Prof. Mary-Ann Constantine of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies wrote the foreword for the book.
Like many other people, I imagine, I only knew Edward Evan indirectly, through the words of his friend and disciple, Iolo Morganwg, as the only other ‘regular Bard in Glamorgan, or in the world’. The work of G.J. Williams and my own colleagues helped to contextualise that bold claim, describing a world of learning and poetic craft in the Glamorgan uplands that shaped Iolo’s vision of himself, and this respectable Dissenting Minister, as ‘the only legitimate descendants of the so-long-celebrated Ancient British Bards’. But I was busy trying to fathom Iolo himself (I never even got close, of course), and Edward Evan remained a figure in the hinterland – the man who died on the day of the Gorsedd on the Garth in June 1798; a shaper, an influence, and then an absence.
This book, for the first time, brings Edward Evan of Ton Coch fully into view. Poet and minister, farmer, musician, neighbour, husband, father, his long life spanned a period of intellectual and economic change whose impact would come into dizzying effect with the massive industrialization of the valleys in the following century. James Stewart’s vivid and sympathetic portrayal of Evan and his world offers multiple windows onto the eighteenth century, not only in the Cynon Valley, but across south Wales. And this is much more than a standard third-person biography. A career in journalism has trained Stewart to quiz his sources, and to seek out experts and practitioners in different fields: what exactly did happen to the manuscript of the Gododdin during Edward Evan’s lifetime? How do you string a harp with horsehair, and what are the qualities of its sound? There are many voices in this book beside those of the author and his subject.
Stewart’s family connection to Edward Evan provokes reflections on how memories are shaped and become a part of history. He uses Evan’s own Welsh-language poems as the starting point for his biographical explorations. First published in 1804 and curated by the poet’s son Rhys, the collection was reprinted four times in the century following his death. Extending the story into the lifetime of Rhys Evans reveals how the poems were read and repurposed in radical new contexts, underscoring the importance of the Glamorgan bard’s legacy. They certainly evoke a world which in many ways is wholly unlike our own. It is difficult to imagine those sparser landscapes of the pre-industrial Blaenau – the difficult roads, the different possibilities and expectations of community, language, work and worship. But Stewart has a deft way of layering new landscapes over old, and helping the reader to understand how many of the patterns which created eighteenth-century south Wales shaped, and continue to shape, our world today.