Llyn Teyrn. Strolled past this lake, in agreeable company, on the way up to Snowdon from Pen y Pass last week. Jonah Jones in his readable book on The lakes of North Wales poses the question "Is it legend or history that connects King Arthur with Llyn Teyrn, 'lake of the Monarch'?" However that may be what is certain is that Snowdonia and its lakes was the area where hard-pressed Celtic chieftains held out for generations against increasing pressures from the east." Whether or not this part of Snowdonia, and in particular the slopes of Lliwedd and Bwlch y Saethau (the Pass of the Arrows), were really the scene of the great battle which ended in the deaths of Mordred and Arthur, is highly speculative. And no one who has browsed the pages of Peter Bartrum's Welsh Classical Dictionary needs to be reminded that in the early period the links between myth, legend, history and topography are nothing if not speculative.

Having said that, some bits of speculation would appear to be more extravagant than others. And into that class might be put the notion, advanced on a certain website, that Llyn Teyrn means "Tyrant's Lake" in Welsh. The Welsh word teyrn no doubt derives, as does the English word tyrant, from the Latin and Greek, but it doesn't have the same dark and baleful connotations. The word is neutral, and simply means king, or monarch. Teyrnas means kingdom, teyrnasaidd has positive connotations, meaning noble, and teyrngarwch means loyalty. As between English and Welsh there may be (or there were then) different cultural connotations as regards governance. The Welsh word for prince, for example, is tywysog, i.e. a man who leads or guides in a consensual manner rather than who rules with a rod of iron or with a mailed fist. Bid ben bid bont, runs the old Welsh proverb - "let him who would be a leader be a bridge." And in fact there are conflicting cultural connotations within English itself. The historian Christopher Hill reminds us that the Levellers and other 17th century radicals liked to cultivate the idea (or perhaps the myth) that prior to the Norman conquest there had been in existence a much more wholesome, home-grown, democratic Saxon way of organizing society. In other words, prior to the invasion of greedy French speaking aristos and thugs from continental Europe we had been much better off, and certainly much better governed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_yoke, which quotes lines from Walter Scott's Ivanhoe

'Norman saw on English oak.
On English neck a Norman yoke;
Norman spoon to English dish,
And England ruled as Normans wish;
Blithe world in England never will be more,
Till England's rid of all the four.

Perhaps a residue of this feeling still exists, and helps explain the deep-seated hostility of many English people to the perceived encroachment of European institutions and indeed to the EU in general. The Celtic nations and other ethnic minorities, no strangers to political, economic and cultural encroachment, are perhaps inclined to take a more nuanced view of it...

Edward Greenly.

Do men improve with the years – as W.B. Yeats seems to suggest in a poem of that name? http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/men_improve_with_the_years.html The poem itself undermines the notion of “improvement”, focusing as it does on the poet’s own bitter experience of ageing. Maybe we get wiser as we get older, but what price wisdom? What person in his right mind would choose the kind of dessicated sagesse that can only be acquired with age and experience? As for the Enlightenment notion that men improve over succeeding generations, the poet doesn’t seem to think much of that, either, judging by his other poems. Twentieth century Dublin or London is not conspicuously wiser or more heroic or nicer than Renaissance Ferrara, or more given to joy and creativity than twelfth century Byzantium. Optimism about the human prospects took a substantial nose dive in the twentieth century, and it can hardly be said to have bounced back in the first decade of the twenty first, either.

These cheerful thoughts prompted by reading the first volume of Edward Greenly’s autobiography, A Hand Through Time – Memories – Romantic and Geological: Studies in the Arts and Religion; and the grounds of Confidence in Immortality. Greenly (1861-19 51) was an interesting character, a dedicated geologist – who more or less single handed did the field work which bore fruit in the beautiful Ordnance Survey geological maps of Anglesey which bear his name. Largely self taught, his career was one of remarkable industry and dedication, and he obviously thought there was no substitute for first-hand observation – preferably done with pencil and sketch pad rather than with the camera.

“However great the value of the photographic camera, it should never displace the pencil, since to draw an object is to learn it.”

But there was a lot more to Greenly than first class professionalism, nor were his remarkable powers of observation confined to geology. He was artistic, watercolouristic, keenly responsive to natural beauty, especially mountain scenery, appreciative of quirky individuality, a lover of poetry and music of an elevating kind, physically active, vegetarian, and not afraid to try new things. He learned to drive when he was 75. Undeniably, from the vantage point of 2010 his spirituality and high-mindedness look about as dead as the dodo. Is there anyone, nowadays, who talks about “the earnest work of life”? It gets worse. He had, as he puts it “a worshipful attitude to Womanhood.” Capital W. As much as anything A Hand Through Time is an act of homage to the author’s wife, Annie Barnard. He writes to her in Quakerish fashion with “thees” and “thous” and puts her on a pedestal in a sort of late Victorian manifestation of courtly love. Not surprisingly Tennyson – after Dante – seems to have been the couple’s favourite poet. The poets of “impetuous and ungoverned passion” held no appeal for them: “Byron, for instance, we never looked at.” Ibsen is “horrid”.

But before dismissing Greenly as an overly gentle, idealizing, highfalutin and therefore fraudulent Victorian - “confident in immortality” (despite having lost his faith in the supernatural inspiration of the Bible) it might be worth pondering the proposition that habitual exposure to nasty things tends to make people nasty. Is there not a kernel of wisdom in his remarking, after a visit to the site of the massacre at Culloden: “Let men realize the proximity of barbarism, lest they do or say something which might rouse it into life again.”

“The proximity of barbarism” is a memorable phrase. Almost as good as Robert Lowell’s comment on modern civilization – “A savage servility slides by on grease.” One can only guess at what Greenly would have made of the god-forsaken, twittering, flickering, tweeting electronic rubbish dump that now commands so much of people's attention …. Almost certainly it would not have been on the lines that “men improve with the years.”

Apparently Greenly was buried in the churchyard at Llangristiolus, near Llangefni– though I’ve not been able to find the grave.

.”

Some further thoughts on "genteel". In defining this word the Oxford English Dictionary notes that "a few years before the middle of the 19th century the word was much ridiculed as being characteristic of those people who are possessed with a dread of being taken for 'common people' or who attach exaggerated importance to supposed marks of social superiority. In seriously laudatory use it may now be said to be a vulgarism: in educated language it has always a sarcastic or at least playful colouring".

The illustrative quotations in OED confirm this. Between the 1815 citation from Jane Austen's Emma - "They were of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel" - and Dickens declaring in 1867 "a small opinion of what the great genteel have done for us" - the connotations have become negative. Even as early as 1814 Scott had his tongue in his cheek when stating that "the magistrates have done the genteel thing (as Winifred Jenkins says.)" Winifred Jenkins (referred to in an earlier post) is a character in Smollett's great comic novel of 1771, Humphry Clinker. Though she never (I think) uses the word "genteel" she does aspire to gentility, noting that in Bath "to be sure, we have the very squintasense of satiety." At the end of the novel, having become Mrs Loyd, she declares that now she has been removed to a higher sphere "you'll excuse my being familiar with the lower servants of the family; but as I trust you'll behave respectful, and keep a proper distance, you may always depend upon the good will and protection of Yours W. Loyd." The interesting and somewhat counter-intuitive thing about Win is that she is redeemed, not by her gentility, but by her vulgarity. As in her comment on London: "O gracious! my poor Welsh brain has been spinning like a top ever since I came hither! And I have seen the Park, and the paleass of Saint Gimes's, and the King's and the queen's magisterial pursing, and the sweet young princes, and the hillyfents, and pye bald ass, and all the rest of the royal family."

By the time we get to Borrow, the connotations of "genteel" are sombre, rather than comic. It evidently irks him when, in the home territory of Goronwy Owen, he hears a girl at Pentraeth giving the preference to English over Welsh as "the most genteel." Borrow replies (with some asperity) "Gentility... will be the ruin of Welsh, as it has been of many other things." A very prophetic remark, given the decline in the fortunes of the language in the course of the following hundred years. What he puts his finger on is the way in which the gentility principle leads to linguistic and cultural capitulation, a dilution of national identity. And underlying the gentility principle is political and economic annexation by a powerful and dominant neighbour, a process with which the Irish and the Scots of Borrow's time were every bit as familiar as the Welsh.

While aspirational gentility may not have disappeared altogether from the cultural lexicon, it is encouraging to note that in Wales things have changed a good deal in the course of the last 50 years. In Wales today it is Welsh, as often as not, that is the language for upwardly mobile Winifred Jenkinses, and the challenges to the language are of a different kind.

However, English speakers need not feel marginalised, despite Bob Geldof's being reported in Saturday's Guardian as saying that "The lingua franca of the planet is not English - it's pop music." Pop music with English lyrics, for the most part. And if not standard British English, then English after a fashion.