Celts descended from Spanish fishermen, study finds

Don't tell the locals, but the hordes of British holidaymakers who visited Spain this summer were, in fact, returning to their ancestral home.

A team from Oxford University has discovered that the Celts, Britain's indigenous people, are descended from a tribe of Iberian fishermen who crossed the Bay of Biscay 6,000 years ago. DNA analysis reveals they have an almost identical genetic "fingerprint" to the inhabitants of coastal regions of Spain, whose own ancestors migrated north between 4,000 and 5,000BC.

The discovery, by Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, will herald a change in scientific understanding of Britishness.

People of Celtic ancestry were thought to have descended from tribes of central Europe. Professor Sykes, who is soon to publish the first DNA map of the British Isles, said: "About 6,000 years ago Iberians developed ocean-going boats that enabled them to push up the Channel. Before they arrived, there were some human inhabitants of Britain but only a few thousand in number. These people were later subsumed into a larger Celtic tribe... The majority of people in the British Isles are actually descended from the Spanish."

Professor Sykes spent five years taking DNA samples from 10,000 volunteers in Britain and Ireland, in an effort to produce a map of our genetic roots.

Research on their "Y" chromosome, which subjects inherit from their fathers, revealed that all but a tiny percentage of the volunteers were originally descended from one of six clans who arrived in the UK in several waves of immigration prior to the Norman conquest.

The most common genetic fingerprint belongs to the Celtic clan, which Professor Sykes has called "Oisin". After that, the next most widespread originally belonged to tribes of Danish and Norse Vikings. Small numbers of today's Britons are also descended from north African, Middle Eastern and Roman clans.

These DNA "fingerprints" have enabled Professor Sykes to create the first genetic maps of the British Isles, which are analysed in Blood of the Isles, a book published this week. The maps show that Celts are most dominant in areas of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. But, contrary to popular myth, the Celtic clan is also strongly represented elsewhere in the British Isles.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article1621766.ece

Iolo Morganwg at Planet Magazine

From Planet 171

"In a Very Deranged State"

by Mary-Ann Constantine

In the first of two articles Mary-Ann Constantine explores the contradictions in the life and work of Iolo Morganwg as revealed in the huge archive of his papers at the National Library of Wales.

Intensive research on anything makes researchers obsessive; they develop exegetical tendencies, see precursors and parallels everywhere, and cannot resist making connections that lead, like so many spider-webs, back to the object of their research. It must be said that the huge archive of papers and letters produced by Iolo Morganwg, now held in the National Library of Wales, is dangerously conducive to this tendency. As endless calls for papers for Romantic-period conferences drop into the inbox, it is hard to resist the mildly intoxicating feeling that it would be possible to knock out twenty minutes on virtually anything. Science? There’s the medicinal visit in 1792 to one “Mr Long Opperator in Electricity in Compton Street, Soho, who electrified me, drawing sparks repeatedly from my hands, arms, breast, knees.” Geology? The cliffs of Glamorgan yielded “the head of a small horned animal petrified in a quarry of limerock, I suppose that it must have been a fish.” Urban versus pastoral? “Let those that abide in the filth of a town/Deride, if they please, the meek life of a clown.” The French revolution? The idea of Britishness? Tea-merchants, druids, lime-kilns, folksongs, marmalade? There will be a note or a poem on it somewhere, scribbled on the back of an advertisement, or developed in an essay-draft or in a letter to a friend or a literary journal. In a period fizzing with eclecticism Iolo Morganwg is more eclectic than most.

A research project at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, funded by the AHRB and University of Wales, is busy mining this archive, adding to fundamental work carried out half a century ago by Gruffydd John Williams, and more recently by Ceri Lewis, Prys Morgan, Gwyneth Lewis and others. The aim of the project, currently employing five researchers, is to make more of the unpublished material accessible, and, especially, to bring it to the attention of an English-language audience. Much of the archive is in fact in English, but has been very little used by those working on this period, particularly outside Wales. A series of books is planned: Iolo’s correspondence, over three thousand letters, will be published in three volumes, and books on bardism, romantic forgery, politics and Iolo’s legacy are also underway. A composite volume of essays on many different aspects of his life and work should be out by the end of this year.

He was born Edward Williams in the parish of Llancarfan, Glamorgan, in 1747. He had little formal education, being “so very unhealthy while a child (and I have continued so), that it was thought useless to put me to school”; but his mother encouraged him to read in Welsh and English, and he received an excellent training in Welsh poetry and letters from local scholars and poets. He learned his father’s trade, stonecutting, and claimed to be carving professionally “at the age of 8 or 9”; he was still working with his hands in his seventies. His mother’s death in 1770 affected him deeply, and he began a restless decade, travelling to north Wales to copy manuscripts and visiting the “Druidic monuments” in Anglesey. He also started to write as an English poet, composing many of the pastoral pieces that would appear in his published collection some twenty years later. At twenty-six he took laudanum for “a troublesome cough”, and he remained addicted to it in varying degrees throughout his life. He worked at his trade in London, seeing at the Welsh School there the papers of Lewis Morris, and manuscripts containing poems by the fourteenth-century poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. They had a powerful effect on him: he became a disciple, a passionate imitator and finally a forger of Dafydd’s poetry. He also worked down in Kent, writing poems about his exile and enduring an exceptionally bad winter: “the snow was 40, or 50, feet deep here abouts, and they have been oblidged to dig ways under the snow, like ye ways under ground in coal mines, to go out to the country for necessaries.” Returning across Salisbury plain he visited Avebury and Stonehenge, and gave a short account of recent excavations at Silbury Hill.

In 1781, back in Glamorgan, he married Peggy Roberts. They had four children, over whom he fussed and worried all his life: the death of a four-year-old daughter in 1793 was a nightmare realised. During the 1780s the family lived in various places in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan, and Iolo tried his hand unsuccessfully at many ways of making a living: “I am in this Country a piece of a marble and freestone mason, a piece of a builder, a piece of a Farmer, a lime burner for the use of the public, I have a small sloop trading in the Severn, in short I am a Jack of all trades, and, if the old proverb is true, I shall never be rich.” Sure enough, he spent a year in Cardiff prison for debt. By the late 1780s his antiquarian interest in the history of the Ancient British Druids and his local interest in Welsh poetic or bardic tradition converged: like many at this period he believed that the Druids were the ancestors of the medieval Welsh bards, and he set out to show that some areas (principally his beloved Glamorgan) had preserved the ancient traditions rather better than others. Many of the “proofs” are subtle forgeries involving texts copied from missing or vaguely identified manuscripts. In 1789, the London Welsh, sponsored by Owen Jones (Owain Myfyr), brought out an edition of the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym which included a dozen of Iolo’s own creations. In the same year he introduced himself to readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine as a self-taught “journeyman mason [...] never seen in liquor”, who, “about the age of twenty [...] was admitted a Bard in the ancient manner; a custom still retained in Glamorgan, but, I believe, in no other part of Wales.” He began to sign himself “Iolo Morganwg”.

Welsh language traced - to Russia

Welsh language traced - to Russia

Sep 16 2006

Tryst Williams, Western Mail

VODKA, furry hats, gymnastic dancing, the setting for one of the greatest Bond movies - Russia has given us a lot. But research has discovered that it also gave Wales the Welsh language - from Russia With Llove, as it were... Researchers documenting the history of Welsh have traced it back to the plains of Russia 6,000 years ago. And an equally intriguing claim that the Scottish borders represented "the cradle of Welsh" 1,500 years ago has been made. S4C's new series Taith yr Iaith starts next week with presenter Gwyneth Glyn's journey to a place described as "the crossroads between Asia and Europe".

Miss Glyn, the Welsh-language Children's Poet Laureate, said, "We were given the most incredible welcome in Kasmodar in south-west Russia where the series starts. Russian film crews came out to film us filming there. They had never heard of the Welsh language and were amazed that we had travelled so far to film. Most of them had never ventured further than their own square mile."

But while today's local population might not travel far, the language that flourished there in about 4,000BC between the Caspian and Black Seas certainly has.

It is there that linguistic historians believe the so-called "Indo-European" group of languages first developed among a tribe of nomadic farmers. This common language would eventually spread and give rise to such diverse tongues as Welsh, German and Sanskrit.

Similarities remain to this day, as shown in the case of "dant", the Welsh word for tooth, and "danta", its Sanskrit equivalent.

Welsh's epic journey across Europe is then traced across Germany (where the Rhone, Rhine and Danube all still bear Celtic names) and the English Channel to Scotland.

It is in the hinterland between Glasgow and Leeds that the language is believed to have first flowered in its own right in the 6th Century in such epic poems as the Gododdin, a Welsh-language poem that describes a battle between the early Scots and early English at Catterick.

It is only after spreading into Scotland, suggests Miss Glyn, that the language made its way to its final destination - Wales.

Despite being one of Europe's oldest tongues, the four-part series portrays Welsh as a living language that is still vibrant in the 21st Century.

Miss Glyn, 26, was brought up in Llanarmon, Eifionydd, a parish with one of the nation's highest percentages of Welsh speakers. She said, "The series left me feeling optimistic that the Welsh language will survive and made me realise how many factors it has had to face over the centuries.

"It's still alive despite some periods of oppression and deterioration; this shows its flexibility. I hope that the series will reaffirm people's pride in the language."

And even though she travelled throughout Europe for the show the talented singer-songwriter added that some of her most memorable experiences came while filming in Wales.

"The opportunity to actually touch a notorious 'Welsh Not', which was used to discourage children from speaking Welsh, was incredible," she said.

"Another unforgettable experience was to see the oldest example of written Welsh on St Cadfan's grave at St Cadfan's church, Tywyn."

Taith yr Iaith starts on Tuesday at 9pm on S4C

Traditional Music of Wales

BBC Radio Wales have a new series on the traditional music of Wales, with an accompanying website. There are several clips of well known Welsh traditional musicians to be downloaded. There are four programmes in the series and they should be archived on the Radio Wales site, but unfortunately the link connects to the wrong programme.