HYWEL AP OWAIN GWYNEDD

(ca. 1120–1170)

Hywel, the son of Owain Gwynedd—the powerful and effective prince of northern Wales, was a poet as well as a prince and warrior. His literary efforts include eight extant poems, including five love lyrics that are unique in 12th-century Welsh court poetry. Hywel was Owain’s oldest son, a natural child by an Irish woman called Pyfog. In 1136–37, with his brother Cadwaladr, Owain raided the English stronghold of Ceredigion in south Wales, and established his own power there. When his father died in 1137, Owain claimed the throne of Gwynedd in the north, and he put Hywel in command of south Ceredigion in 1139. Hywel skirmished with his uncle Cadwaladr, trying to establish his own authority throughout the region, but ultimately he was expelled from Ceredigion by his uncle in 1153.At the same time, he was helping his father consolidate his power in the north. He supported his father against the English king HENRY II as Henry tried to reassert English authority in the region. Though suffering a setback in 1157, Owain fomented a general Welsh revolt against the English in 1165, after which he was able to expand and protect his own holdings until his death in 1170.

Upon Owain’s death, Hywel was engaged in a brief power struggle with his two half-brothers, Dafyddd and Rhodri, who defeated and killed him at Pentraeth in Anglesey in 1170. One of his supporters, Peryf ap Cedifor, wrote an elegy expressing the grief all of Hywel’s retainers felt at his passing. It is as a poet himself that Hywel is best remembered today. His compositions show that he had studied the formal process of versification under someone well versed in Welsh poetic traditions. Perhaps his instructor was Gwalchmai, Owain Gwynedd’s court poet, who was older than Hywel and whose poem entitledGorhoffedd(that is, “Boast”) bears the same title as Hywel’s longest and best-known poem.Hywel’s “Boast” focuses on three major themes: his prowess in battle (a theme quite common for a court poet); his love of his native land, expressed in his descriptions of nature; and his love of women—eight in all that he mentions in his poem, described in a kind of selfmocking tone. Two of his short poems are fairly conventional celebrations of battle. Five of his other lyrics are specifically love poems. Hywel speaks in one breath of the seashore, the green wood and the nightingale, and in the next of a childlike waif of a girl whose footstep barely disturbs the rush she walks upon.

Scholars have speculated that Hywel’s position as prince allowed him a certain freedom from following conventions, thus enabling him to write the nature poetry and love lyrics that are unique in Welsh court poetry. Or it may simply be that when poets of lower social rank wrote personal poems of this type, they were not thought of by contemporaries as important enough to preserve. In either case, his self-mockery, his love poetry, and his love of nature are elements that influenced subsequent Welsh poetry, looking forward in some ways to the lyrics of DAFYDD AP GWILYM.

■ Williams, Gwyn, trans.Welsh Poems, Sixth Century to 1600. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.

■ Williams, John Ellis Caerwyn.The Poets of the Welsh Princes. Cardiff: University ofWales Press, 1994.