The Bard from Glamorgan
The three necessary functions of a Bard: to teach and explain all things in the face of the sun and the eye of light; to praise all that is excellent and good; and to substitute peace for devastation and pillage. —Barddas 4
The leaves were turning their fall colors on Primrose Hill, on the northern side of Regent’s Park in London, as a line of people filed out of a pub and through the streets toward the hilltop. Most of them were young, and all of them wore the colorful garments that were fashionable just then; some had ribbons, blue, green, or white, tied around their right arms above the elbow. Passersby looked on in bemusement as the group reached the hilltop and formed a circle. The leader of the group, a forty-something man in a bright blue coat whose unruly brown hair fluttered around his face in the breeze, went to the center of the circle and called out, “Is there peace?” The people in the circle responded together, “Peace.” The celebration of the autumn equinox, following traditions that the group’s leader claimed to trace back to the time of the ancient Druids, had formally begun.
Many people who are alive today remember nearly identical happenings in the London counterculture scene of the 1960s and 1970s, in the first years of today’s revival of interest in all things Celtic. Yellowing newspaper clippings in old archives tell of similar events back in the 1920s, when an earlier wave of enthusiasm for Celtic traditions was in full spate. The events I have just described, though, don’t belong to either of those eras. They took place on September 23, 1792. On that day George III was on the English throne, and English men and women were already beginning to dress in the styles that would make the Regency era one of the great ages of elegant attire. Across the Channel, revolutionary violence gripped France, and the cannonade of Valmy just three days before the equinox ceremony marked the beginning of an era of European wars that would not end until the carnage of Waterloo nearly twenty-three years later. On the far side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, George Washington was nearing the end of his first term as President of the newly founded United States. This was the world into which Iolo Morganwg, a poet and stonecutter from the county of Glamorgan in Wales, launched what he claimed were the teachings of the ancient Welsh bards.
Wales and England
To understand Iolo and his impact, it’s necessary to start with Wales, the mountainous principality on the western flank of the island of Britain. Some twelve centuries before Iolo’s time, as the Roman Empire tumbled into ruin, what was then the province of Britannia was ravaged by armed invasions from the barbarian countries of northern Europe. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—three closely related tribal peoples who lived in what is now northern Germany and Denmark—took advantage of the collapse of Roman rule and their own mastery of the seas to swarm across to Britain’s poorly defended shores. Over the centuries that followed, the bulk of the island fell into their hands, becoming Angle-land, or as we now say it, England. Their languages blended together to become the ancestor of modern English, and their customs and culture laid the foundation on which their descendants and later waves of invaders built what is now the English nation.
The mountainous regions in the north and west of the island remained independent when the lowlands fell, however, and their history unfolded along a different path. In the immediate wake of the English conquests, there were four independent Celtic nations in Britain: from north to south, Scotland, Rheged, Wales, and Cornwall. Rheged was overwhelmed by the Northumbrian Saxons in the seventh century, and only scraps of its ancient Celtic culture and language survive. Cornwall was conquered by the Saxon kingdom of Wessex in the ninth century but remained a nation apart, and the old Cornish language is still spoken there today. Scotland had a more complex history, for most of its traditional Celtic culture arrived in post-Roman times with immigrants from Ireland; its original Celtic peoples, the Picts, spoke a language related to Cornish and Welsh, but they faded out of history during the turmoil of the Dark Ages.
Then there was Wales: “Wild Wales,” as the prophecies of the Welsh bard Taliesin called it, a land of rugged mountains and steep-sided valleys between the rolling hills of the English Midlands and the cold waters of the Irish Sea. It was invaded repeatedly by English armies and finally conquered by King Edward I of England in 1282, but it retained its own distinctive laws and legal system until the sixteenth century, and to this day the language, culture, and customs of the Welsh remain sharply different from those of their English neighbors to the east.
One of the core elements of Welsh culture is the oldest living tradition of poetry in Europe, a heritage that can be traced back in an unbroken lineage to the sixth century. The bard—this English term is actually a borrowing from the Welsh word bardd—has always been an important figure in Welsh communities, a learned and respected person filling roles in society that few other cultures assign to poets. A properly trained bard was expected not only to be able to compose verses in the demanding meters of traditional Welsh poetry, but also to have by heart a wealth of traditional tales, to preserve local genealogies and histories, and to serve as a general source of learning and lore for the community in which he lived.
These duties, however, became steadily harder to fulfill as England entered the industrial revolution, and wealth and power became ever more concentrated in the hands of the bankers and merchants of London and the industrialists of the English Midlands. By the middle years of the eighteenth century, the Welsh poetic traditions were carried on mostly by part-time bards who supported themselves with day jobs, while the rest of the Welsh population had little time for poetry in an age when brutal poverty was the norm. The cultures of all the Celtic nations were widely condemned and despised as relics of a barbarous past, and those who clung to Welsh culture in the teeth of English public opinion faced a rising tide of social and legal penalties. It was in this setting that Iolo Morganwg was born.
A Bardic Apprenticeship
His real name was Edward Williams, and he was born in 1747 in the little village of Pennon in the county of Glamorgan in Wales. His father was a stonemason and young Edward took up the same trade, traveling to various corners of Wales and England in search of work. In his teen years, however, he met some of the few remaining Welsh bards—Lewis Hopkin, Rhys Morgan, and especially Siôn Bradford, who became his most important instructor. From them he learned the rules of formal Welsh verse and gained an enduring love of the language and its poetry. His travels in Wales gave him the opportunity to visit libraries and manuscript collections around the principality, and sparked a taste for copying and collecting old Welsh manuscripts that lasted for the rest of his life. It was customary for the bards of his day to adopt a pen name in Welsh; Edward Williams followed suit, adopting the name by which he would be remembered ever after—Iolo Morganwg, “Ned of Glamorgan.”
In 1773 he moved to London and quickly made contacts in the Welsh expatriate scene there, becoming a member of the recently founded Gwyneddigion Society, an organization devoted to Welsh historical scholarship. Combined with his training in traditional bardic verse and his enthusiasm for old manuscripts, the historical background and access to documents he gained by way of London’s Welsh community gave him a thorough grounding in the ancient literature of the principality, and he turned out to have a remarkable talent for the language and poetry of medieval Wales.
It was also during this first period in London that he first encountered the writings of the fourteenth-century bard Dafydd ap Gwilym, one of the greatest of Welsh poets. Iolo was bowled over by the power of Dafydd’s verse and the effortless way in which the old bard handled even the most demanding of formal Welsh poetic forms. Reading and rereading Dafydd’s poems, Iolo felt transported back to an older and better time, when bards could still count on financial support from aristocrats such as Dafydd’s patron Ifor Hael, and the scars of the new industrial system had not yet begun to deface the Welsh landscape with coal mines and smokestacks.
Daydreams do not pay the bills, though, and London had plenty of stonemasons. He traveled to Kent and worked there for a time, but business was not much better. In 1777 he returned home to Glamorgan and married, determined to settle down, open a business of some kind, and earn the kind of steady income that would allow him to pursue his poetic and scholarly interests with some degree of comfort and financial security.
Unfortunately for his plans, Iolo had no talent for business at all. Each of the schemes he launched to try to better his situation collapsed around him, leaving him so far in debt that he spent a while in debtor’s prison. When his wife Margaret inherited a farm from her parents, he gave farming a try and had only slightly better luck. It didn’t help that in his London days, Iolo had picked up the habit of using laudanum—opium dissolved in alcohol, which was legal and readily available in Britain at that time—and his drug habit gave him no help at all in dealing with the hard realities of business or farming.
Still, the main problem Iolo faced was that he was brilliantly qualified for a profession that no longer existed—court bard to a medieval Welsh aristocrat—and not really suited to anything else. He knew the old bardic teachings inside and out, had the traditions and lore of his native county at his fingertips, and could, at the drop of a hat, craft first-rate verse in medieval Welsh using any of the classic poetic forms, but nobody in eighteenth-century Britain was willing to pay for medieval Welsh poetry written by a modern poet named Edward Williams.
But if those same poems had Dafydd ap Gwilym’s name on them …
The Forger
It was a propitious time for such ventures, for the late eighteenth century was one of the great ages of literary forgery. When Iolo was fourteen years old, in 1761, a Scottish poet and collector of traditional tales named James MacPherson claimed to have discovered an epic poem in the Scots Gaelic language titled Fingal, which had been written by the ancient bard Ossian.5 His English version of the poem was an immediate bestseller and was followed two years later by another epic poem by the same bard, titled Temora. The Ossian poems, as they came to be called, found enthusiastic readers across Europe—Napoleon, to mention only one famous name, was a passionate fan. MacPherson refused to show scholars the Gaelic originals or explain a range of details that didn’t fit, though, and it came out eventually that he had simply gathered up an assortment of traditional Highland tales about the hero Fionn and his son Oisín, strung them together into a single narrative, and written the poems himself.
Around the time that hard questions were first being asked about the Ossian poems, in turn, a teenager from Bristol named Thomas Chatterton astonished and delighted the English literary world by his discovery of the manuscripts of a previously unknown medieval poet of the fifteenth century, Thomas Rowley. After Chatterton committed suicide in 1770 at the age of seventeen, it turned out that he had written all of the Rowley manuscripts himself.
MacPherson and Chatterton were only two of the brightest stars in the glittering sky of eighteenth-century forgery, and the thought of imitating the success of MacPherson’s work, in particular, must have been tempting to Iolo. He was familiar with the controversies surrounding both men and seems to have paid close attention to their mistakes.6 Unlike MacPherson, he had no need to worry if he were asked to show verses in the original language, and his grasp of medieval Welsh was much more complete than Chatterton’s knowledge of medieval English. For a man living on the brink of destitution with a wife and children to support, he was also surprisingly patient. He moved into the business of forgery slowly, without the sudden rush of discoveries that roused suspicions about MacPherson and Chatterton.
It was thus early in the 1780s that he first mentioned, in letters to scholarly Welsh friends in London, that there were poems by Dafydd ap Gwilym in Glamorgan that didn’t seem to be in the manuscript collections elsewhere. Two of those friends, Owen Jones and William Owen Pughe, just happened to be assembling the first published collection of Dafydd’s poems just then, and eagerly wrote back for more details. In due course, when Barddoniaeth Dafydd ab Gwilym (The Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym) saw print in 1789, it included a number of Iolo’s forged poems—which were promptly hailed as among Dafydd’s best work.
More forgeries followed in due course. Meanwhile, with an eye toward achieving a more conventional sort of literary success, Iolo got to work on a collection of verse in English, to be titled Poems Lyric and Pastoral. Crowdsourcing may be the latest thing in today’s internet culture, but it was already a familiar process in Iolo’s time; poets or writers who didn’t have the funds to pay for the printing of their works could put advertisements in literary periodicals, soliciting subscribers to pay for copies in advance. That was how Poems Lyric and Pastoral was published. Among the many people who contributed was a plantation owner and military officer in the former British colony of Virginia who had become famous by the time the book finally saw print in 1794; his name was George Washington.7
The Gorsedd of the Bards
In 1791, with high hopes of launching a writing career, Iolo returned to London. His lifelong bad luck at business continued to pursue him, though. Poems Lyrical and Pastoral went through one delay after another on its way to publication, and other opportunities were few and far between. A large part of his writing time, furthermore, went into projects that would not help pay his bills—above all, into the first drafts of a series of documents outlining the history, teachings, and customs of the ancient Welsh bards.
A mystery that will probably never be solved surrounds these documents, which were finally published long after Iolo’s death in a collection titled Barddas (Bardism). By the time Iolo returned to London, he was an accomplished forger of medieval Welsh poems and literature. Equally, by the time Iolo returned to London, he had traveled through much of Wales and copied a great many old documents, many of which were later lost or destroyed. Even those scholars who criticize Iolo’s forgeries in the harshest terms have been forced to admit, for example, that his collection of southern Welsh folk music—Ancient National Airs of Gwent and Morganwg (published posthumously in 1844)—is full of authentic traditional songs and tunes, and that some of the other documents he unearthed were in fact authentic discoveries rather than forgeries.
The old manuscripts of Wales in those days were scattered far and wide. Local gentry and clergy all over the Welsh countryside had their own collections, and it was far from rare for ordinary farm families to have inherited a manuscript volume or two, which might contain copies of poetry and tales found nowhere else. Wales at that time was a literary collector’s paradise, since any random farmhouse might hide some lost literary treasure, but it was also a forger’s paradise for the same reason. Most of what survived of the literary heritage of old Wales consisted of copies of copies, as often as not riddled with mistakes. If Iolo said that he’d found a poem supposedly by Dafydd Gwilym in a volume kept by a farmer in a remote corner of Glamorgan, few people were able or willing to tackle the long journey that was needed in those days to see if he was telling the truth. What’s more, if some of the fine details of the poem’s grammar and verse structure weren’t quite right for the fourteenth century, who was to say that those errors hadn’t been accidentally inserted by some clumsy copyist?
The mystery surrounding Iolo’s bardic documents is thus simply that nobody knows which parts of his bardic lore came from one of the many documents that Iolo is known to have studied but have been lost since his time, and which parts came from his own vivid imagination. There are things in Barddas that are almost certainly Iolo’s inventions, but there are also things in the collection that are very hard to explain unless Iolo did in fact draw on sources that dated from the Middle Ages.8 In some cases—for example, the Meddygon Myddfai (Physicians of Myddfai), a collection of recipes for herbal medicines—it’s been shown by scholars that Iolo found an actual Welsh document and then rewrote it, adding additional material.9 The possibility that some of the papers collected in Barddas could have come out of some similar process can’t be dismissed out of hand.
It was his work on the traditions and institutions of the ancient bards that gave rise to the ceremony described at the start of this chapter. According to Iolo, a Gorsedd of Bards—the word gorsedd in Welsh means “throne” and refers to the chair of the presiding bard—was the traditional assembly of bards, held on the solstices and equinoxes, at which candidates for bardic training were formally accepted, those who had completed their training received the honored title of Bardd Braint a Defod (Bard by Right and Privilege), and decisions relating to the bardic institution and its traditions were debated and handed down. A gorsedd had to be held out of doors—“in the face of the Sun, the eye of light”—which explains the scene that startled passersby near Primrose Hill on that autumn day.
Iolo held at least three gorseddau in London; he may have held others, but those are the ones from which records survive. By the time he left London again in 1795, his failed dreams of literary success had been replaced by a more powerful and stranger vision—the dream of resurrecting the bardic institutions of Wales in all the glory that he had imagined for them.
The Secret of the Bards of the Island of Britain
Iolo spent the last thirty years of his life in this eccentric quest. Amazingly, the success that had eluded him in every other pursuit finally came to him. Supported mostly by the generosity of his many friends and admirers, he alternated periods of writing and teaching at home with long journeys throughout Glamorgan and other parts of Wales, handing on the traditions and customs of Welsh bardism to anyone who wanted to learn them. He founded gorseddau wherever there were poets qualified to lead them—at one point in his life, for example, the small town of Merthyr Tydfil boasted no fewer than three independent Gorseddau—and he attracted a circle of disciples as passionate about his bardic teachings as he was. His son Taliesin was among these. Another, the most influential in the long run, was a young Anglican priest from Merioneth named John Williams, who in later years—as John Williams ab Ithel—would play a crucial role in transmitting his teacher’s legacy to the future.
To his bardic students, Iolo handed on an extraordinary body of lore, symbolism, and wisdom teaching. According to him, bardism dated back to the beginning of the world, when Einigan the Giant, the Welsh Adam, witnessed the three descending rays of light that brought the world into being. In those rays of light was all the knowledge that ever was or would be, and Einigan, beholding them, understood some of that knowledge. In order to preserve what he had learned, he took three long straight branches of a rowan tree, cut them into staves, and carved the first of all letters on them. Some time afterward, though, others who encountered the three staves worshipped them as gods instead of learning the wisdom that was written on them, and Einigan was so distressed by this that his heart burst and he died.10
A year and a day after Einigan’s death, the story continues, Menw the Old happened upon the giant’s skull, lying neglected in a field. Through the skull’s eye sockets and mouth grew the three rowan staves, which had taken root and sprouted leaves—and the wisdom that had been carved upon the staves was still partly legible. Studying that wisdom, Menw became the first of the Gwyddoniaid, the loremasters of the Welsh people in the distant past before Hu the Mighty led them to the shores of Britain. It was after the Welsh came to Britain that the Gwyddoniaid were divided into the three orders of ovates, bards, and druids, and the bards received their portion of the wisdom of Einigan to transmit down the centuries.
It must have been an astonishing experience to sit with Iolo around the table in his home, or in some clergyman’s house or rural inn where he stayed for a few days while traveling, and listen to the old bard as he conjured up the luminous images of a Welsh past that never was. By this time, between his laudanum habit and his own passionate commitment to his vision, Iolo himself had long since lost track of his own role in inventing the bardic mysteries he taught. With shining eyes and sweeping gestures, he spoke of the cycles of reincarnation by which souls worked their way up from the simplest living things through all the forms of the animal creation to humanity and then beyond, into the realm of Gwynfydd, the Luminous Life;11 he expounded the customs and traditions of the bardic assemblies; he taught his pupils how to write in the ancient Bardic alphabet, the Coelbren of the Bards, and hinted at the existence of a secret hidden away in the Coelbren that was known only to properly initiated bards.
Cyfrinach Beirdd Ynis Prydain, the Secret of the Bards of the Isle of Britain, was the heart of Iolo’s teaching. What it was has never been publicly revealed. According to Barddas, it had to do with the true name of God, which was somehow concealed in the emblem of the Three Rays of Light, 
. It was communicated to a properly prepared bardic student by his teacher, under a vow of secrecy, and it could not be revealed to anyone other than a bard without forfeiting all the rights and privileges of bardic status. The secret could also be found in the Dasgubell Rodd—a phrase that means “gift besom”12 in Welsh—but neither Barddas nor any other collection of Iolo’s writings reveals what the Dasgubell Rodd is. Here is what Iolo had to say about it, in dialogue form:
Q. What is the Dasgubell Rodd?
A. The key to the primitive Coelbren.
Q. What is it that explains the primitive Coelbren?
A. The Dasgubell Rodd.
Q. What else?
A. The secret of the Dasgubell Rodd.
Q. What secret?
A. The secret of the Bards of the Isle of Britain.
Q. What will divulge the secret of the Bards of the Isle of Britain?
A. Instruction by a master in virtue of a vow.
Q. What kind of vow?
A. A vow made with God.13
The Legacy of Iolo Morganwg
The sheer scale of Iolo’s achievement in his final years is among the most remarkable things about his far from ordinary life. Serene in the conviction that he spoke for the bardic traditions of antiquity, he called on the poets of nineteenth-century Wales to embrace the customs and institutions that he had invented—and astonishingly, that’s exactly what they did. The turning point in that process came in 1819, when an eisteddfod (bardic competition) held in Carmarthen invited him to conduct a Gorsedd of Bards as part of the ceremonies. That established a tradition that was honored by subsequent eisteddfodau across Wales, and is still honored to this day.
The popularity of the Gorsedd of the Bards had a significant impact on Welsh cultural history in the nineteenth century. Under its patronage, the rebirth of Welsh scholarship that had been launched by expatriates in London late in the previous century spread explosively through Wales. In the peace that followed the long ordeal of the Napoleonic Wars, local societies for Welsh learning and culture sprang up across the principality, and hosting an eisteddfod and gorsedd was a popular way for those societies to proclaim their enthusiasm for Welsh tradition. In the wake of this revival, a growing number of Welsh men and women began to take pride once again in their language and culture. Many other people contributed to that transformation, of course, but historians today consider Iolo Morganwg to have been a crucial figure in forging—in both senses of the word—the modern Welsh nation.
His impact was helped along considerably after his death by John Williams ab Ithel, the disciple of Iolo’s mentioned above. A capable scholar with a solid command of the older forms of the Welsh language, Williams ab Ithel was a working clergyman but devoted his off hours to a series of important editions and translations of old Welsh literature, including the Dosparth Ederyn Dafod Aur, the medieval treatise on Welsh grammar mentioned in the introduction to this book. His last great project was the creation of Barddas, the handbook of bardic lore Iolo had envisioned but never managed to produce. Assembling the fragmentary manuscripts Iolo left behind was an immense chore, but for Williams ab Ithel it was a labor of love. The hefty volume saw print shortly before his death in 1862 and found plenty of readers—and not only in Wales.
The revival of Celtic culture that Iolo helped set in motion spread over the course of the nineteenth century, far beyond his native principality. South across the Channel from Cornwall and Wales is Brittany, one of the two surviving Celtic nations on the European continent—the other is Galicia in the northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula. Brittany’s relationship with France closely parallels the Welsh experience with England, and so it was not surprising that Bretons would be inspired by the example of their relatives to the north. In 1899 a group of Breton poets and scholars were formally made members of the Welsh Gorsedd at a ceremony at Cardiff in Wales, and the next year the Goursez Vreizh (Breton Gorsedd) held its first formal meeting in the Breton town of Guingamp. Cornwall followed suit in 1928, when a delegation of Cornish poets and scholars were inducted at the Welsh Gorsedd in Treorchy, and then held the first celebration of the Gorsedh Kernow (Cornish Gorsedd) at the stone circle at Boscawen-Un. Both these are still active; less successful in the long run was a Gorsedd of the United States organized among Welsh expatriates in America, which flourished between the two world wars but went out of existence thereafter.
The remarkable popularity of the gorsedd movement had many positive results, but it also had its inevitable downsides. As the movement focused ever more tightly on the preservation of the language, literature, and culture of the three Celtic nations that adopted it, the stranger and more visionary aspects of Iolo’s bardic lore got pushed to the sidelines.14 Iolo’s Bardism was neither the first nor the last tradition to lose track of much of its uniqueness in the process of becoming popular—that’s a common event in the history of alternative culture. Its importance in the story told here is simply that this is how the Coelbren of the Bards dropped out of common use, and the meanings of the Coelbren letters were forgotten.
There were dissident groups outside the mainstream of the Welsh Gorsedd that kept up the wilder aspects of Iolo’s heritage. The most important of them was an independent gorsedd in Pontyprydd, in Iolo’s own home county of Glamorgan. Two eccentric and charismatic archdruids—Evan Davies, whose bardic name was Myfyr Morganwg, and his successor Owen Morgan, better known in his time as the irrepressible Archdruid Morien—kept Iolo’s bardic mysteries in circulation into the 1920s, and for a time had students across Wales and in America as well.15 Many aspects of Iolo’s teachings have gone on to become important in traditions of spirituality around the world that draw inspiration from the legacy of the Celtic peoples.16
The Coelbren of the Bards followed a similar trajectory. In Iolo’s last years, and for some decades after his death, a great many Welsh poets took the time to learn how to write in it, and a fair number of Welsh museums still have poems written in the Coelbren on wooden sticks as part of their collections. Later on, as Iolo’s forgeries came to light, the Welsh Gorsedd quietly distanced itself from him, and the Coelbren was one of many things that got dropped in that process. It’s possible that teachings about the Coelbren are still passed on to those who are admitted to the rank of Bardd Braint a Defod by the three remaining gorsedds, and they may even be instructed in the Secret of the Bards of the Isle of Britain, but that will only be known by those who have undergone the ceremony in question. Outside the gorsedd circle, though, all that remains of the Coelbren are teachings buried in a handful of old books—but as we’ll see, there are good reasons to change that, and bring the Coelbren of the Bards back into the widespread use Iolo envisioned for it.
4 Williams ab Ithel (2004), vol. 2, 57.
5 This name is more properly spelled Oisín, pronounced “usheen.”
6 Constantine (2007) is an excellent introduction to the issues surrounding Iolo’s forgeries.
7 Williams (1794), xxxviii.
8 See, for example, Greer (2014).
9 Constantine (2007), 24.
10 Williams ab Ithel (2004), 48–51.
11 Williams ab Ithel (2004), 226–235.
12 A besom is an old-fashioned broom made of twigs tied around the bottom of a long handle.
13 Williams ab Ithel (2004), 165–167.
14 Important cultural and linguistic differences (as well as ancient rivalries) separate these three Celtic nations from Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, and thus no effort seems to have been made to export the gorsedd movement to any of these latter nations.
15 Bonwick (1983), 3.
16 Greer (2006) is one example of many.