Welsh Erotic

The Welsh are a Celtic people whose identity has, for most of recorded history, been defined against a larger neighbour. Wales itself is a peninsula on the western flank of the island of Britain — uplands, narrow valleys, a long coastline, and a border with England that has been politically settled since 1536 but culturally never quite is. What holds the Welsh together as Welsh is not statehood (Wales has no parliament older than 1999) but an unbroken thread of language, hymn, and historical memory.

That language, Cymraeg, is the oldest living literary tongue in Europe north of the Greek world. It sits in the Brittonic branch of Celtic, a cousin to Cornish and Breton rather than to Irish or Scots Gaelic, and it survived where its siblings nearly died because nineteenth-century Welsh life was organised around the chapel and the chapel was organised around Welsh-language preaching. Roughly one in five people in Wales speak it today, with the densest concentrations in the rural north and west — the area sometimes called Y Fro Gymraeg. English-speaking Welsh identity is no less Welsh; this is one of the points outsiders most often miss.

Religion in Wales is Christian and historically Protestant, but the shape of it matters. The defining tradition is Nonconformist — Methodist, Baptist, Congregationalist — rather than Anglican, and the great revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced a culture saturated in chapel hymnody, four-part singing, and a moral seriousness that fed straight into the trade union and Labour movements of the South Wales coalfield. The chapels themselves are mostly emptying now, but the choral tradition they built has outlived them.

The diaspora is older and stranger than people expect. Welsh-speaking communities took root in Pennsylvania and Ohio in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the slate quarries of Vermont, in Australian goldfields — and most distinctively in Y Wladfa, the Welsh colony established in Patagonia in 1865, where Welsh is still spoken in Chubut Province alongside Spanish. There are sub-regional identities at home too: the agricultural north, the industrial south shaped by coal and steel, the Marches along the English border, and the traditionally English-speaking enclave of south Pembrokeshire known as Little England beyond Wales. The eisteddfod — a competitive festival of poetry and music with roots in the medieval bardic tradition and a modern form codified in the nineteenth century — remains the closest thing the culture has to a national institution.