Welsh Journals

Iolo MORGANWG. By Prys Morgan. 'Writers of Wales' Series, University of Wales Press, on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council, 1975. Pp. 97. £ 1.00. We have become accustomed to the statement that Iolo Morganwg 'polluted the sources of history and the wells of scholarship for up to a hundred years'. It was not, indeed, until the year 1926, exactly a century after lolo's death, that Griffith John Williams published the first fully documented proof of this pollution in his Iolo Morganwg a Chywyddau'r Ychwanegiad. This work exposed lolo's 'forgeries' of poems which he had successfully passed off as the work of Dafydd ap Gwilym, in an appendix to the first collected edition of the poet's work, which was published in 1789 under the editorship of Owen Jones (Myvyr) and William Owen Pughe. This was followed in 1956 by the same scholar's Iolo Morganwg: Y Gyfrol Gyntaf, which was to have constituted the first volume of a detailed study of lolo's life and work-a venture which, to our immeasurable loss, Professor Williams did not live to complete. Prys Morgan's study conforms with the general plan of the 'Writers of Wales' series in that it presents within a restricted compass a general conspectus of lolo's career and of his literary activity. Inevitably it draws on Professor Williams's book for the details of lolo's biography, but in surveying his literary work in toto and in examining the progress of his ideas he has much to say that is original and thought-provoking about this unique and bizarre phenomenon in the Welsh literary tradition. Dr. Morgan divides lolo's career into three main stages: firstly, the period of composition of his early love-poems and of his imitations of Dafydd ap Gwilym; secondly, the period of the forgeries connected with his build-up of the literary supremacy of Glamorgan; and thirdly, the period of his druidic fantasies and of his creation of the Gorsedd ceremonies. In a sensitive appreciation of lolo's original verse, which includes both the cywyddau which he 'fathered' upon Dafydd ap Gwilym and the fabrications which he attributed to a fictitious 'Rhys Goch ap Rhiccert', together with other poems discovered posthumously among his manuscripts, he shows that a main difference between lolo's Welsh compositions and his English ones is that in the latter he tended to follow the habitual cliches of the second-rate English poets who were his contemporaries, while in Welsh he could do no other than fall back upon his innate 'creative' (in the best sense) response to earlier Welsh poetry-to the work of Dafydd ap Gwilym and to the traditional, orally-preserved folk-songs which he heard on the lips of his country neighbours (the poems which we now know as the canu rhydd). (It is, incidentally, worth noting that lolo-unlike Goronwy Owen- on the available evidence totally ignored the complete corpus of Gogyn- feirdd poetry, to which he barely makes any allusion.) Although he came from an English-speaking home it was Welsh, not English, which was the language of lolo's literary awakening: Welsh was therefore his deepest linguistic matrix. To call Iolo's response to earlier Welsh poetry a 'creative' response is to touch upon the very centre of the psychological problem which he presents. By copying the cywyddau which he found in ancient manuscripts, and by recording the folk-songs which he heard around him, he absorbed these poems which stirred him so deeply in such a way that they became an integral part of his own being; so that the irresistible impulse which he