Welsh Journals

and he will also discern how easily the Welsh people absorb elements of other cultures and make them appear within a short time their very own. PRYS MORGAN Swansea. Y SIPsIWN Cymreig. By Eldra and A. O. H. Jarman. Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1979. Pp. 210. £ 9.95 (hardback), £ 5.95 (softback). Grattan Puxon in the current (and, unfortunately, the last) number of Planet says that during the nineteenth century there was such an upsurge of interest in the Gypsies that the term Gypsiologist was coined to describe those who studied these extraordinary wanderers. Yet they had done (he adds) some disservice because they treated the Gypsies as informants and suggested that they were the last of their line, and that their language was about to disappear. Despite persecutions from Fascists and others, Gypsies who retain their language are, in fact, an expanding minority in areas such as the south-east of Europe. George Borrow was the most famous, but Dr. John Sampson of Liverpool was the most learned, Gypsiologist, and his classic The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales (1926) is familiar to historians of modem Wales. Sampson's informants, themselves the kinsmen of Eldra Jarman, were the last of their line in Wales to keep their language. Mrs Jarman says that few true Welsh Gypsies survive today as travelling folk, and none is likely to speak the wonderfully pure inflected Romany which so aston- ished and delighted Sampson in 1894. Mr Ernest Roberts of Newtown has drawn attention in his recent book in Welsh, John Roberts, Telynor Cymru, to one branch of the Welsh Gypsies and their musical activities, and the Roberts family also form an important part of Y Sipsiwn Cymreig. The Jarmans draw, justifiably, on the work of Sampson and his contemporaries, and upon the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society; but they also give us much that is original- references to the Romany in Welsh literature, and many personal touches and tales from Mrs. Jarman's own family lore. The book is subtitled 'Teulu Abram Wood', for it is as the 'Family of Abram Wood' that many Welsh people, especially those in the north, refer to Gypsies, assuming that they are descended from that mysterious patriarch, Abram Wood, who died in 1799. This book gives us a short, scholarly and interesting survey of what is known about this gifted and fascinating branch of the Romany, the Wood clan: their lore and customs, their 'discovery' by Dr. Sampson in 1894, their patterns of intermarriage (almost as close as that of the Ptolemies of Egypt), their language, which had survived with remarkable purity in the mountains of the north, and their legends and sayings. In some ways the survival of a self-conscious clan during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, speaking a dialect of Sanskrit and retaining strange and curious lore and customs, is a reflection in miniature of the survival of Welsh itself. The clan worked as a highly self-conscious minority, outsiders looking down on the English and the Welsh as foolish, dirty gajo or gentiles, keeping their racial purity through intermarriage,