Welsh Journals

rarely left such complete records of their thoughts and deeds. It is clearly not Mr. Fritz's concern generally to examine the attitudes of the propertied classes during the Fifteen and Forty-Five; indeed his title is slightly misleading, for his preoccupation is overwhelmingly with the crucial decade between the Swedish plot of 1717 and the death of George I, the following years being covered in a matter of paragraphs. Even so, he might have employed a more critical approach to his sources. He publishes, for example, the very interesting but somewhat optimistic Jacobite estimate of support in England and Wales in 1721, without assessing its reliability, and he similarly prints a list of Jacobites based on the biogra- phies in Romney Sedgwick's House of Commons, 1715-1754, itself not known for underrating the Jacobite menace. He seems generally to accept the assertions and assessments of Jacobite plotters at face value, though it is not absolutely clear that he has quite made up his own mind about the precise extent of disaffection, for there is a certain ambiguity in the book on this point. That Walpole was convinced of the danger of a second Restoration emerges very strongly; whether he was right to be so con- vinced is a question which has yet to be definitively answered. PAUL LANGFORD Lincoln College, Oxford MAKERS AND FORGERS. By David Greene. G. J. Williams Memorial Lecture, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1975. Pp. 22. This lecture, given by a distinguished Irish scholar from Dublin, sticks fairly closely, if indirectly, to the life-work of G. J. Williams, the study of the career and writings of Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826). Beginning with a philological discussion on the closeness of the words for making and for forging (fabric and fabrication, for example), he shows how often in history poetry is close to forgery, and how much myth-making is a deliberate part of the writing of history. This was especially true of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and David Greene refers not only to the well-known figures of Macpherson, Villemarque, and others in Celtic countries, but also to figures such as Elias Lonnrot from Finland who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, selected and combined ancient Finnish folk songs to make the national epic Kalevala (known to most of us through the music of Sibelius), an epic which in turn had great influence on the Finnish nationalist movement. Lonnrot is never called a forger, yet what he did was very similar in many ways to the work of Iolo or Macpherson. The writer also draws a parallel with Iolo's contemporary, William Blake, as a mythologist. Blake never claimed, as did Iolo, to be a scholar or historian, and hence was free from the accusation of being a forger. He was only a maker. Perhaps the writer is rather unfair to lolo when he says (pp. 19-20) that Iolo's sole contribution to Welsh national consciousness in the nineteenth century was the Gorsedd of Bards. I would argue that the Gorsedd was only an outward, popular symbol of what Iolo believed was the essence of Welsh history, the guardianship of the language and its