It’s just not possible to condense a millennium of history into a single post without generalising massively and becoming irritatingly long. Sorry for both, but in the interests of brevity I’m starting at the non-existant year zero (between 1BC and… Read More
Two key things become apparent when you sit down to trace the history of the development of Arthurian literature. First, medieval writers were huge on appropriation of stories. Huge! Second, Arthrui-mania wasn’t just a British thing–the Dutch, Scandinavian,… Read More
Anglo-saxon (Germanic), Norman and Danish words dominate the language we know as ‘English’ but there are a number of ‘Welsh’ words that survived through to modern English. ‘Wales’ itself gets no points because it’s not a Welsh word… Read More
The Celtic spectrum different to ours. Theirs was based on and described by the quality of the hue, not the wavelength. Thus, the early Welsh ‘llywd’ can mean brown (like paper), blue (like mould) or grey (like rabbit)… Read More
Typically, going back to the earliest naming conventions of Wales/Cymru names had very formal structures but weren’t simply limited to patronyms. Individuals had a given name followed by a byname. Patronyms (ie: being named for your father) were,… Read More
In naming my hero from book three in the y Ddraig series, Lailocen (the Myrddyn), I went back to a range of old Celto-Cymric legends. The ‘Merlin’ as he is most commonly recognised today was a collective evolution of… Read More
J.R.R Tolkien was a card-carrying fan of all things Welsh. He loved the country, he loved the language, he loved the literature and became somewhat of an expert in it even busying himself working on both translations and… Read More
This phrase is still fairly well used — ‘waxing poetic’ in the US and ‘waxing lyrical’ in most other English languages. The fact that waxing lyrical and waxing poetic both exist and are deemed interchangeable makes me think… Read More
Brilliantly conceived language tree showing how language evolved. Look at Welsh tucked away there on their own tiny branch so far from English.
The stories of y Ddraig are based on real characters of history, myth or literature and, thus, some places in the stories are real. Caer Gai (known as Caer Gynyr in ‘Sacrifice’ but Caer Gai by ‘Ascension’) did… Read More
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