#National Library of Wales

[lionofchaeronea]

King Arthur. Illustration by an unknown artist from a 15th century Welsh manuscript of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae). Now in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Photo credit: National Library of Wales.

[vox-anglosphere]

The romantic ruins of Tintern Abbey have inspired poets & painters.

[queerwelsh]

Abertawe! Swansea! 🦢

Starting in one week - 3 sessions exploring LGBTQ+ clips, films, music and TV shows in the Welsh Broadcast Archive (National Library Wales) 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

100% free, with refreshments, you can come to 1, 2 or 3 of the sessions ☕️

In Elysium Gallery & Bar, Swansea, at 5:30pm on the 10th, 17th and 29th of October!

-

Yn dechrau mewn 1 wythnos - 3 sesiwn yn archwilio clipiau, ffilmiau, cerddoriaeth a rhaglenni teledu LHDCT+ o'r Archif Ddarlledu Cymru (Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru) 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

100% Am ddim, gyda the a choffi, ac mae croeso i chi dod i 1, 2 neu 3 o'r sesiynau ☕️

Yn Elysium, Abertawe, am 5:30yh ar y 10fed, 17eg a 29ain o Hydref

(Bydd y sesiynau'n ddwyieithog)

Dewch yn llu!

[rayeshistoryhouse]

Alexander the Great entering Italy on his famed horse, Bucephalus

Flemish, c. 1450-1500

rayeshistory.com

[plmq]

[delyth-thomas-art]

Please sign, I can't stand to see art and history cut. The cut is taking 10% - 22% from these sectors!

Please help the National Museum Of Wales

Please sign the petition!!!!

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Hey, sorry if you already answered this question before, but I would like to enjoy some Welsh media, like songs, tv-shows/movies or books. Do you have any recommendations? Also, happy holidays and a happy new year!

Hello! I hope your holidays were happy.

I'm assuming you're asking for Welsh-language media specifically, so that's what I'll offer; if you want anything from the rest of Wales, give me a shout.

Music - so, my personal Welsh-language playlist on Spotify is here, which may contain things to interest you as a sort of jumping-off point to explore an artist more. I'll also put my Welsh music tag on this post, though, so you can check that and see what recommendations others have made on my posts in the past. You'll find people recommending Adwaith and Gwenno and people like that, see, neither of whom I particularly like and so don't have on my list, but are pretty popular. The true cultural tour-de-force for young Welsh speakers is Sebona Fi, by Yws Gwynedd - if you listen to no other, listen to that one.

TV and Film - tricky because availability is difficult. I gave some recent recs here; others to consider are Ar y Ffin (the big current drama on S4C), 35 Diwrnod (sort of a thriller - each series focuses on a murder, which you see in the opening minutes, and then rewinds to 35 days before it happened. You then watch the events play out. Kind of murder mystery, but no detectives), and...

Actually, maybe check out Hansh across its various platforms? It specialises in little short pieces (a few minutes each) that could be comedy skits, documentary shorts about a social issue, cultural round ups of the various gigs happening this week in Wales, etc. Very diverse. Their target audience is, basically, Millennials And A Bit Under. They also do longer form variety things on S4C, but the shorter stuff is on FB, YouTube, etc.

Oh, and my husband has a kids variety show coming out in the next few months! I don't know what I'm allowed to say yet, but I'll definitely blog about it closer to the time.

Books - Obviously I don't know your tastes in books, but my recs:

Absolutely anything by Mihangel Morgan. He's the gold standard if you're learning, because his language is lovely and accessible; but also if you're a fluent speaker, because he writes mundane sci-fi and slightly absurd horror and things like that, all with an undercurrent of social commentary, and his stuff is absolutely fantastic. Dan Gadarn Goncrit is my husband's favourite book of all time in any language; meanwhile, I was given Saith Pechod Marwol at A Level and fucking loved it. I believe he's had one book translated into English, too - Melog. I've not read it in either, but I've heard great things.

Y Llyfrgell, by Fflur Dafydd (the author is also on my music playlist). Here's the blurb:

On a cold February morning, in the year 2020, Dan, a porter at the National Library of Wales, is committing his daily offence against the regime. Greeting him at the door is Eben, a biographer, itching to be admitted. But, they are both unaware that Ana and Nan, two librarians intent on revenge, are on the brink of changing the history of the National Library of Wales forever. This novel transforms the peaceful atmosphere of the National Library into a theatrical set full of possibilities - where bullets cut through the silence, the Reading Room is a cell, and the Library itself is an anti-hero of our literature...

Spectacular book, won the Gwobr Goffa Daniel Owen at the Eisteddfod in 2009.

I hope anything in there is useful!

[reimenaashelyee]

New Alexander Comic update!! 🐏

The Queen seeks advice from the Egyptian priest, and he's got some interesting ideas...

A webcomic about the life and legends of Alexander the Great. 👁‍🗨 About the comic 📕 Read from the beginning 🛍 Get the print or ebook edition of Book 1

Historical footnotes under the cut:

... Time flies when one isn't paying attention, doesn't it? (or rather, when one had a final semester of postgrad, two out-of-state weekend festivals and a flu to deal with)

I am just going to give up on consistent updates for the time being in favour of updating whenever I have something new. @_@ The next two months and a half are going to be another whirlwind of activity. Some of the relevant pieces of those two months:

I will be tabling at Emerald Hill Comics Festival in South Melbourne on September 15, 11 am to 4 pm. More info about the festival on Squishface Studios' instagram. As for me, I will be selling my usual wares: Seance Tea Party, My Aunt is a Monster, and Alexander Book 1.

I am currently working on completing the script of Book 2 in preparation for a 2 week long group residency (Comic Art Workshop). If you can believe it, I have been struggling through the script for this Book since late 2019, as the story for this Book is structurally challenging aka it's above my skill level. Things are slowly starting to look up though, which means I am more confident about proceeding with updates.

Footnotes:

The serpentine dalliances referenced are:

Peniarth MS 481 30r (National Library of Wales)

Andreas Boscoli, Olympias, Mother of Alexander, Visited by Zeus in the Guise of a Serpent (Art Institute of Chicago)

BNF Fr. 50 120v (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

[aithusarosekiller]

Apparently it's meant to be common knowledge in my family that there is a bust of my great great grandfather in the national library of wales???

In nearly 18 years of life I have not been told this

[thunderstruck9]

Claudia Williams (British, 1933-2024), Self Portrait with Gwilym, c.1968. Acrylic on board, 61.5 x 41 cm. Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

[official-wales]

As an English person who discovered Wales through uni, gotta give a shout-out to Aberystwyth. Long live Mother Aber!

oh absolutely. the victorian seafront and railway, the medieval castle, the beautiful beaches, the national library of wales, the university life. I once saw a polite little cat being walked on a lead in aberystwyth, which probably isn't that weird, but I thought it was fantastic

[lionofchaeronea]

Still Life of Fruit in a Basket, a Pineapple Alongside and Wine Bottle and Glass Behind, George Frederick Harris, 1901

[invisibleicewands]

‘Theatre changed my life,’ says Michael Sheen. ‘Now my passion is for helping others’

Theatre can change lives. And I should know. It’s changed my life more than I’d ever have imagined. Back in 2011, a play called The Passion took over the streets of my hometown of Port Talbot. And I haven’t been the same since.

Perhaps the perception of actors before a play is that we’ll learn a few lines, try on a few costumes... break a leg. But with The Passion, I went all in like never before.

I also met the people doing vital work in the community I grew up in, helping vulnerable people who need it the most, often at make-or-break moments. Being at this coalface of community opened my eyes.

This patchwork of people holding society together with the thinnest of threads, going over and above each and every day to help people in almost every aspect of their lives.

I saw then – and I continue to see – kind-hearted, warm, tolerant people helping out their fellow humans to bring communities together. These are the people who make our nation what it is.

The good deeds that these people did – from giving young carers a night off to go bowling, to setting up the only grief counselling service in the area – generally worked under fragile funding and often were under-appreciated by the wider community.

I knew then that I had to devote as much time and energy as I could to helping, however I could.

In the decade and a half since The Passion, I’ve started projects around homelessness, high-cost credit, care, and local journalism. And for the past 18 months, these have come under the banner of a movement known as Mab Gwalia.

Mab Gwalia believes that opportunity should not only be available to those who can afford it. The ambition is to build a movement that makes change.

We support people and projects which work in three ways: projects creating opportunity and fighting for fairness; projects rooted in communities, helping people directly; and projects that work in new and ambitious ways to deliver change.

My work on The Passion made me realise there’s so many people out there doing this. And Mab Gwalia has supported as many of them as we can.

This has included: Army veterans in Merthyr Tydfil. Autism support for children in Rhondda Cynon Taf. Food growing in Pembrokeshire. Opportunities for women in Swansea who’ve suffered knock-back after knock-back. Community skills hubs in Rhyl.

Theatre changed my life. Now I want the spark it set off in me to do the same for others.

My ancestor, Nanny Blower, the lion tamer

My great-great grandmother was called Mary Ann-North. Or Nanny Blower, as we know her.

She left Wales for New York in 1896 where she became, wait for it, an elephant and lion tamer for the Bostock and Wombwell Circus. Fast forward to today and young people in the Upper Neath Valleys don’t have to run away to join the circus. Organised Kaos comes to them.

Kaos stands for “keeping adolescents off the streets” and that’s what they do. I first met them on The Passion (riding BMXs through fire – them, not me) and now Mab Gwalia has helped fund their work.

Manics band drum up £15,000 for drama study

“Libraries gave us power” – the opening lyrics to Wales’ second national anthem, A Design For Life.

The Manic Street Preachers wrote a version of the song for The Passion, performing it at The Last Supper in the Seaside Social & Labour Club… before being arrested and hauled off stage for the show’s added drama.

The band is working with Mab Gwalia to fund a drama scholarship, providing financial support to students who need it. Since 2021, 11 students have received up to £15,000 each academic year.

We’ve just committed to another three years. The students tell us it gives them a chance to believe. The arts should be for everyone.

Mothers Matter, like my mum and partner Anna

My mum’s going through a tough time as my dad is living with Alzheimer’s. It’s a lot to take. I’m thankful every day for how my partner Anna is with our daughters.

It’s an understatement, but mothers matter. That’s the name of an organisation Mab Gwalia has supported. Mothers Matter helps mums suffering from loneliness and isolation through support, counselling, wellbeing hubs and workshops. Mothers in South Wales don’t have to do it alone.

We give a voice to working class writers

A summer reading recommendation: Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands. It’s Cora’s story – a teenage girl with ADHD finding her way through life in the early 90s in post-industrial Scotland. She’ll change the way you think about neurodivergence. It’s an unforgettable debut novel.

Tom was part of A Writing Chance, a project I developed alongside the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, New Writing North and Northumbria University. The Office for National Statistics says nearly half all authors are from the most privileged backgrounds.

So we’re trying to redress that balance. To turn up voices not always heard. Tom was one of the first group – 11 writers who received bursaries and mentoring with industry leaders including regular writer of this column, Ros Wynne-Jones.

You can hear their stories in the BBC Sounds podcast Margins to Mainstream with Michael Sheen. Now, 16 more writers are on board. Think of the stories to come.

My debut at the ‘brilliant Welsh party’

With origins dating from 1176, the National Eisteddfod is Europe’s largest cultural festival. A celebration of Welsh language culture with performances and competitions in everything from composition to cynghanedd (a type of Welsh poetry). And, last weekend, in Pontypridd, I made my debut on the maes (site or field).

My four-year-old daughter now refers to it as “that brilliant Welsh party” which neatly describes the atmosphere. On stage, the actress Sian Phillips said the sounds of words in Welsh “echoed with the language”.

I felt those echoes all day. Spoken in the park by families. Performed by young actors. Sung with emotion by choirs. It was a beautiful thing.

Homeless World Cup a beautiful game

Next month, the Homeless World Cup takes place in Seoul, South Korea. Bringing the tournament to Cardiff in 2019, seeing 500 players with experience of homelessness represent their nation on the football field, was something I’ll never forget.

If you can’t wait until then, watch The Beautiful Game on Netflix. Keep an eye on Callum Scott Howells, a brilliant young Welsh actor who I directed in BBC drama The Way (available on iPlayer).

Nye NHS vision seen on world stage

I’ve spent much of this year playing the man who had the vision and valour to create the National Health Service. Nye was theatre at its most far-reaching.

There were sold-out runs in the National Theatre in London, the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. And cinema screenings were viewed by people all over the world.

On the night we filmed the NT Live screening, NHS workers from around the country were invited to be in the audience. They knew that at that moment, a global audience was learning about our welfare state and the man who was behind it.

My dad came along one night. He was just a little kid when Bevan’s idea became reality. Soon there’ll be very few left who can remember what life was like before the NHS.

Let’s hope it stays that way. Can the new government come up with a progressive policy that inspires a story which packs them in 75 years on? We can but dream.

[queerwelsh]

I'm co-hosting these LGBTQ+ sessions with the Welsh Broadcast Archive (of the National Library of Wales) in Carmarthen, sharing LGBTQ+ TV shows, films, documentaries, clips and more from their archives!

On Tuesday the 20th of August, we will be focusing on trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming representation.

On the 27th of August, we will be focusing on Pride, ahead of Carmarthen Pride on the 31st of August.

There will be Welsh, English, bilingual and multilingual content.

These sessions are completely free, there will be tea, coffee and snacks - just come along!

[justforbooks]

Richard Woodman

Writer who drew on his own experience at sea in a series of novels and historical works about the British merchant navy

“The end was anticlimax. We slipped home unnoticed. Britain turned no hair at our arrival, as just as she has turned no hair at our extinction.” When Richard Woodman published Voyage East in 1988, he knew that the mercantile world depicted within it, which he had joined aged 16, was gone.

The first-person novel – which never reads like fiction – describes the voyage of a cargo liner carrying goods and passengers from Liverpool to Singapore, Hong Kong, Kobe and Shanghai in the mid-1960s. There is a moment, off the coast of Borneo, when the captain sees a vessel with half a dozen grey aluminium boxes on her foredeck: “What the devil are they?” he asks the pilot. “‘They’re containers, Captain,’ the Pilot replied, and no one on the bridge heard the sentence of death pronounced upon us.”

Woodman, who has died aged 80, became the memorialist of the merchant fleets. Between 2008 and 2016 he wrote the history of the British merchant navy in five volumes, followed by A Low Set of Blackguards, a two-volume history (2016-17) of the East India Company.

His outstanding contribution came through his three second world war convoy histories: Arctic Convoys (1994), Malta Convoys (2000) and The Real Cruel Sea (2005). These are works of passion, based on experience and scrupulous research.

The loss of life among merchant seamen was proportionately greater than in any of the armed services and the recognition they received far less. From the beginning of the war a seafarer’s pay was stopped the minute his ship was sunk. “Time spent fighting for his life on a float or lifeboat was an unpaid excursion,” wrote Woodman.

While Winston Churchill acknowledged the crucial importance of the Battle of the Atlantic to national survival, it was not until 2012 that those who had served in the Arctic convoys, and had taken the highest casualties of all, were retrospectively honoured.

Born in north London, Richard was the elder son of Rosalie (nee Cann) and Douglas Woodman, a civil service administrator. Though he was far from the sea, his imagination was captured by the works of Arthur Ransome, Daniel Defoe, RM Ballantyne and Alan Villiers, and his enthusiasm nurtured by Sea Scout membership.

He was the youngest member of the Sea Scout crew that sailed the ex-German yawl Nordwind in the 1960 Tall Ships race and, despite failing all but two of his O-levels, he was accepted as an indentured apprentice with the Alfred Holt (Blue Funnel) line in 1960.

His first long trip to Australia came as a midshipman on the SS Glenarty, returning via the US: “I had been round the world before I would have been allowed inside a British pub.” Life on board ship took place in an uncompromising, all-male environment: the almost compulsory swearing, drinking and sexist banter encouraged the development of “a carapace behind which we hid our private selves”.

Woodman responded eagerly to the hands-on education in seamanship and navigation, developed his writing and sketching through the log-keeping and read his way through the excellent ships’ libraries provided by the Marine Society. He completed his four-year apprenticeship and gained his second mate’s certificate. He was, however, in love and hated saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Christine Hite, an art student, for many months at a time.

He left Blue Funnel in the mid-1960s and went to work for the Ocean Weather Service, where he discovered how vicious the North Atlantic winter weather systems could be – and how pitilessly an ex-second world war corvette would roll. Fortunately it was not long before a temporary position became available with Trinity House, the corporation charged with the maintenance of navigation marks around England, Wales and the Channel Islands.

The position became permanent; he and Christine married in 1969 and settled in Harwich, Essex, near the Trinity House east coast depot, and he served the corporation for most of the rest of his life.

The work at sea was varied, challenging, sometimes dangerous. Precise navigation, seamanship and attention to detail were essential qualities, but Woodman also found time to write. His first novel, The Eye of the Fleet, was published in 1981. This introduced a series of 14 adventures featuring the young Nathaniel Drinkwater, a hero somewhat in the Horatio Hornblower mode but bearing the unmistakable stamp of a writer who was also a sailor.

Despite his professional career being in motorised vessels, Woodman loved traditional gaff-rigged yachts, particularly his own Kestrel and then Andromeda, in which he and Christine explored the east coast rivers and beyond. The action of his nautical novels often turns on neat, seamanlike manoeuvres as well as including varied and closely observed seascapes.

His productivity was astonishing. He often wrote two or three novels a year and soon added non-fiction to his output. When he became captain of Trinity House Vessel Patricia, he achieved this by having two desks, one from which he could conduct official business, the other hidden behind a door, with a page from the work in progress always ready in the typewriter.

Meanwhile, in his job he was extremely focused, conscientious and painstaking. Although some remember him as being of the “old school”, Jill Kernick, the first woman in almost 500 years to work at sea for Trinity House, credits him with helping her break through traditional barriers in the early 80s.

In 1997 Woodman retired to write full time, but was soon elected a Younger Brother of Trinity House, and then an Elder Brother, the first time a former employee was accorded this honour. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 but there was no let-up in his work rate. His last completed novel, A River in Borneo (2022), harks back to 60s Indonesia but sets its final scene in a Colchester hospice.

He is survived by Christine and their children, Abigail and Edward, and grandson, Arlo.

🔔 Richard Martin Woodman, master mariner and author, born 10 March 1944; died 2 October 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[emvidal]

It would be regretful if I didn't reshare this excellent Mabinogion map on Halloween. For those unaware: the Mabinogion is a collection of the earliest known Welsh prose stories dating between the 11th and 12th centuries and they help to make up the Matter of Britain.

The stories themselves date far older as they are made up from some of the oral traditions which had been present in Welsh lands for centuries, if not longer. Many date to a time when the ancient Britons roamed the lands and these stories would have been spoken in the Brythonic tongue, the parent language of Cymraeg.

(Credits: Artist Margaret Jones & National Library of Wales - Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, https://www.library.wales/index.php?id=13491)

#WelshHistories #WelshHistory #WelshLegend #Mabinogion #HanesCymru