Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards

This is one of the first acts of cultural rescue in modern literary history. In 1764, the Welsh bardic tradition was dying. Centuries of linguistic change had rendered ancient verses increasingly unintelligible, and the great professional poets of the eisteddfod were fading into silence. Evan Evans, himself a scholar and poet, undertook to recover voices that might otherwise be lost forever. He translates verses that sing of heroic deeds, love of country, and the legendary age of Arthur, providing historical notes that anchor each poem in the culture that produced it. Evans acknowledges the impossibility of his task: how do you bring across the fire of medieval Welsh poetry for an English readership that has never heard the strict meters, the cynghanedd, the ancient music? What emerges is a document of urgent love - a scholar reaching across centuries to grasp the hands of bards who were already ancient in their own time. This is the raw material of Welsh identity, preserved in the moment before it might have slipped away entirely.