Why the Eisteddfod no longer speaks for Wales

This week hundreds of thousands of visitors are pouring into Edinburgh for its annual festival. This is not a festival of Scottishness, rather a display of Edinburgh as a culturally confident European capital, a world event that happens to be staged in Scotland. There is little Scottish about the event, let alone linguistically so. While some 60,000 claim acquaintance with Gaelic in the Highlands and Islands, the Glaswegian dialect descended from Lallans seems more a native tongue.

How different is Wales. Also this week, in a delightful meadow in the Montgomeryshire hills near Meifod, stands the biggest tent in Britain, holding 3,500 seats. It is venue to the oldest arts festival in Europe. The Welsh National Eisteddfod has been staged, on and off, since the 12th century. Here are no European orchestras and cosmopolitan satirists. No word of English is spoken. No drop of alcohol is drunk. There is only fierce competition, for poetry, prose and song, in a language which, when spoken or sung, is as lovely as Italian. The 15th-century cynghanedd poetic form has 24 different metres and is, I am told, verse of huge and subtle variety. It still boasts 500 practitioners.

Unlike Edinburgh, the Eisteddfod is fiercely, masochistically, exclusive. It moves to a different Welsh venue each year, as if defying adherents to follow it. Last August it was perched on a wild headland in Pembrokeshire, the pavilion nearly torn from its moorings by an Atlantic gale — a test for the wildest bard.

Anglo-Welsh culture is ignored, excluding such “Welsh” poets as Dylan Thomas, Danny Abse and R.S. Thomas. Ignored, too, are other Celtic tongues, such as Gaelic or Breton. Even burger stalls must be marked “byrger”. Attendances are plummeting, despite such desperate marketing tools as a “Welsh-speaking lonely hearts club”, with G-strings “endorsed by 14 poets”. Small wonder the event goes unreported in the English-language press, its proceedings confined to the world’s most heavily subsidised and under-watched television channel, Welsh Channel Four (SC4).

The Eisteddfod is a remarkable relic, a medieval literary joust reborn in an age of league tables and “hundred best”. Yet it invites ridicule. What should be a dignified celebration of Celtic culture was hijacked in the 19th century by an amiable romantic, Iolo Morganwg, and in the 20th by Welsh proto-nationalism. Iolo held that the bardic tradition went back to the pre-Christian animists. He founded a “gorsedd” or assembly of bards on Primrose Hill in London, believing this to be the capital of the “Brythonic” culture of the ancient Celts. The good people of NW1 failed to rise up and worship Iolo’s sacred tree.

He had more success in Wales. In 1819 he induced the Eisteddfod to endorse his fictitious nonsense. Wales’s great festival adapted itself to the pageantry of archdruids, thrones, imprecations, swords, capes, white boots and maidens with harps. It is as if the Edinburgh Festival had decamped to the Kyle of Lochalsh, conducted its proceedings in Gaelic and daubed its musicians in Pictish woad.

The iron law of paranoia states that nobody not “of the blood” has a licence to criticise any ethnic or geographical group. Only Jews may make jokes at the expense of Jews, only Frenchmen may criticise France. Do not attack Liverpool if you are not Liverpudlian and never abuse anything Welsh from east of Offa’s Dyke.

National self-abasement has long been a Welsh blood sport. In a lecture this week, Jane Aaron, of the University of Glamorgan, suggested that the Welsh had a “cultural gene” which responded only to attack. They had a “heightened sense of living on the perpetual brink of extinction”, she said, never rising up to defend their status and language unless doom was at hand.

This is a conundrum. Why did the Irish and Scots not defend their Celtic languages, so similar in origin and history? Many answers are given. Mine is that Wales was never truly poor. It did not suffer the same mass demoralisation and depopulation as the others, nor the same domination by Anglophone landowners. Farm and chapel life were more settled. Welsh speaking was embedded in the middle as well as working class, especially among preachers and teachers. It was not poverty but prosperity that preserved Welsh.

Now a more unexpected phenomenon is boosting the Welsh cause. Language is a totem of politically correct anti-metropolitanism. While Welsh speaking declines overall, compulsory teaching in schools has brought the language to more children. To this is added the booster of public sector employment, for which Welsh appears both a necessary and a sufficient qualification. Wales’s booming officialdom in administration, broadcasting and academia offers jobs to virtually anyone literate in Welsh.

To this may be added yet another incentive to Welshness. From the crofters of Scotland to the peasants of Provence, hostility to newcomers is a natural response of settled communities. As Professor Aaron points out, retreating into Welshness is a defence. But where Welsh has achieved a critical mass, newcomers can often prove the most committed localists. Today’s second-homers are tomorrow’s retired residents. Just as newcomers’ children learn Welsh in school, so adult Welsh classes are packed. (Likewise, I am told most students of Cornish are non-natives.)

I am inclined to conclude that a campaign I never thought could succeed might be working: the state sponsorship of minority cultural survival. The authorities have made Welsh the dominant feature of Welsh identity. The Welsh Assembly, by no means as insignificant an institution as its formal powers suggest, conducts much of its business in the language. In Cardiff, Welsh has become the private argot of the Welsh “Tafia”. Costly, confusing on forms and dangerous on road signs, Welsh nonetheless appears to have lost its loser status and become smart.

In much of North West and West Wales, Welsh is like a second language anywhere, the expression of localism. Visiting a hospital in Aberystwyth last week, I noticed that English was the language of the doctors (mostly Indian) but Welsh of the ward and nursing staff. The gossip of street, shop and playground is Welsh, an indication of familiarity. English is for strangers. This gradation of intimacy through bilingualism may seem exclusive to outsiders, but it enriches communal life wherever in the world it occurs.

Does this matter? Scotland’s identity is not diminished by the loss of Gaelic or Ireland’s by the decline of Irish. But they have other totems of nationhood. We all take refuge in some genius loci. The Bretons, the Basques and the Welsh do so in language. It asserts their communality against the outside world, in Britain their defiance of national centralism. If this costs public money, what of the millions squandered on the cultural foibles of the metropolis?

Which makes the Eisteddfod’s equation of Welshness with linguistic exclusivity all the sadder. It should admit Anglo-Welsh writing and song to its annals. Wales’s most distinctive mark, its language, seems marooned in a theme park, denying access to three quarters of the people for whose culture it claims to speak. The Eisteddfod should draw them in, rather than treat the world as its enemy.

If Edinburgh has lost touch with Scottishness in its yearning for the world, the Eisteddfod has lost touch with the world in its yearning to speak Welsh.

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