The Correlating Careers of Christianity and Cymraeg in Wales
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‗And the Word became Welsh‘: The Correlating Careers of Christianity and Cymraeg† in Wales by the Very Rev. Bill Roberts Rector, St. Gregory‘s Episcopal Church, Deerfield, Illinois, USA Dean, Waukegan Deanery, Diocese of Chicago After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. Revelation 7:9 SUMMARY Four years ago I spent my first Sabbatical in the United Kingdom exploring the roots of our Anglican heritage. As part of my preparation I bought a cassette tape to learn how to pronounce Welsh consonants and vowels. The response I received encouraged me to study Cymraeg— the Welsh word for the Welsh language. Over the past four years, as I learned more about the Welsh language, I discovered that the destinies of Christianity and Cymraeg in Wales have intertwined. This Project was my opportunity to learn more about their ‗correlating careers‘ and to describe them in an orderly, and, I hope, interesting and enjoyable fashion. I begin with an introduction to the Welsh language, and then proceed to tell the story of its relationship first to Celtic Christianity, and then to Roman Christianity, English Reformation Christianity, and, finally, to the denominational expressions of Christianity since the sixteenth century. In a Project of this sweep but limited length, I have necessarily had to omit many important developments in the history of the Welsh language, of Wales, of England, and of Christianity in the United Kingdom, which would have given a wider context for the personalities and events I have recounted. I have also been limited by the resources available to me on this side of the Atlantic, and several books I tried to obtain by internet never became available. I prepared a letter and questionnaire, in both English and Welsh, to hear from contemporary Welsh Church- and Chapel-goers. I emailed or mailed them to a dozen clergy and lay people for distribution, but to date I have received but one response— from the Archbishop of Wales. Copies of those letters and questionnaires appear at the end of this paper. If I receive responses at a later date, I will incorporate them into this Project or subsequent manuscripts. I want to give a special word of thanks to Mr. Dulais Rhys, a talented composer, pianist, author, teacher, and, to give him the ultimate accolade, Cymro. I met him last summer at the Cymdeithas Madog Welsh Language Course, where he was a guest lecturer on the life of the Welsh composer Joseph Parry, who wrote Aberystwyth, among other works. During my very first conversation with him, he invited me to stay with his family in Caerfyrddin this summer to work on my Welsh and to experience something of the life of a bilingual Welsh parish. He worked patiently with me as I attempted to translate my letter and questionnaire into Welsh. Diolch yn fawr iawn! (Thank you very much!) I dedicate this Project to Ingrid. _________________________ † pronounced kum-rīg (the ‗r‘ is trilled; the consonant ‗g‘ is always sounded like the English ‗go‘) 2 ALL IN THE FAMILY You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? . You are observing special days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid that my work for you may have been wasted.1 The Venerable Bede must have read St. Paul‘s words of exasperation many times in the course of his lifetime. As he wrote A History of the English Church and People, could he possibly have made the connection between St. Paul‘s exasperation with the Galatians in AD 50 and that of St. Augustine of Canterbury (and Bede) with the Britons in 603? Now the Britons did not keep Easter at the correct time, but between the fourteenth and twentieth days of the moon— a calculation depending on a cycle of eighty-four years. Furthermore, certain other of their customs were at variance with the universal practice of the Church. But despite protracted discussions, neither the prayers nor the censures of Augustine and his companions could obtain the compliance of the Britons, who stubbornly preferred their own customs to those of universal use among Christian Churches.2 The Galatians of the first century and the Britons of the seventh century were descendents of a tribe that emerged during the fifth century before Christ in what is today central Europe. The Greeks called them the ―secret people‖— the — or, the Celts. Moving beyond their original homeland, by 300 BC they had conquered territory ‗from the Iberian peninsula in the west, to the Scottish highlands in the north, spanning Europe to the Black Sea in the East, and touching as far south as Central Italy‘. 3 John Davies, in A History of Wales, writes: ‗Theirs was the first culture of true splendour to develop in Europe north of the Alps. That culture had a striking unity, as museums from Lisbon to Ankara bear witness; it was essentially the same among the Galatians of Anatolia as it was in Spain or northern Italy or Bohemia‘.4 The cities of London, Paris, Vienna, and Gallipoli (the ‗city of the Galtae‘) bear Celtic names, as do the Rhone, Rhine, and Danube rivers. But by the middle of the first century BC the Celts had succumbed to Roman power, and the descendents of the earliest Celtic tribe, now separated from each other over vast expanses of Europe, began to develop separate cultures and languages. Some of those descendents had migrated to the central highlands of Anatolia, a region of Turkey that the Emperor Augustus named Provincia Galatia in 25 BC, and to which St. Paul sent an extraordinary letter seventy-five years later. Other Celtic descendents had made their way to the island of Albion, where they discovered inhabitants whom they called in their language ‗Priteni‘, and whom the Romans, in their Latin tongue, called Britanni, and their island, Britain.5 TONGUES WILL WAG Since the mid-nineteenth century, linguists have posited an Indo-European parent language which gave birth to a family of European and Asian languages. The first generation of European languages included Greek and Armenian, which developed without producing new offspring. But other first generation languages, among them the Celtic, Germanic, and Italic, did produce second and later generations: the Italic produced Latin, which in turn generated the Romance languages; the Germanic produced North, West, and East language groups, which generated such progeny as Danish, English, and Gothic, respectively; and the Celtic, which produced Continental and Insular descendants. The (European) Continental descendents consisted of the Gaulish language spoken in France and northern Italy, a Celt Iberian language used in Spain, and the Galatian language of central Turkey. All three of these Continental Celtic 3 languages have long since disappeared. The Insular descendents, so-called because they developed in the British Isles, were more fortunate. In July, 2003, the National Academy of Sciences (USA) published a paper describing the evolutionary development of the Insular Celtic languages from their Continental (Gaulish) and Indo-European antecedents. The authors include a representative glossary of words illustrating the relationship of the Gaulish tongue to thirteen other languages, both ancient and modern. For example: GAULISH TARVOS AVVOT DECAMETOS MATIR Latin taurus fecit decimus mater Greek tauros poiein, dran dekatos mētēr Old Irish tarb do-rigni dechmad máthair Modern Irish tarbh dhein sé, rinne sé deichiú máthair Modern Scots Gaelic tarbh rinn deicheamh máthair Modern Welsh tarw mae e wedi gwneud degfed mam Modern Breton tarv deus graet dekvet mamm Modern French taureau a fait dixième mère Modern Italian toro ha fatto dècimo madre Modern Spanish toro ha hecho décimo madre According to their analysis, the Indo-European parent language emerged sometime between 10,000 and 6200 BC, and in the course of prehistoric migration the Celtic language developed. With the arrival of Celtic peoples in the British Isles between 4700 and 1700 BC, an Insular Celtic language began to evolve apart from its Continental sibling. Subsequently, Insular Celtic also divided into two language groups. The Celts who migrated further west into Ireland began to speak a version of Celtic known as Goidelic or Gaelic, while the Celts who settled in Britain spoke Brythonic or Brittonic. Tacitus, writing in AD 98 about Britain and Gaul, remarks that ‗the language differs but little‘. Later, in the sixth century AD, Irish migrating to Scotland produced the Scots Gaelic language, and British migrating to France produced the Breton language.6 The Goidelic family of languages includes Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic; while the Brythonic family includes Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Goidelic is sometimes referred to as Q-Celtic because its phonetic –kw– sound distinguishes it from its Brythonic or P-Celtic counterpart which uses a –p– sound. For example, the Welsh word for head is ‗pen‘, while the Irish word is ‗ceann‘ (pronounced ken). When the Roman legions invaded Britain in AD 43, Latin loan words began to enter the Celtic vocabulary, and these can be seen today in Welsh words like pont (bridge), ffenest (window; compare the French fenêtre), eglwys (church; compare the Spanish iglesia), and finegr and ficer (vinegar and vicar).7 According to John Davies, ‗In 400, the inhabitants of Wales spoke Brittonic; in 700, they spoke Welsh‘. Moreover, he marvels that they had begun to write in their language at a time when the only written language was Imperial Rome‘s Latin. By contrast, there were few attempts to write in the Romance languages before 1000. Davies is particularly struck by the appearance about 633 of the word Kymry, used interchangeably for either the people or the country of Wales until about 1560, when the land of Cymru is distinguished from the Cymry.