The English Historical Review Advance Access originally published online on April 28, 2009
The English Historical Review 2009 CXXIV(508):666-667; doi:10.1093/ehr/cep125
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© Oxford University Press 2009, all rights reserved.
The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales
University of Navarre, Pamplona
The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales, ed. John Davies, Nigel Jenkins, Menna Baines, and Peredur I. Lynch (Cardiff: U. of Wales P., 2008; pp. xxviii + 1,059. £65).
The Welsh Academy has produced a splendid volume: in the cliché beloved by publishers, it should be on the shelves of every library worth the name. It is hard, in listing its merits, to refrain from superlatives. One uses it repeatedly, often reading articles remote from a first enquiry. Going to the entry on the Bible leads to reading about baseball, bees, or beer; or (more seriously) agriculture, astronomy (with a pioneer photograph of Andromeda on p. 727), education, energy, insurance, geology, or science. A book capable of informing on such things, often with implications going far beyond Wales, is a triumph of enlightenment.
Its virtues can be summed up under two headings. First is its comprehensiveness. It is hard to think of any aspect of Wales past or present that escapes its compilers. For many users the encyclopaedia will serve as gazetteer and dictionary of biography (but excluding the living, so there is no entry for Shirley Bassey). Its survey covers popular culture, including actors (Richard Burton), entertainers (Harry Secombe), film, and sport. More sombre entries cover mining and transport disasters, or murder. The last brings us to that victim of British justice, Timothy Evans (born in Merthyr Tydfil), or to Al Capone's chilling henchman Llywelyn Humphreys (whose parents were from Carno, Powys). Lurid items aside, there are graphs and statistics to explain the economy, health, or population. For researchers, the sole limitation is a lack of bibliographical reference, ‘deemed impracticable’ (p. xxv), so that they are directed to other sources.
The second virtue is the very quality of the volume. To direct some 400 contributors required formidable organisation. The success of that is most obvious in the encyclopaedia's hundreds of illustrations. They are outstandingly well chosen, and some of the colour ones are spectacular. Many are also curiously memorable, like those of uniformed girl-marchers on a Glamorgan estate (p. 411); or Newtown children playing on the Severn (p. 617), frozen in the winter of 1940–1; or a Romany harpist of Queen Victoria's day (p. 775), a gentleman in whiskers and grey topper.
So there is something for everybody. Historians will notice much on Wales's radicalism. This figures in accounts of the Abergele Martyrs, Churchill (‘a chequered relationship’), Coal (showing strikers of 1984–5 parading with banners as they returned to work), the Communist Party, English Monarchs, the Falklands (Malvinas) War (sic), Greenham Common, Marxism, Socialism (‘still an article of faith to many in Wales’), and the Tonypandy Riots. Radicalism of a newer kind appears variously under Agnostics and Atheists, Homosexuality, Nuclear Fallout (on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster for Gwynedd), and Women. Some may thus feel more at home with the excellent articles on immigrants, including Chinese, Indians, Italians, Jews, Poles, and Yemenis, most of whom subscribe to traditional values. They may also find reassuring the accounts of David Lloyd George, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, the Welsh Guards, and other disciplined fighting entities not known for the loser's mentality, thereby providing first-class role models for the Welsh today.
Now for some problems. A desire to speak well of Wales means that distressing facts are sometimes ignored. Accounts of the artist Brenda Chamberlain (p. 135) and politician Desmond Donnelly (p. 222) prove this. A disinclination to look beyond Wales also incubates error. Here are some of them. On Arthur (p. 37), few will now call him ‘an (sic) historical figure of the sixth century’. The work of Dumville, Higham, and Padel has here discredited the authority of the Welsh annals and Historia Brittonum. ‘Boudicca’ (p. 76) is correctly spelt Boudica, stressed on the second syllable, with a long vowel. This was stated years ago by the scholar Kenneth Jackson (1909–91), who himself has an entry; but, if he is ignored, what hope for lesser mortals? The poem Armes Prydein ‘Prophecy of Britain’ cannot relate directly (p. 262) to events of 937, since it was not written until late 940, following West Saxon humiliation at Leicester by the Vikings (which it mentions), when Welsh militants believed that a concerted attack would crush the English for ever. On Professor Sir Idris Foster (1911–84), many of his Oxford pupils were (p. 298) not ‘enthused by his teaching’, and at least one does not regard him as a ‘man of immense learning’. Gildas was not ‘born on the banks of the Clyde’ (p. 317), but probably at Arclid (now in Cheshire)—hence his familiarity with North Wales. Princess Gwenllian died (after a raid on Kidwelly) in 1136, not (p. 342) 1137. The assertion that her authorship of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi is ‘almost certainly without foundation’ is pure Semmelweiss Reflex. On the same tales (p. 525), there is no evidence whatsoever for a dating between 1050 and 1120. The evidence points to the 1120s or early 1130s, before Geoffrey of Monmouth began publishing. The notion that the scholar-bishop Sulien of St Davids (p. 836) or his son Rhygyfarch (not ‘Rhigyfarch’) wrote any of them is also absurd. It is, quite rightly, ignored in St David of Wales, edited by [Bishop] J. Wyn Evans and J.M. Wooding (2007). Finally, three slips. The narrow-gauge train at Tanygrisiau (p. 729) is not ‘approaching’ the station but leaving it. It is not going backwards. St Davids (pp. 790–1), cathedral city, should appear without apostrophe. What became the University of Wales, Bangor, was founded not in 1844 (p. 899) but 1884.
Wales is a land rich in myths, many of them recent. Though doomed to die, some still live on in this volume. But Wales would be a dull place if it allowed no chance for polemical knives. For all that, it should be said once again that historians, teachers, broadcasters, journalists, and (in short) all who have any feeling for Wales, will find this to be a volume of unique qualities. It is a book to acquire, to treasure, and to use.
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