Narrative
Gweledigaetheu y Bardd Cwsc
Ellis Wynne · 1703
Synopsis
A bard falls asleep at the top of a mountain and three angels take him in charge to show him the world. They first pass through the city of pride, where everyone thinks himself better than his neighbour and where people pay to be seen. Then the city of death, where a man is judged on what he has done and not on what he has said. Then the lower regions, occupied by tailors, lawyers and preachers, each in the torment that suits his trade.
Context
The work appeared in 1703 and takes its form from a seventeenth-century Spanish book, known through an English translation: the guided journey through the vices of the world. What its author puts into it is Welsh through and through, the trades, the ways of speaking, the failings of his parish. It has since been held to be the model of the prose of its language, on a par with the translation of the Bible published a century earlier, and it is to these two books that twentieth-century writers returned when they wanted to write differently from the chapels.
Who it is for
Three visions of about sixty pages each, in classical Welsh. Nothing in French. The satire assumes some knowledge of the country's society around 1700.
Prizes and reception
The book to which the Welsh language refers when it wants to measure its own prose, and copied by schoolchildren for two centuries.