Ann Griffiths(1776–1805)

Ann Thomas was born at the farmhouse of Dolwar Fach in the parish of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa, in the high country of southern Montgomeryshire, in April 1776, fourth of the five children of John Evan Thomas and Jane Theodore. The family were Anglicans of moderate Methodist sympathies and small means; she was raised on the farm, schooled at the parish school, learned the standard Welsh-language Bible by heart in early adolescence, and on her mother's death in 1794 took over the running of the household at eighteen. She came under the preaching of the Calvinistic Methodist itinerant Benjamin Jones at the Easter Communion at Llanfyllin in 1796, experienced the Methodist conversion that became the central event of her life, and joined the Calvinistic Methodist society at Pontrobert under the seiat leader John Hughes in 1797.

Her hymns came in the last three years of her short life. From around 1802, in her twenty-sixth year, she began to compose Welsh-language hymns at the hearth at Dolwar Fach in the long evenings between the farm-work, dictating them in the form she had composed them to the family servant Ruth Hughes of Dolwar Fach, who memorised them and could repeat them word-perfect on demand. Ann did not write her hymns down. She composed at the spinning wheel and at the kitchen table; Ruth held them in memory; only after Ann's death did Ruth, on the instruction of John Hughes the seiat leader, dictate the seventy-four surviving hymns to the Welsh-language Methodist press at Bala.

She married Thomas Griffiths of Meifod in October 1804, gave birth to a daughter in July 1805, and died at Dolwar Fach in August 1805 in her thirtieth year of complications of the birth. The daughter died two weeks later. Ann's hymns were first printed in the second edition of Hymnau a gyfansoddwyd ar amrywiol achosion (Hymns Composed for Various Occasions) of Mary Jones of Llandinam at Bala in 1806, the year after her death, on the dictation of Ruth Hughes to John Hughes. The collection ran through the next forty years to over a hundred editions in the Welsh-language Methodist hymn-book trade.

Twenty-six of her seventy-four surviving hymns are in continuous use in the Welsh-language hymn-book tradition. Wele'n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd (Look, between the myrtles He is standing) is the central single hymn of the Welsh Methodist tradition, set to the tune Cwm Rhondda; O am gael ffydd i edrych (Oh that I had the faith to look), Bererin llesg gan rym y stormydd (Pilgrim faint with the storm's strength) and Yn y dyfroedd mawr a'r tonnau (In the great waters and the waves) are on every modern Welsh-language hymn-book. The hymns are notable in Welsh-language literary history for the directness of the eucharistic theology, the density of the Old Testament imagery, the mystical-meditative register, and the strict-metre cynghanedd-influenced versification. The Griffiths name in modern Welsh religious culture carries the weight of the seventy-four hymns of Dolwar Fach.