From the quarrelling captains in Henry V, to the linguistically challenged lovers in I Henry IV, to the monoglot vocalist Lady Mortimer, to the proud Sir Hugh Evans, Shakespeare offers Welsh characters whose voices, language use, and presence help reflect a sometimes marginalized aspect of British identity. "Speak It in Welsh" Wales and the Welsh Language in Shakespeare seeks to understand why Shakespeare included the Welsh voice in his plays.

Between Wales and England is an exploration of eighteenth-century anglophone Welsh writing by authors for whom English-language literature was mostly a secondary concern. In its process, the work interrogates these authors’ views on the newly-emerging sense of ‘Britishness’, finding them in many cases to be more nuanced and less resistant than has generally been considered. It looks primarily at the English-language works of Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, and Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) in the context of both their Welsh- and English-language influences and time spent travelling between the two countries, considering how these authors responded to and reimagined the new national identity through their poetry and prose.

This book explores how that love influenced Tolkien's ideas about linguistic taste, his invention of languages, many of the themes and motifs in his creative writing, and his sense of a (regional) English identity. Drawing on unpublished material as well as Tolkien's published fiction, poetry and academic writing, Tolkien and Wales describes more fully than ever before the extent and depth of Tolkien's debt to the Welsh language and Welsh literature. It also argues that Tolkien's love of Wales and Welsh is inseparable from his love of England and his sense of belonging to the border country of the West Midlands. Besides discussing such famous books as The Hobbil and The Lord of the Rings, particular attention is paid to relatively neglected texts such as Tolkien's lecture on 'English and Welsh' and a poem that he published in The Welsh Review, The Lay of Aotrou and Iotroun. Where earlier scholarship has addressed Tolkien's debt to Welsh it has tended to do so in the context of 'Celtic' influence in general, but this book shows that Tolkien had very different attitudes to different Celtic languages. Tolkien and Wales reveals the seminal influence of Wales and Welsh on the writings of the twentieth century's most popular writer. Book jacket.

The daughter of one king and the lover of another; matriarch of a powerful dynasty and the cause of conflict and war: Nest, princess of Dyfed, became a legend. This biography reveals Nest's role in one of the most exciting and dynamic periods of Welsh, Irish and English history.

The first comprehensive book-length analysis of personal pronouns in present-day English.

This book develops a novel approach to the study of language, bringing it into dialogue with the latest geographical concepts and concerns and provides a comprehensive account of the geography of Welsh language analysing policy development, language use, ability and shift. The authors examine in particular: the different ways in which languages can be mapped; how geographical insights can be used to develop understandings of language use; the value of assemblage theory as a way of interpreting the social, technical and spatial aspects of language policy development; and the geographies that characterise institutional engagements with languages. This book will set a research agenda for the geographical study of language, developing a conceptual framework that will offer fresh insights to researchers in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Minority Languages, Geolinguistics, and Public Policy.

For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean "long field" but generally translates into English, inadequately, as "homesickness." At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence. In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time. A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”