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Updated: June 20, 2025
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.
"Briefly put we presuppose the existence of a set of semi-dramatic, semi-narrative, poems, in which a Bledri figures as an active, and at the same time a recording, personage. Now that such a body of literature may have existed we are entitled to assume from the fact that two such have survived, one from Wales, in the Llywarch Hen cycle, the other from Ireland, in the Finn Saga.
I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the couch of honor shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch. How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was brought forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from his burden."
After Llywarch Hen's: How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was brought forth after Byron's: Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen take this of Southey's, in answer to the question whether he would like to have his youth over again: Do I regret the past? Would I live o'er again The morning hours of life? Nay, William, nay, not so!
He will go to hell; he will not surrender the pride and glory of his soul to the mere meanness of fate. He will "Go to Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast." So with Llywarch Hen, Prince of Cumberland, in his old age and desolation.
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.
In the Welsh poem called 'Y Gododin' the poet Aneirin is represented as expressing his gratitude at being rescued by the son of Llywarch Hen from 'the cruel prison of the earth, from the abode of death, from the loveless land. The salient features, therefore, of the Celtic conceptions of the other-world are their consonance with the suggestions made by Celtic scenery to the Celtic imagination, the vagueness and variability of these conceptions in different minds and in different moods, the absence of any ethical considerations beyond the incentive given to bravery by the thought of immortality, and the remarkable development of a sense of possible inter-relations between the two worlds, whether pacific or hostile.
O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is very long since I was Llywarch. Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved. The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together, -coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.
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.
It has all through it a sort of intoxication of style, a Pindarism, to use a word formed from the name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power of style seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not in its great poets only, in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian, does the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its productions:
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