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Countries / Western Europe

Wales

works
17
14 books · 3 films
period covered
1350–1997
language of writing
Welsh and English

Three million inhabitants, two languages, and a Welsh-language literature that has never ceased since the sixth century: it is the oldest living poetic tradition in Europe. It has survived conquest, the ban at school and the industrial exodus, and today it counts nearly nine hundred thousand speakers. Beside it, a Welsh literature in English was born in the twentieth century in the mining valleys. The two read each other poorly, and the French reader generally knows only the second.

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A way to begin

Collected Poems 1934–1952

Dylan Thomas · 1952

The ninety poems Dylan Thomas himself chose to keep, a year before his death: Foyle Poetry Prize.

The entry See the author

Ninety poems the author himself selected, from the early collections to pieces written after the war, opened by a verse prologue. A nineteen-year-old hears the same force drive the flower and destroy him; a child killed by fire in a London air raid receives a poem that refuses to be an elegy; childhood stays on a Welsh farm return. The language is dense, sonorous, made to be spoken.

Timeline

  1. VIe–XIVe s.The bards and the MabinogiA court poetry unbroken since Taliesin, and four branches of narratives that keep gods without naming them.
  2. 1282–1536The conquest and the unionThe last prince killed, the revolt of Glyndŵr, then annexation. Poetry passes from the courts to the houses of gentlemen.
  3. 1588–1800The Bible and the chapelsThe translation of the Bible into Welsh saves the written language. The religious revival makes the country a people of readers.
  4. 1850–1930CoalThe valleys fill up, the language retreats in the south, and a literature in English begins to be written there.
  5. 1930–1970Two literaturesKate Roberts and Saunders Lewis in Welsh, Idris Davies and Dylan Thomas in English. They ignore each other.
  6. 1962–2000The language defendedTryweryn, Aberfan, the Welsh Language Society, a television channel won by a hunger strike, and the assembly of 1999.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • Welsh surnames are few and repeat themselves: Jones, Williams, Davies, Evans, Thomas cover an enormous share of the population, because they all come from first names followed by an English-style possessive s.
  • Hence the custom, in villages, of designating people by their trade or their house, Jones the Post or Williams Bryn Coch.
  • The old system, ap for “son of”, survives in the names of writers who took it up again by choice.
2What is said and unsaid
  • Religious Nonconformism made the chapel and its minister the centre of social life for a century and a half, and with it a reserve about the body, alcohol and money that the literature of the twentieth century spends its time forcing.
  • Laughter there is almost always a defence.
  • Lament, on the other hand, has been a recognised genre since the Middle Ages and no one finds it indecent.
3Religion and the unseen
  • The country was Christian before England and remains so in a mode of its own: local saints by the hundreds, healing springs, and from the eighteenth century a chapel Protestantism that doubles the established Church and ends up supplanting it.
  • The pagan material, for its part, has not disappeared: the medieval narratives stage characters who were gods, without ever saying so.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • The eisteddfod, a contest of poetry and song that goes back to the twelfth century and is held every year in Welsh, crowns a poet seated in a wooden chair; it is the national festival and it is literary.
  • Male choral singing comes from the chapels and the mines, and people sing at funerals as at matches.
  • On the first of March, people wear a leek or a daffodil.
5Shared references
  • The conquest of 1282 and the death of the last independent prince found a literature of loss that lasts seven centuries.
  • The revolt of Owain Glyndŵr, around 1400, is its dreamed-of return.
  • In the twentieth century, two events weigh on everything: the drowning in 1965 of a village in the Tryweryn valley to give water to Liverpool, and the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when a spoil tip collapsed onto a school.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • Welsh is not a dialect of English but a Celtic language unrelated to it, and its spelling is pronounced regularly by anyone who knows the rules: ll, dd, w and y are not typing errors. “Welsh” comes from a Germanic word that meant foreigner; the people concerned call themselves Cymry, that is, compatriots.
  • Finally, a Welsh author writing in English does not write for the same readers as an author writing in Welsh, and the two publics overlap little.

Tales and mythologies 1

  • TaleY MabinogiAnonymous · 1350Four tales in which princes exchange faces, a sister is avenged, and flowers take human form.Literature

Available in English 13

The books from this country that can be read in English, in the original or in translation.

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