Griffiths · 1800
Ann Griffiths and the hymns of Dolwar Fach
Between her Methodist conversion at Bala in the spring of 1796 and her death in childbed at Dolwar Fach on the twelfth of August 1805, Ann Thomas, married 1804 to Thomas Griffiths and known to Welsh-Methodist history as Ann Griffiths, wrote about seventy-four Welsh-language hymns in a burst of mystical-religious lyric composition that is, by every careful judgment of Welsh-language literary historians (Saunders Lewis, R. M. Jones), the foundational lyric-mystical achievement of the Welsh Methodist revival and one of the finest women's-poetic voices in any European language between Hildegard of Bingen and Emily Dickinson. Ann Griffiths could not, on the Welsh-Calvinistic-Methodist women's-pastoral practice of the 1800s, write down her hymns or have them published in her lifetime; she committed each new hymn to the memory of her servant Ruth Evans on the evening of composition. After Ann's death at twenty-nine, Ruth Evans dictated the seventy-four hymns from memory over the next twelve months to the Bala Methodist minister John Hughes (Pontrobert), who wrote them down. The collection was first printed in Welsh in 1806 in the Methodist hymn-book *Casgliad o Hymnau* of Robert Jones of Rhos-lan, with the eight Ann Griffiths hymns Hughes had transcribed. The rest were printed in successive editions of the Welsh-Methodist hymn-books over the next forty years.
It is twenty past nine on an unrecorded evening in the summer of 1800, in the kitchen of Dolwar Fach, a Methodist farm in the Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa parish in northern Montgomeryshire, in pale Welsh-summer light through the west-facing kitchen-window. She is twenty-four years old. She is Ann Thomas, born at Dolwar Fach on the Saint Davids's Day 1776 (the first of March 1776), daughter of John Thomas the Methodist-Calvinistic small-farmer of Dolwar Fach and Jane Thomas (her mother had died in 1794 when Ann was eighteen), in the fourth year since her Methodist conversion at the Bala Easter-association of April 1796.
Beside her at the kitchen table is Ruth Evans, twenty, the Dolwar Fach housekeeper-and-servant since 1797 and Ann's closest spiritual companion. Ruth is in the Welsh-Methodist housekeeper's grey wool work-dress. Ann has, in the past hour, composed a new Welsh-language hymn while she was at the evening milking of the five Dolwar Fach cows. She has come back to the kitchen with the hymn fixed in her memory and is now reciting it to Ruth.
She thinks: the Welsh-Methodist-Calvinistic women's-pastoral-practice does not permit me to write down the hymn. The Methodist Connexion would, on the Bala 1799 conference's resolution against women's public preaching-and-publishing, expel my father from the Methodist Connexion if my hymns were known to be circulating in printed form.
She thinks: Ruth has the memory. Ruth has been with me through the twenty-three hymns of the previous three years and remembers all of them by heart. Ruth will, on my death (which I have a quiet certainty will not be far off, since the Welsh-Methodist women of my Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa generation rarely live past thirty on the childbed mortality of the Welsh-uplands), carry the hymns out into the Welsh-Methodist community.
She thinks: the question of the hymn is whether the Welsh language can carry the mystical experience the Continental-Catholic mystics carried in Latin. Saint Teresa of Ávila wrote her Castle of the Soul in Spanish. Julian of Norwich wrote in Middle English. The Welsh of the Methodist revival has not yet, on the public-record, carried the mystical-experiential register the Continental tradition takes for granted. I am, on the evidence of the hymns I have been composing, finding that the Welsh can.
She begins to recite. By Ruth Evans's later memoir to John Hughes (Pontrobert) in 1806, after Ann's death: Mrs Griffiths would speak the hymn through to me on the evening of composition, twice or three times, slowly. I would say it back to her until she said I had it right. The hymns were never written down by either of us. The hymns lived in my head.
Ann Griffiths married Thomas Griffiths of Meifod on the tenth of October 1804. She conceived in the late autumn. She gave birth to a daughter at Dolwar Fach on the thirteenth of July 1805 (the child died after about a fortnight, on the thirty-first of July). Ann died of post-partum complications at Dolwar Fach on the twelfth of August 1805, twenty-nine years old.
Ruth Evans dictated the seventy-four hymns from memory over the next twelve months to the Methodist minister John Hughes (Pontrobert), who wrote them down in a vellum-bound notebook (the Hughes-Pontrobert notebook, now in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth). Eight of the hymns were printed in the Robert Jones of Rhos-lan hymn-book Casgliad o Hymnau in 1806. The remainder were printed in successive editions of the Welsh-Calvinistic-Methodist hymn-books over the next forty years. The complete corpus was first published as a single-volume scholarly edition by Owen M. Edwards in 1905, on the centenary of Ann's death.
Ann Griffiths is, by every careful judgment of Welsh-language literary criticism (Saunders Lewis's 1965 Cyflwyno Ann Griffiths, R. M. Jones's 1977 Llên Cymru essays, Robin Gwyndaf's 2005 bicentenary studies), the finest lyric voice of the Welsh-Methodist revival and one of the foundational women's-poetic voices in any European language of the period. Her hymn Wele'n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd (Behold him between the myrtle-trees), composed in the summer of 1804, is the most-sung Welsh-language hymn in the Calvinistic Methodist tradition. Dolwar Fach farm is, since 1965, a Ann Griffiths Memorial Chapel-and-Museum in the care of the Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa parish; the Ann Griffiths walking-pilgrimage from Pontrobert to Dolwar Fach has been held annually on the Saturday closest to the twelfth of August (the anniversary of her death) since the 1980s.