Gallant Little Wales: Sketches of its people, places and customs

by Unknown

And in Strength, Understanding;

And in Understanding, Knowledge;

And in Knowledge, the Knowledge of Justice;

And in the Knowledge of Justice, the Love of it;

And in that Love, the Love of all Existence;

And in the Love of all Existence, the Love of God.

God and all Goodness.”

Then the Archdruid, Dyfed, standing upon the Gorsedd stone and facing the east, unsheathed the great sword, crying out thrice, “Aoes Heddwch?” (Is it peace?) and the bards and ovates replied “Heddwch!” (Peace.)

There are some scholars who question the “identity of the Bardic Gorsedd with the druidic system.” The Welsh Gorsedd, this side of the controversial point, is forty centuries old, and in all conscience that is old enough. Diodorus, the Cicilian, wrote, “There are, among the Gauls, makers of verses, whom they name bards. There are also certain philosophers and theologists, exceedingly esteemed, whom they call Druids.” Strabo, the geographer, says, “Amongst the whole of the Gauls three classes are especially held in distinguished honour—the bards, the prophets, and the druids. The bards are singers and poets, the prophets are sacrificers and philosophers, but the druids, besides physiology, practised ethical philosophy.” As far back as we can look in the life of the Cymru, poetry, song, and theology have been inextricably woven together. The Gorsedd was then, formally, for the Welsh people what it still is informally: a popular university, a law court, a parliament. The modern Gorsedd, with its twelve stones, is supposed to represent the signs of the zodiac through which the sun passes, with a central stone, called the “Maen Llog,” in the position of the sacrificial fire in the druidical temple. A close reverence for nature, a certain pantheism in the cult of the druids, shows itself in various ways,—in the belief that the oak tree was the home of the god of lightning, that mistletoe, which usually grows upon the oak, was a mark of divine favour. The most prominent symbol of the Gorsedd is the “Broad Arrow” or “mystic mark,” supposed to represent the rays of light which the druids worshipped. Even the colours of the robes of the druids, ovates, and bards are full of characteristic worship of nature; the druids in white symbolical of the purity of truth and light, the ovates in green like the life and growth of nature, the bards in blue, the hue of the sky and in token of the loftiness of their calling.

Up there on the hilltop, with its vast panorama of hill and valley, sea and sky, time became as nothing. The Gorsedd became again the democratic Witenagemot of the Welsh, and there still were represented the mountain shepherd, the pale collier, the lusty townsman, the gentle knight, the expounder of law, the teacher and the priest. But if upon the hill time was as nothing, down below in the gigantic Eisteddfod pavilion some ten thousand people were waiting. “Gallant little Wales,” which has certainly awakened from its long sleep, was past the period of rubbing its eyes. It was shouting and calling for the Eisteddfod ceremonies to begin, perhaps as the folk in Caerwys had called impatiently in the days of the twelfth century, or again in that old town in the days of Elizabeth, the last that memorable Eisteddfod when a commission was appointed by Elizabeth herself to check the bad habits of a crowd of lazy illiterate bards who went about the country begging.