews/simon-james.html

It's late and I'm tired, and most of the thoughts that have been teeming through my head today on the subject of the appropriateness of the term Celt have disappeared. In the interview, Simon James describes admits that he took a polemical approach in The Atlantic Celts, as a way of stirring the pot a bit--"The book was deliberately framed in polemical terms."

Basically, the problem seems to be that Celtic can refer to a people, a language group, a kind of art, but none of these applies to each use of the term Celt. For instance, Celtiberians didn't have the La Tene style of Celtic art. Language is surely the primary point of reference, but most modern Celts--people who live in Ireland, Wales, Brittanny, Scotland, Man, Cornwall--no longer speak the Celtic languages. We can't be sure that archaeological finds are truly Celtic if they give us no information as to the language of the people that made and used these artefacts. James objects particularly that most of the people who are called Celts never applied that term to themselves, and the modern Celts who do identify themselves as such have only done so since the eighteenth century.

Anyway, follow the links and see what you think. It does seem to me that language is the key. Tellingly, James states in the interview that "In the book, I largely avoided language, because it is not my province: I was making an archaeological and historiographical case. "

Surely a modern Celt is someone who comes from a country where a Celtic language is spoken, or has been spoken in relatively recent times (so that we can include the Isle of Man and Cornwall.)

What is a Celt?

While browsing for Celtic-related sites, I came across the following: http://shadowdrake.com/celtic/

This is a modern witchcraft site, but has a number of articles on matters Celtic. The articles vary in quality, but generally use up to date scholarship and list their sources carefully. A general comment at the top of the page led me to "For 100% of the instances where the term 'Celtic' is used there is a more appropriate cultural term that can be used." (Unfortunately, this is ascribed to "Lord Drake, House Shadow Drake, 2001. "

What this means in practice is that they label the essays as pertaining to Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Breton culture etc., although some of the essays still use the word 'Celtic' in the titles. I haven't read all of the articles, but it seems that the labelling is subsequent to the creation of the article. One of them is obviously wrong--Prayer to Manannan, Culture: Wales comment: A simple prayer to Manannan which was recorded in the early 1900's.
As one might expect, this is an Manx prayer, not a Welsh one.

It seems that the site is attempting to be a bit more rigorous than most neo-Pagan Celtic sites, but that in avoiding the term 'Celtic' they run into other problems.

Why should they want to avoid the world 'Celtic'? See next post.

I have now decided to publish the first volume of Skene's Four Ancient Books without taking any material from the second volume. This way, I can see if there is demand for the second volume when I put out the first volume. The first volume contains Skene's introduction, which runs to around 200 pages, plus all of the English translations of the poems. The second volume contains the Welsh originals, plus notes in English and some appendices.

I've been reading The Celtic Realms by Myles Dillon and Nora Chadwick. More approachable and also more comprehensive than Chadwick's better known The Celts. (Perhaps I should reread The Celts.) This looks at the historic Celtic kingdoms in Ireland, Britain and France. The first chapter has a good summary of the classical references, Indo-European parallels, etc. The second chapter looks at Britain and Ireland up to the end of the Roman rule, which only directly affected southern Britain. The Irish material is particularly interesting. The Tain can apparently be taken as being a fairly accurate picture of Iron Age Ireland.

I'm trying to brush up on my Welsh, and I found the following page on Tolkien and the Welsh language at the BBC's Catchphrase site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/catchphrase/catchphrase/ref-tolkien.shtml

Apparently, Tolkien's Elvish languages were modelled on Welsh. They even include mutations! Even though the Elvish (at least as spoken in the LOTR films) doesn't *sound* all that Welsh to me, since it lacks the distinctive ll and ch sounds, the open vowels, and the up and down tone of the language, a couple of people commented to me that it did sound Welsh.

The Catchphrase page links to a page dedicated to Tolien's invented languages:
http://www.elvish.org/resources.html
"In a fascinating and revealing essay titled"English and Welsh", Tolkien relates how he first encountered Welsh as a youth, in names seen on coal-trucks and station-signs,"a flash of strange spelling and a hint of a language old and yet alive; ... it pierced my linguistic heart". And he bemoans that as a youth he had found it"easier to find books to instruct one in any far alien tongue of Africa or India than in the language that still clung to the western mountains and the shores that look out to Iwerddon". Thus he was unable to learn Welsh until he matriculated at Oxford, where, upon winning the Skeat Prize for English at Exeter College, he shocked his college by spending it on Welsh. (John Morris-Jones, A Welsh Grammar: Historical and Comparative. Oxford, 1913) was the Welsh grammar that Tolkien bought with his prize money, in 1914. His heavily annotated copy is in the English Faculty Library of Oxford University."

From Tolien's essay English and Welsh:
"For myself I would say that more than the interest and uses of the study of Welsh as an adminicle of English philology, more than the practical linguist's desire to acquire a knowledge of Welsh for the enlargement of his experience, more even than the interest and worth of the literature, older and newer, that is preserved in it, these two things seem important: Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior language of the men of Britain; and Welsh is beautiful. I will not attempt to say now what I mean by calling a language as a whole 'beautiful', nor in what ways Welsh seems to me beautiful; for the mere recording of a personal and if you will subjective perception of strong aesthetic pleasure in contact with Welsh, heard or read, is sufficient for my conclusion".

"Perhaps I might say just this - for it is not an analysis of Welsh, or of myself, that I am attempting, but an assertion of a feeling of pleasure, and of satisfaction (as of a want fulfilled) - it is the ordinary words for ordinary things that in Welsh I find so pleasing. _Nef_ may be no better than _heaven_, but _wybren_ is more pleasing than _sky_. Beyond that what can one do? For a passage of good Welsh, even if read by a Welshman, is for this purpose useless. Those who understand him must already have experienced this pleasure, or have missed it for ever. Those who do not cannot yet receive it. A translation is of no avail. For this pleasure is felt most immediately and acutely in the moment of association: that is in the reception (or imagination) of a word-form which is felt to have a certain style, and the attribution to it of a meaning which is not received through it. I could only speak, or better write and speak and translate, a long list: _adar_, _alarch_, _eryr_; _tan_, _dwfr_, _awel_, _gwynt_, _niwl_, _glaw_; _haul_, _lloer_, _ser_; _arglwydd_, _gwas_, _morwyn_, _dyn_; _cadarn_, _gwan_, _caled_, _meddal_, _garw_, _llyfn_, _llym_, _swrth_; _glas_, _melyn_, _brith_, and so on - and yet fail to communicate the pleasure. But even the more long-winded and bookish words are commonly in the same style, if a little diluted. In Welsh there is not as a rule the discrepancy that there is so often in English between words of this sort and the words of full aesthetic life, the flesh and bone of the language. Welsh _annealladwy_, _dideimladrwydd_, _amhechadurus_, _atgyfodiad_, and the like are far more Welsh, not only as being analysable, but in style, than _incomprehensible_, _insensibility_, _impeccable_, or _resurrection_ are English".

I was fascinated by Tolkien as a child and teenager, and writers such as Lloyd Alexander and Alan Garner were responsible for my interest in the Mabinogion. Perhaps I'm not postmodern enough, but it seems a pity that so many able people have put so much energy into an invented mythology and languages, when the living Celtic languages are struggling for survival and much of the mythology is barely known.

A bit more about me and the focus of this blog. My name is Andrew Smith, and I'm the publisher of Bardic Press. Our first title, Hafiz: New Nightingale, New Rose, is already out, and it's a reprint of an excellent translation of Hafiz by Richard Le Gallienne. We are launching a line of Celtic interest books. The first of these will be reissues of long out of print classic works of scholarship. The late nineteenth century saw a boom in Celtic studies, and a great deal of the original material was translated and left to moulder in libraries. In particular, many Irish tales only exist in the translations which were made at the end of the nineteenth and begining of the twentieth centuries, and which are not available to the general public. We hope to update these translations and bring them back into print.

February 2005 will see the release of a major new book on the Mabinogi by "freelance Medievalist" Will Parker. Entitled "The Four Branches of the Mabinogi: Celtic Myth and Medieval Reality," Will's book explores the different layers of these four interlinked stories, finding typological reference to the contemporary political scene and dynastic rivalries of Medieval Wales, then looking at the connections between the Mabinogi and older Celtic myth, and looking even further back to Indo-European connections and possible mythic memories of the prehistoric situation. Will studied Celtic and Medieval studies at Cambridge, and this is a dense and scholarly work. The book will contain new translations of the Four Branches, which you can currently read at his website here: http://www.mabinogion.info

In the meantime, we're bringing some of the classic works of Welsh Celtic scholarship back into print. Sir John Rhys and Edward Anwyl will follow, but our first Celtic release will be Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales. This is the only translation which includes all of the poetry from the White Book of Rhydderch, the Black Book of Carmarthen, the Book of Aneurin and the Book of Taliesin.

This book has previously only been reprinted as a facsimile edition--facsimile editions are produced from photographs (or, these days, scans) of the original book. This makes them interesting to collectors, but they are not attractive books to read. All Bardic Press books are completely re-typeset, so they will be attractive books. In general, we keep the original pagination, so that references to earlier editions can be used with our editions.

The Four Ancient Books has remained out of print for so long because of the high page count. The original is two volumes of nearly 600 and 500 pages respectively. The second volume contains the original Welsh versions of the poems, plus notes. I'm currently assessing the notes, whether they should be included or not, since this will bump up the page count to 700 pages or so. But in any case we're not going to include the Welsh originals. This allows us to reprint the book as a single volume. Anyone who can read the Old Welsh or Middle Welsh of the originals should be using the best critical texts of these poems, and probably has access to a university library. So this edition is meant for those who have no Welsh, or not enough Welsh to read the originals. For many of these poems, this is the only available English translation.

W.F. Skene wrote an extensive and interesting historical introduction to the poems, and the book was his project. But the translations themselves were made by two Welsh scholars. Rev. Robert Williams of Rhydycroesau translated the Book of Taliesin and Rev. D. Silvan Evans of Llanymawddy translated the other three. I hope to honour them again in the credits.

As a last note: for a while we have been announcing The Book of Taliesin at our website http://www.bardic-press.com . This was to have included the text of Llyfr Taliesin along with translations by Robert Williams (Skene), D.W. Nash (from his book on Taliesin) and J. Gwenofvryn Evans. Instead, we're printing Skene's Four Ancient Books. I hope that we can one day issue a book of the best modern translations of Taliesin, but this will require a lot of work on permissions and rights, so it will be a project for the longer term.

I'll be exploring the world of Celtic mythology, poetry and scholarship. I'll inevitably be focussing more on the Welsh material, which I'm more familiar with, but I will also include plenty of Irish material, and whatever Breton, Scottish, Cornish and Manx material I come across.