Abstract
If you find a Welsh person away from Wales, that person will inevitably demonstrate a case of hiraeth. The Welsh word means ‘homesickness’ or ‘nostalgia’; but like the German equivalent, Sehnsucht, it means much more. It refers to an indescribable longing which consumes the exile and points to something beyond mundane reality. It would not be surprising, therefore, to find in Welsh writing in Wales and abroad the idea of the quest, the echoes of Welsh folktale and legend, and the expression of an unquenchable desire to return to the ancestral setting—not necessarily to experience Wales as a geographical location, but to recapture that mysterious sense of place which has come to be associated with its mythical and historical past.
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Notes
See Sally Roberts Jones, ‘News from the Land of Youth: Anglo-Welsh Children’s Literature—A Tradition in the Making’ The New Welsh Review 2:4, 1990, 6–10; and in the same issue, Norma Bagnell, ‘An American Hero in Welsh Fantasy: the Mabinogion, Alan Garner and Lloyd Alexander’ 25–29.
See C.W. Sullivan III, Welsh Celtic Myth in Modern Fantasy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). This is an important study which will, I hope, be the first of many dealing with the topic of Welsh myth and its contemporary relevance. Sullivan discusses thematic and aesthetic concerns, while I have concentrated upon the polemic, a concern complementary to those of Sullivan’s.
See Kath Filmer, Scepticism and Hope in Twentieth Century Fantasy Literature. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992.
John Ackerman, Dylan Thomas: his life and work. New edition. Basing-stoke: Macmillan, 1991.
Tony Curtis, ed., The Poetry of Snowdonie. Bridgend: Seren Books, 1989.
See George Borrow, Wild Wales. London: Collins rpt. ca 1930. Fp 1862.
George Orwell, ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ in his Inside the Whale and Other Essays. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957.
See, for example, Esther de Waal, A World Made Whole: Rediscovering the Celtic Tradition (London: Fount, 1991), which gives a lively and sympathetic account of Celtic Christianity.
It should be noted here that I have avoided, for the most part, the inclusion of the vast amount of popular Arthurian material in my study. The simple reason for this is that it is so vast; at least one critic has said that there are thousands of such works. On the other hand, I have made an exception of Lawhead’s trilogy, since it specifically uses other sources—historical data, the Four Branches, the Triads-as well.
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© 1996 Kath Filmer-Davies
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Filmer-Davies, K. (1996). Welsh Myth and the Sense of Belonging. In: Fantasy Fiction and Welsh Myth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24991-6_1
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