Wild Wales: The People, Language, & Scenery
1862
Wild Wales is essentially a love letter to a nation, filtered through one of the 19th century's most irrepressible personalities. George Borrow was a linguist who had taught himself Welsh as a young man from a groom in Norfolk, and his peculiar genius for languagesanimates every page. Walking through the Welsh countryside with his wife and daughter in the 1850s, he encounters farmers, innkeepers, scholars, and shepherds, interrogating them about words and ways while soaking in the mountain moors and coastal villages. The book captures a Wales that was already shifting: the old language battling English, the old customs fading, the landscape both brutal and beautiful. Borrow is not a neutral observer. He loves Wales, perhaps too much, and this passion makes him blind to some things and brilliant about others. His chapters on the history of the Welsh bards, on the nuances of the language, on the legends embedded in the hills, feel like secrets passed from a passionate man to a willing ear. For readers who want to understand what Britain looked like before the railway age fully transformed it, or who simply want to walk alongside a character who refuses to be ordinary, this book is a door into another time.
![Tales of the Wild and the Wonderful [1825]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3b2n8gj62qnwr.cloudfront.net%2FCOVERS%2Fgutenberg_covers75k%2Febook-65597.png&w=3840&q=75)
