Gorsedd y Beirdd Ynys Prydain

Eisteddfod Proclamation

Gorsedd y Beirdd Ynys Prydain (The Gorsedd of Bards of the Island of Britain) was founded in 1792 by Iolo Morganwg as part of his project to imaginatively re-construct druidry. The insititution has survived with the same name up until the present and is closely associated with The National Eisteddfod of Wales. The Gorsedd performs ceremonies such as the announcement of the annual Eisteddfod festival, the presentation ceremonies of the main literary prizes in the Eisteddfod pavilion and the setting of the competitions for those prizes, including the tasks to be fulfilled by those competing for the Chair (a long poem in cynghanedd, using the strict metres) and for the Crown (a poem in the ‘free’ metres). The Gorsedd also honours practitioners in the other arts and those who have contributed the cultural life of Wales and in the Welsh language, conferring druid robes of white, green or blue for different categories to be worn when taking part in the Gorsedd ceremonies. 

This year a proposal to change the name simply to ‘Gorsedd Cymru’ was announced. This has caused some controversy. Those in favour welcome the acknowledgement that the Gorsedd now has a far wider remit than poetry and that it is a specifically Welsh institution and the name should recognise that. Those against deplore the break with the tradition going back to Iolo Morganwg who also devised many of the ceremonies on which the current practices of the Gorsedd are still based. But the main objection is that the name change also breaks the link with the practice of composing poetry in the language inherited from the earlier inhabitants of Britain according to rules devised by the medieval bards who sought to define and continue that earlier tradition.

The arguments and counter-arguments are essentially those of pragmatists, identifying a need to work with current realities and present a modern image, against idealists who see the Gorsedd as embodying an expression of Welsh life inherited from a time when the Bards of the Island of Britain were just that. They see the proposed name change as undermining an important idea at the centre of Welsh identity: that the Welsh language, and the bardic tradition expressed in that language, continues a cultural thread that binds the modern inhabitants of Wales to the Brythonic-speaking peoples who inhabited Britain when the Romans invaded and who continued to speak that language in spite of the dominant influences of Latin and, later, the first English speakers.

Identity and tradition are tricky things which need to evolve and to adapt in order to survive. But they also need to retain certain characteristic features to continue evolving rather than simply being replaced by something else.  Does ‘Gorsedd Cymru’ replace the idea that Welsh is the language of the bards of the Island of Britain with an acknowledgement that it is simply the language of the people of Wales? And if so, does this reinforce the sense of Wales as a separate part of of Britain or does it undermine an essential aspect of the identity which underlies and reinforces that sense of separateness? 

          

The Crown and the Chair

The Empty Chair

A oes heddwch? Nac oes! There is is fact some disquiet in bardic circles. The two main prizes awarded for poetry in the National Eisteddfod of Wales are the Crown and the Chair (there are a number of other prizes for short poems). The winner of the Crown this year was Ceri Wyn Jones. Usually the Crown is awarded for a long poem or sequence NOT written in cynghanedd while the Chair is awarded for a poem in full cynghanedd, conforming to the rules of the strict metres. Some of his fellow bards were surprised, therefore, that the winning poem for the Crown was in cynghanedd. A quick check with the exact specifications confirmed that the words "not in full cynghanedd" did not appear. So the poem was within the rules though not, some argue, in the spirit of the competition. The feeling is that poems in cynghanedd should be for the Chair, not the Crown. Twm Morus characteristically contributed a robust version of this objection which played with images of a squirrel among Welsh Black bulls.

All this was compounded at the end of the week when it was revealed that the Chair was not to be awarded as no-one was judged good enough. One of the judges that decided this was Ceri Wyn Jones which was why, he explained, he couldn't enter a poem for the Chair. So disappointment tempered by a feeling that standards are being maintained was the order of the day on Friday. As for the Crown, commentators are predicting that future specifications will ensure that it is spelled out that it is for a poem in the free metres.

Eisteddfod Genedlaethol

As I prepare to visit the National Eisteddfod, held this year in Bala (the festival moves around Wales to a different site each year), I am reminded of the conclusion of Emyr Humphreys’ poem ‘Ancestors’:

Their voices live in the air
Like leaves like clouds like rain
Their words call out to be spoken
Until the language dies
Until the ocean changes.

The sense of the language being alive in the natural as well as the cultural environment is a persistent one. Waldo Williams, writing of the Welsh mountains, said

Ni fedr ond un iaith eu codi
(Only one language can lift them)

and the poet Gerallt Lloyd Owen, about whom there will be a talk this year in the Pabell Lên (Literary Pavilion) on the Eisteddfod field, writes, in his poem ‘Etifeddiaith’ (Inheritance):

We had a language, though not by choice,
for it had already quickened in the soil
its strength restless on the mountains.

(a translation of the whole poem appears on my poetry translation pages HERE )

This sense of the language having some sort if interpenetration with the land of Wales is common, even among many who can’t speak it. The Eisteddfod’s peripatetic existence, setting up camp even in areas where Welsh is not common currency, acknowledges this. But Bala is certainly in the heart of ‘Y Fro Gymraeg’ and I’ll be in the thick of this particularly intense form of ancestor worship while there.

And afterwards…? When I walk the mountain paths will the language seem to be with me there, or are culture and nature distinct? At times they seem completely unconnected; at others inextricably interpenetrated. Waldo William’s suggestion that those mountains can only be raised in one language rather carefully qualifies the assertion by relating it to “a sky of song”. That is, the celebration of the mountains is what gives them meaning in language. But this is ambiguously expressed. And it is not to say, as Gerallt Lloyd Owen indicates, that we have any choice in the matter: “It’s strength restless in the mountains”. Waldo Williams too characterises this language as if she were both eternal and “as young as ever” and “full of mischief”. So she has to be to survive.