Jon Gower toasts the success of Yr Hen Iaith

Jon Gower

I have nursed a secret ambition for many a long moon, namely to return to university to study Welsh literature.

I even thought about the dynamics of a writer, long in the tooth mixing with undergraduates and duly put out feelers among academics I knew.

Even though I’ve written a good many books in Cymraeg I’ve often felt myself to be deficient when it comes to knowing about our literary history. Unlike many of my creative contemporaries my studies in school were brief and undistinguished: I had a “B” at O-level and that was the end of my formal learning of Welsh.

But the advent of ‘Yr Hen Iaith’ changed all that. The series of podcasts on am, hosted by Professors Jerry Hunter from Bangor University and Richard Wyn Jones from Cardiff University allowed me to realise the dream and appreciate literature in the most accessible and entertaining way.

The podcasts themselves have been complemented by weekly, now fortnightly articles we have been proud to publish on Nation.Cymru, with the third series now starting at the same time that the digital platform am celebrates its fifth anniversary. Llongyfarchiadau gwresog.

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Eager beaver

The conceit of the podcasts is a simple one. Jerry Hunter is the man with all the knowledge and Richard Wyn Jones, Director of Cardiff University's Wales Governance, is his eager beaver student, keen as mustard to learn what he can. You feel that if there was some brain transference system such as those you find in ‘B’ movies then the pupil would happily hook himself up to the gurglint tubes but then it would be a very short series.

A good reference point for the amiable, joshing exchanges between the two presenters, who are clearly great mates to begin with, might be Socrates and Glaucon, top Greek philosopher and talented sidekick, whose dialogues showed a free exchange of views and information, with the one learning from t’other.

A more recent example in Wales was the Socratic dialogue between the fiery Marxist Republican historian Gwyn Alf Williams and the sophisticated royalist broadcaster Wynford Vaughan Thomas in the HTV series ‘The Dragon Has Two Tongues.’ And as we follow the history of literature in Yr Hen Iaith we see the way it holds up a mirror to society, albeit a sometimes cracked affair, especially in times of war or social upheaval.

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Good fun

Yr Hen Iaith isn’t just accessible and authoritative, it’s really good fun, as the self-styled “boy from the mid west of America” (Hunter comes from Cincinnati, Ohio) “teaches” Richard Wyn Jones from Anglesey. Such teaching is seemingly effortless as the series blows along on great gusts on enthusiasm generated by the two.

It’s little wonder that they paused the series recently to produce material that could help ‘A’ level students in Wales with their studies, another laudable aim and one superbly realised. 

There were discussions of poems on the syllabus such as Dafydd ap Gwilym’s “Yr Wylan” and “Trafferth Mewn Tafarn” and works by poets such as Myrddin ap Dafydd and Gerallt Lloyd Owen. They also looked at novels, resulting in Richard Wyn Jones being encouraged to read some works for the very first time.

His encounter with Caryl Lewis’ ‘Martha, Jac a Sianco’ was such that he was kept awake by the characters.

The resulting two-way discussion about the Ceredigion-set novel’s merits ranged widely and wisely, so that we considered how Mam, the mother figure is a dark take on the Welsh mam, pondered the novel’s surreal and Gothic elements and viewed the reality of hardscrabble lives of three people tied to the land through the lens of Richard Wyn Jones’ own memories of such rural characters.

Luckily I later left university having learned one important thing – that my education didn’t end with gaining a degree but, rather, that it was just beginning. I learned sufficient history while drinking pints of Brains S.A. every night with the great historian John Davies to allow me to write The Story of Wales in sixteen weeks.

By the time Yr Hen Iaith reaches Llyfr Glas Nebo, or wherever the series ends, I like many other readers and listeners will feel that they’ve had a university level education in the ways and wonders of llenyddiaeth Cymraeg and done so in a way far removed from classroom learning.

Bardic legacy

So we have met fascinating writers such as the medieval poet Gwerful Fechain and assessed towering achievements such as Bishop William Morgan’s translation of the Bible into Welsh, which played its role in safeguarding the language and providing a bulwark for literacy. It remains an important influence, even to this day, as Hunter explained:

‘When writing formal literary Welsh today, people use a linguistic register which is based to a great extent on the 1588 Bible produced by William Morgan. And one of things which made (and makes) William Morgan’s Welsh such a powerful, elegant and flexible literary idiom is the fact that it was influenced to a great extent by the formal language of the medieval Welsh bards.

‘This means that if you write creatively in Welsh, you have a huge range of literary registers in your artistic arsenal. You can locate your work on one far end of the long linguistic continuum and use formal literary Welsh. Or you can go to the exact opposite end of the continuum and write in an extremely oral fashion, using writing to express how people speak a particular dialect.’

It's been a fascinating series so far and promises more of the same as we run into the third run of articles and podcasts.

As we raise a glass of mead to its ongoing success, a line in the National Anthem, Hen Wlad fy Nhadau sums things up admirably: ‘O bydded i’r hen iaith barhau.’ May the old language live on.