Wild Wales

I was stirred to read this book on listening to Carwyn James bringing up the subject at the small world exhibition, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. I can see why it was not a popular book in its time, at the height of Empire, with a war going on in the Crimea, he didn't have a good word for the English. Intrinsically it didn't sell well because it was just another travel book, but I don't believe that, there was so much social interaction, such a love of the Country, it's Language & literature, mainly poetry, he knew the names of all the great heroes & poets over the centuries, the greatest of whom for him was Dafydd ap Gwilym, in his eyes unrivalled even in ancent Greece & Rome, not just that but he could quote their 'oeuvres' in Cymraeg/Welsh, or from his own English translations done as a youth, after having learned classical Welsh and the strict meters involved by reading Owen Pugh's  translation of 'Paradise Lost' and being taught pronunciation by a Welsh groom. He had a profound knowledge of the history and  legends attached, and could 'understand' when a Welsh butcher attacked a rival English one with a knife, for wasn't he from the race of  Hengist, the Saxon chief who commited the dastardly 'treason of the long knives'? He remarked on the great divide in the cultural awareness of the respective Welsh & English lower classes, with the former's being far superior, and this at a time when the Welsh themselves were succumbing to a sense of inferiority due to their lack of English, just seven years after another treachery, that of the 'Blue Books'.  I saw more of the Country in detail than I ever saw with my own eyes, and learned a lot as I accompanied him from Llangollen to Chepstow (he gives the Welsh name as Aber Wye and not Cas-Gwent), where I just saw him off on the train to London at just before 2 a.m. Dec. 21, 2010 my time, after 10 o' clock at night, Nov. 16, 1854, his. He wrote 80 chapters of the North as against only 29 of the South and not much about Glamorgan & Monmouthshire, by far the most populous counties, perhaps partly because of his difficulties of understanding the southern  dialects which would have stunted the conversation that he was so into, and partly because of the satanic visions of the heavy industry. In his account nobody was speaking Welsh in Wrexham, but half the people he spoke to 7 or 8 miles to the east of Casnewydd/Newport were, and everyone was speaking Welsh on the streets of Merthyr. I noticed that whilst discoursing with a North Walian, the man referred to Caerludd and not Llundain. Anyhow, as I've written, I came back to this book having been stirred by a speech delivered by Mr. Carwyn Jones, the First Minister of Cymru/Wales, when after hearing his story of George Borrow in Y Gwter Fawr, today's Brynaman,  I picked up the book I bought 46 years ago but never wholly read. I'm afraid that he was in error, for far from our guide being thrown out of the pub because he could understand their conversation which displeased them, as he stated; au contraire, they allowed him to speak to them, to tell them a story which held them in awe until the evening ended and he retired to bed in the same inn, one of the company even brushed him down the following morning such was he respected; also it was the 1850's and not the 1830's, so Carwyn you got it wrong! I hope you take more care to get things right before addressing the public in other matters.