Bog Myrtle & Peat

I went to see M Wynn Thomas at the Montgomery Literary festival in Powys. I was there to speak for myself on the following day, but couldn’t resist the opportunity to hear and meet a long-time idol of mine.

My first glimpse of the man himself was surprisingly opaque. He slipped onto the stage in silence, begging more questions than answers; he might’ve been soft or effeminate, tired or underspoken – there was nothing to betray the character of this man whose books are full of unpacked and repackaged ideas on Welsh national and cultural identities. I could only say that he was a small and pleasingly chelonian figure dressed in creams and taupes, carrying a tote bag filled with unbound sheets of printed paper.

I’ve spent weeks reading M Wynn Thomas. I’ve gobbled up as much of this his writing as I can find, particularly that which relates to his friend RS Thomas, the greatest poet of the Twentieth Century. M Wynn Thomas is something of a literary mogul with influence far beyond his role professor of English in the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales at Swansea University. He has a profound grasp on the grand intangibles, and while I’m still finding my feet as an observer of Welsh culture, he’s a landmark visible from the Solway shore on a clear day.

With the old expression “never meet your heroes” ringing in my head, I was certainly conscious that I’m heavily invested in this man, who rustled his beige anorak and looked suspiciously into the room as a small audience settled in; twenty five people, of whom eight were wearing lanyards to suggest they were part of the organising committee. He wasn’t anxious or nervy on the stage; only impatient to start.

He’d come to Montgomery promote his latest book “A History of Wales in Twelve Poems”. I already own a copy but hadn’t managed to make a start on it. Adjusting my ears to better catch that unfamiliar but richly welcome Welsh accent, Wynn Thomas began his talk with a lurching sideways plunge off piste into a discussion about Y Gododdin and orality in older literary traditions. That classic poem represents a cornerstone of Welsh literature, but there’s a neat kicker in the fact that it was written in what is now modern Scotland. It may seem remarkable today, but 6^th Century Wales included Southern Scotland, which it called Yr Hên Ogledd – “The old North”.

There’s plenty to unpack in that, not least in how modern nationalist narratives express older Celtic identities. I recently read a biography of Owain Glyndŵr which was at such pains to point out that William Wallace was Welsh that the impression was downright touchy. So when M Wynn Thomas pointedly reclaimed Y Gododdin as Welsh, he did so by shouldering Scotland off the ball.

There’s not much of an ownership dispute here, but it raises some fun questions about whether it’s actually useful to bracket literature according to nation states. Y Gododdin is certainly the oldest Scottish poem in terms of geography, but it was composed in Early Welsh and preserved for five centuries in a uniquely Welsh bardic tradition. Nobody’s seriously trying to deny that Y Gododdin’s Welsh, but it’s worth remembering that the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid caused a stir by recasting aspects of the poem for Scotland in the 1930s.

You can take this two ways; MacDiarmid was an ardent nationalist who strove to create a functional modern literature for Scotland using all the tools available to him. He clearly felt entitled to work with Y Gododdin as part of a broader Scottish canon, even if it required him to “take” material which “belonged” to others. That’s an interesting challenge to conventions, but rather than alienate his Welsh counterparts, many were inspired to model Welsh nationalism on the imaginative template MacDiarmid established for Scotland.

On the other hand, you could rehash MacDiarmid’s handling of Y Gododdin as a gesture of British plurality on the cusp of the Second World War, highlighting a sense that modern understandings of Wales and Scotland would have meant little to our shared Celtic ancestors. Facing Hitler, it was helpful to remember that “we’re all in this together”. Several key writers did this, but it seems unlikely that MacDiarmid would have done the same. He would have snarled at “British plurality” as little more than a watered-down sop to pure-form Scottish nationalism, even in the face of Nazi expansionism. If he saw common threads in British plurality, they would only have led him to a shared sense of injustice at English rule; the common burden of Paol Keineg’s “ransomed nations”.

But I buy the argument of plurality and commonality, even if MacDiarmid didn’t. I find it extremely easy to lean into parallels between older Scottish and Welsh cultures, and I look enviously at Welsh works like the Mabinogion or the Irish Táin because we have nothing to match them in Scotland. Our single-minded fixation on the Reformation meant that we simply walked away from vast, essential threads of our own cultural history. Puritanism created scandalous gaps in our collective imagination, and it’s impossible to quantify what we threw away.

In this context, it’s no surprise that Walter Scott and James Hogg were obsessed with reimagining a pre-Reformation Scotland, full of faeries and minstrels from a readily identifiable Cymric format. Feeling a hole in themselves, they created a synthetic prehistory for Scotland which pleases the tourist trade but lacks any authentic sense of organic continuity. So it’s useful for modern Scottish readers to engage with Welsh, Irish and Manx culture because these uncover a window on our Celtic selves that’s otherwise missing at home.

Of course this is only one strand of M Wynn Thomas’ anthology of poetry, which ran all the way from Blodeuwedd to Fern Hill and Gillian Clarke, but he touched on so many themes I recognise as a Scottish reader. He made it clear that while the Anglo Saxon’s stereotypical Celt is the passionate, colourful Dylan Thomas (or Robert Burns), the other side of the coin is something calmer and cooler; reflective, ascetic and clean. In Scotland, that’s often expressed as a Presbyterian dourness and a sense of self-restraint. It sometimes seems like Noncomformist Wales is just the same, but the differences are surprisingly rich.

There’s no reason for me to bind myself to a Welshman like M Wynn Thomas with such intensity, but his academic work and literary criticism is so exciting and relevant to Scottish readers that I’d call it downright inflammatory. The man himself exceeded my imaginings; subversive, funny and madly wise. In fact I was so in thrall to him that I bought myself a second copy of A History of Wales in Twelve Poems, just so that he could sign it.