Following the celebration of the Library building’s centenary in July, we are proud to announce the opening of our extension! I am referring to the Library’s new shared exhibition gallery in north east Wales, at the Wrexham County Borough Museum. In the future, Wrexham residents and visitors will be able to see items from the collections of the National Library and the National Museum exhibited locally. The first exhibition, entitled ‘Welsh Wonders’, coincides with this week’s National Eisteddfodat Wrexham, and two items on display deserve particular attention…
Whilst the enrobed druids parade in their finery on the eisteddfod field, the spirit of Iolo Morganwg (1747-1826) will be looking on in approval. Iolo invented an order of bards, whom he claimed had inherited the secret learning and traditions of the ancient druids. His ‘History of the British Bards’ was to reveal this knowledge, including the runic alphabet used by the druids themselves, and his handwritten key to this secretive code can be seen in the gallery. It took almost a century for scholars to expose Iolo’s fabrications, and to prove that the eisteddfod gorsedd was no more than a modern flight of fancy!
One stanza and refrain from the Welsh national anthem, ‘Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’, can also be seen in the Wrexham exhibition, in the hand of (alleged) composer James James (1833-1902), who wrote the melody in January 1856. Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton, after his recent victory in Germany’s Grand Prix, complained that the British (sic) national anthem was too short, but it is not the length of the Welsh anthem that should worry the Wrexham visitor, but the authorship of the words, long attributed to Evan James (1809-1878).
Dafydd Glyn Jones recently drew attention to a similar but anonymous poem, entitled ‘The Land of my Fathers’, published in the Bangor Gazette in October 1819:
The green hills of Britain advance on my sight,
The hills that my fathers once view’d with delight,
The birth place of Freedom, the land of the Brave,
The hate of the Tyrant, the hope of the slave…
With its ‘tombs where our Fathers are laid’, common themes, and seven syllable lines, the 1819 poem is intriguingly similar to Evan James’s supposed 1856 composition.
Could it be that the Welsh national anthem in Wrexham’s glass case is a later copy of a much older composition?
Maredudd ap Huw