Welsh Poems and Ballads

Transcribed from the 1915 Jarrold & Sons edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
WELSH POEMS AND BALLADS
BY GEORGE BORROW
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ERNEST RHYS
LONDON JARROLD & SONS MCMXV
TO THOMAS J. WISE, Bibliophile, Bibliographer and Good Borrovian (at whose instance this Norfolk Budget of Welsh Verse was brought together).
In a collection of unedited odds and ends from Borrow’s papers bearing upon Wales, and dating from various periods of his career, there is one insignificant-looking sheet on whose back some lines are pencilled, beginning “The mountain snow.” They are reproduced in the text, but deserve notice here because of the evidence they bring of Borrow’s long-continued Welsh obsession and his long practice as a Welsh translator. Apparently they date from the time when he was writing “Lavengro,” since the other side of the leaf contains a draft in ink of the preface to that book. Other sheets of blue foolscap in the same bundle—folded small for the pocket—are devoted to unnumbered chapters of “Wild Wales.” Yet another scrap, from a much earlier period, is so closely packed in a microscopic hand that it reminds one at a first glance of the painfully minute script of the Brontë sisters in their earliest attempts. Its matter is only a footnote on the Celts, Gaels and Cymry, and its substance often reappears in later pages; but other items both in the early script of a fine minuscule, and in the later bold, untidy scrawl, serve to carry on the Welsh account, with references to Pwll Cheres and Goronwy Owen; and the upshot of them all goes to show that Borrow, whether he was at Norwich or in London, was not only a stout Celtophile, but much inclined, early and late, to be a Welsh idolater. And since the days when the monks of the Priory at Carmarthen wrote the “Black Book” in a noble script, I suppose no copyist ever took more pains than Borrow did in his early years in transcribing the lines of the Welsh poets, as the facsimile page given in this volume can tell.