United States or French Guiana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Welsh historian and critic, b. at Pont Nedd Fechan, Glamorganshire, s. of a shoemaker. His works include The Literature of the Kymry , The History of Trial by Jury in Wales, and an essay in which he demolished the claim of the Welsh under Madoc to the discovery of America. He also wrote on the life and works of the bard Aneurin.
But in the heart of the wild people there still lingered a spark of the poetic fire which had nerved it four hundred years before through Aneurin and Llywarch Hen to its struggle with the earliest Englishmen. At the hour of its lowest degradation the silence of Wales was suddenly broken by a crowd of singers.
The names of older singers, of Taliesin, Aneurin, and Llywarch Hen, were revived in bold forgeries to animate the national resistance and to prophesy victory. It was in North Wales that the spirit of patriotism received its strongest inspiration from this burst of song.
Historically, they still march with Cadwallader, with Llewellyn, with Glendower; sing with Aneurin, Taliesin, old Llywarch: individually, they are in the heart of the injury done them thirty years back or thrilling to the glorious deed which strikes an empty buckler for most of the sons of Time.
Neither Gildas nor Aneurin, his contemporaries, speak of him; Bede did not even know his name; Taliessin and Liwarc'h Hen gave him only a secondary place. In Nennius, on the other hand, who lived about 850, the legend has fully unfolded. Arthur is already the exterminator of the Saxons; he has never experienced defeat; he is the suzerain of an army of kings.
Does that get rid of the great traditional poets, the Cynveirdd or old bards, Aneurin, Taliesin, Llywarch Hen, and their compeers, does that get rid of the great poetical tradition of the sixth century altogether, does it merge the whole literary antiquity of Wales in her mediaeval literary antiquity, or, at least, reduce all other than this to insignificance? Mr.
It is indeed known that, up to a somewhat late period, the bards continued to compose pieces under the names which had become popular of Aneurin, Taliessin, and Liwarc'h Hen; but no confusion can be made between these insipid rhetorical exercises and the really ancient fragments which bear the names of the poets cited fragments full of personal traits, local circumstances, and individual passions and feelings.
The poem of Aneurin entitled the "Gododin" bears very strong marks of authenticity. Aneurin was one of the Northern Britons of Strath-Clyde, who have left to that part of the district they inhabited the name of Cumberland, or Land of the Cymri.
The poem of Aneurin entitled the "Gododin" bears very strong marks of authenticity. Aneurin was one of the Northern Britons of Strath-Clyde, who have left to that part of the district they inhabited the name of Cumberland, or Land of the Cymri.
It is the epoch of all the heroes of enduring fame, of all the characteristic saints of the Breton Church; finally, it is the great age of bardic literature, illustrious by the names of Taliessin, of Aneurin, of Liwarc'h Hen. The sixth century is in fact for the Breton peoples a perfectly historical century.
Word Of The Day