Orality, the Folk, and the National Literature in the 19th-century Wales

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The aim of this research was to analyse how and whay the canon of the Welsh national literature had shifted from the bardic poetry to the prose tales of the Mabinogion. The pan-European popularity of Ossian, an alleged collection of ancient oral tradition preserved in the folk memory of the Scottish Highlanders, urged the 19th-century Welsh literati to produce the Welsh Ossian which was sought out in the Mabinogion. Thus, these stories were claimed not only as the origin of European romances, but also as a part of the popular tradition of the Welsh people. Yet, contrary to Scotland and Ireland, the folklore did not play a significant role in Welsh cultural nationalism, which focused on the learned, written culture going back to the Romano-British period, and promoted the ideal of the modernised Wales consisting of the respectable working class armed with the English literacy and the Victorian social values.