author
1731–1788
A Welsh poet, cleric, and scholar remembered for helping preserve the oldest layers of Welsh literary tradition. His writing and research opened medieval Welsh poetry to new readers and helped shape later interest in Wales’s cultural past.
Born in 1731 at Cynhawdref in Cardiganshire, he became known by the bardic names Ieuan Fardd and Ieuan Brydydd Hir. He studied at Ystrad Meurig school under Edward Richard and later went to Merton College, Oxford. Although he did not build a settled academic career, he developed a reputation as an unusually learned reader of Welsh manuscripts and an important voice in Welsh literary scholarship.
He worked as a clergyman in a number of parishes in Wales and England while continuing to collect, copy, and study older Welsh poetry. His best-known book, Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards (1764), brought early Welsh verse to a wider audience through translations and notes, and is often treated as a landmark in the revival of interest in medieval Welsh literature. He also wrote his own poetry in Welsh and was admired as both a critic and a creative writer.
Later accounts describe a difficult final period marked by financial strain and disappointment, but his standing as a scholar endured. Today he is remembered as one of the leading Welsh literary figures of the eighteenth century, especially for preserving and explaining traditions that might otherwise have been less widely known.