Yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru, or The National Eisteddfod, is in full swing down at Newport, with lots of online coverage from the BBC. Big news of the day: they’re selling alcohol on site for the first time ever. Not all the bards are happy. (One day, I shall go. But it’s intimidating for a novice Welsh learner. This is probably the most intense experience of ‘Cymru’ you’ll ever get. It doesn’t help that I decided, what with needing to get on with the research in London, that I just didn’t have the time to attend Wlpan Awst this year. And you don’t get too many opportunities to see and hear everyday Welsh in Richmond.)
So, what’s an eisteddfod, some of you might be asking? Why is it such an important part of the Welsh cultural scene? In one way, it could be seen as a kind of ‘invented tradition’; at the same time, in one form or another, the eisteddfod (literally, ’sitting’) goes back a long way. The potted histories all quote the date 1176, when one of the pre-eminent Welsh magnates of the day, the Lord Rhys, called a tournament of poets and musicians who competed for the prize of a chair of honour at the lord’s table. Hence the name, which is recorded from the fifteenth century; and today’s winners (’chaired bards’) receive hand-carved chairs.
Medieval Welsh poetry was a rigorous and complex art, particularly perhaps the rules of cynghanedd (“the repetition of sounds within a line of verse, following fixed patterns” – much more than simple alliteration). In the hands of a master such as Dafydd ap Gwilym, the great lyrical fourteenth-century poet, or the fifteenth-century Guto’r Glyn, the results could be sublime (though virtually impossible to translate into English…). (The best book to read if you want to learn more is A guide to Welsh literature, vol. 2, ed. by AOH Jarman and GR Hughes. Dafydd’s poems can be found in English translation, however inadequate that might be.)
Medieval eisteddfodau were serious affairs. The bardic orders were upheld by the traditions of princely and noble patronage of bards; the eisteddfodau decided who was good enough to sing the lords’ praises – and thus to earn a living. And with the end of that aristocratic medieval society came the end of the medieval bards. (‘Anglicisation’ is a perhaps rather simplistic way of describing a long-term process of social and cultural change that meant that these traditions simply ceased to be relevant to Welsh society.) The last professional household bard died in the late seventeenth century; the eisteddfodau were in serious decline long before that – certainly from the sixteenth century. They still existed in the eighteenth century, but were by now usually very small-scale, local (and low-quality) affairs. They had, it can be argued, been supplanted by more plebeian cultural institutions such as the anterliwt (interlude), with its famous masters such as Twm o’r Nant, bawdy, satirical plays that were loved by the Welsh people in the eighteenth century (but often regarded with suspicion by authorities, and much disliked by religious reformers).
The modern Eisteddfod, with its ‘druidic’ Gorsedd of Bards, is in many ways a late eighteenth-century Romantic nationalist creation. For much of that, you can blame Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams), Glamorgan stone mason, self-taught polymath, ethnographer, poet, opium addict and master literary forger. He’s been called a ‘rattleskull genius’, and there’s currently a major research project devoted to him and his writings underway in Aberystwyth. His forgeries were indeed amazing; his Triads are a wonderful read, quite apart from being virtually indistinguishable from the medieval real thing, and his ‘Dafydd ap Gwilym’ poems were good enough to fool scholars until the mid-twentieth century. Yet at the same time, his observational writings on his native Glamorgan are accurate, vivid ethnographical sources for historians today.
In a sense, he was following the lead of eisteddfod revivals in north-east Wales from 1789 (Iolo, a true Glamorgan man, was always jealous of north Walian achievements, always had to go one better; many of his inventions were aimed at showing that Glamorgan was the real heart of Welsh culture, not the north). But in doing so, he created enduring, key elements of the modern Eisteddfod. In 1792, he held the first Gorsedd (‘Throne’) of Bards, at Primrose Hill in London, with claims that he could trace the ceremony back thousands of years to the original druids; in 1819, the Gorsedd arrived in Wales.
In truth, the Gorsedd existed only in his imagination. But even if it came directly out of Iolo’s fertile brain, it caught on rapidly in the context of an emerging Welsh nationalist consciousness in search of ‘usable’ pasts, and a Romantic one shying away from the ugly realities of industrialisation (see Prys Morgan’s The Welsh eighteenth-century renaissance, or his chapter in The invention of tradition, ed. by Hobsbawm and Ranger). By the time his invention had been exposed, the ceremonies had become inextricably part of the Eisteddfod.
Indeed, they’re probably even more central today than in the nineteenth century, when eisteddfodau flourished across Wales (at least 500 competitions of some importance were held during the century, and there would have been many more small events that have left few or no records). The first National Eisteddfod was held in 1861; it was established as an annual event, alternating between north and south Wales each year, in the 1880s. Today, there’s a wide range of competitions: not just poetry, but also prose writing, singing, dance, recitation; not to mention a wide range of entertainments (and now, of course, alcohol). And there are also the multitudes of local eisteddfodau; and, at the other end of the scale, the Llangollen International Eisteddfod, a music competition. The eisteddfod continues to evolve (despite annual worries that insufficient funds will be raised to keep it going). Iolo Morganwg’s ambition was for the eisteddfod to become a true national Welsh institution, and even though Welsh may now be the minority language (which was not the case in his day), there can be few doubts that that is what it’s become.
One day, I will go.