Ann Griffiths and the hymns of Dolwar Fach

Some literatures cross into the mystical register early, in monasteries and courts, with patrons and scribes to catch every line. Others wait centuries for the right voice in the right kitchen, and when that voice arrives it carries no pen, no paper, and no permission to be heard. What survives, in such cases, survives because another woman in the same room had a memory for it.

THE FARM AT DOLWAR FACH

Ann Thomas was born at Dolwar Fach on Saint David's Day, the first of March 1776, to John Thomas, Calvinistic Methodist small-farmer of the parish of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa in northern Montgomeryshire, and to Jane Thomas, who died in 1794 when Ann was eighteen. The household was Welsh-speaking, Bible-reading, and uneasy with the new fervour spreading out of Bala; Ann herself, by her own later account, had been a sharp-tongued young woman fond of dancing at the parish fairs. At the Easter association in Bala in April 1796 she was converted under the preaching of Thomas Charles, and the sharpness turned inward. For four years now she has been a Methodist communicant of the Pontrobert society, walking the seven miles to chapel and back, working the dairy, reading her Bible in the kitchen at Dolwar Fach. She is twenty-four. She has begun, in the past three years, to compose hymns in Welsh, in her head, while she works.

AN EVENING IN SUMMER

It is twenty past nine on a long-lit evening in the summer of 1800. The sun is still on the slate ridge of the western hills; the kitchen at Dolwar Fach has the pale lemon light that comes through a west-facing window between milking and dusk. The five cows have been milked, the buckets carried in, the cream set. Ann has come back into the kitchen with a new hymn fixed in her head, composed in the cowshed against the soft press of a flank and the rhythm of her own hands. Ruth Evans is at the table: twenty years old, Dolwar Fach's housekeeper since 1797, in the grey wool work-dress of a Methodist servant, with the kind of memory that the chapel had long ago marked and the family had long ago come to depend on. Ann sits down opposite her. There is no paper between them. There has never been paper between them.

THE HYMN UNWRITTEN

The Bala association of 1799 has resolved against women preaching or publishing in the Connexion; Thomas Charles's letters have been firm on the point, and the rule reaches into every farm kitchen in Montgomeryshire. To write the hymn down would be to publish it. To publish it would be to draw the Connexion's discipline upon her father, upon Pontrobert, upon the small society of believers that has been her whole inward country since 1796. She has thought of this often, and she thinks of it now, briefly, the way a dairymaid thinks of the weather: as a fact of the room she is standing in. The hymn, meanwhile, is whole in her. She can feel its shape the way she can feel the shape of a pail by its weight. The Continental mystics had Latin and patrons and convents; Teresa had her Castilian and the Carmel at Ávila, Julian had her cell at Norwich and a scribe. The Welsh of the revival has not yet, by the public record of the Connexion's hymn-books, carried this register. She has been finding, hymn by hymn over three years, that it can. The question is whether anything she finds will outlast the kitchen it was found in. She looks across the table at Ruth. Ruth has held the twenty-three previous hymns in her head for three years without losing a line. Ruth is the paper. Ruth will be the press. Ann begins to recite, slowly, twice through, the way one teaches a child the Lord's Prayer. Ruth says it back. Ann corrects a phrase. Ruth says it again. Ann nods.

THE METHOD

From that summer onward the method does not change. A hymn comes to Ann at the churn or the milking-stool or on the long walk back from Pontrobert chapel; she carries it home in her head; she gives it to Ruth in the evening; Ruth carries it. By Ruth Evans's later account to the Methodist minister John Hughes of Pontrobert, in 1806, 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. About seventy-four hymns accumulate in Ruth's memory between 1796 and 1805. None is recited beyond the kitchen. None is sung in chapel. None is known, in Ann's lifetime, beyond the small circle at Dolwar Fach and at Pontrobert.

THE SHORT MARRIAGE

On the tenth of October 1804 Ann Thomas marries Thomas Griffiths of Meifod, a Methodist farmer, and becomes Ann Griffiths of Dolwar Fach. She conceives in the late autumn. The hymn Wele'n sefyll rhwng y myrtwydd, Behold him standing between the myrtle-trees, is composed in the months of that marriage and will become, within a generation, the most-sung Welsh hymn in the Calvinistic Methodist tradition. A daughter is born at Dolwar Fach on the thirteenth of July 1805 and lives a fortnight, dying on the thirty-first of July. Ann dies of post-partum complications on the twelfth of August 1805, twenty-nine years old. Ruth Evans, twenty-five, is in the house. The seventy-four hymns are in her head and nowhere else.

THE DICTATION

Over the twelve months following the burial Ruth Evans walks to Pontrobert and sits with John Hughes, the Methodist minister there, and recites the hymns to him from memory, one by one, in the order she remembers them coming. Hughes writes them down in a vellum-bound notebook in his own careful hand. He queries phrases; Ruth says them again the way Ann said them; Hughes corrects what he has written. The notebook, which will pass in time to the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth, is the textual ground of every printed edition that follows. Eight of the hymns are set into Robert Jones of Rhos-lan's Casgliad o Hymnau in 1806, the first Methodist hymn-book to carry them. The remainder enter the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist hymn-books in successive editions over the next forty years. The complete corpus is first gathered as a scholarly volume by Owen M. Edwards in 1905, on the centenary of Ann's death.

WHAT THE WELSH COULD CARRY

The judgment of the twentieth-century Welsh critics, Saunders Lewis in his 1965 Cyflwyno Ann Griffiths, R. M. Jones in his Llên Cymru essays of the 1970s, Robin Gwyndaf in the bicentenary studies of 2005, is that the Welsh language did carry, in Ann Griffiths's hymns, the mystical-experiential register the Continental tradition had assumed in Latin and Spanish and Middle English; that Ann is the foundational lyric voice of the Welsh Methodist revival; and that she belongs in the company of Hildegard and Julian and Teresa and, later, Emily Dickinson, in the small line of women who took a vernacular and made it do what its priests had not asked it to do. The method by which her work survived is part of the work. A hymn composed at a milking-stool, recited to a servant, held in that servant's memory for a year past the poet's death, set down at last by a minister at Pontrobert: this is the chain that carried Welsh-language mysticism into print.

THE PILGRIMAGE

Decisive hours are usually imagined as the hours of generals on ridges. There are other hours, quieter, in farmhouse kitchens at twenty past nine, when a woman with no pen and no permission gives a poem to another woman with a good memory, and the language of a small country acquires a register it did not know it possessed. Dolwar Fach farm has stood as the Ann Griffiths Memorial Chapel and Museum, in the care of the parish of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa, since 1965. On the Saturday closest to the twelfth of August each year, walkers gather at Pontrobert at dawn and follow the lane Ruth Evans walked, seven miles up into the hills, to the door of the kitchen where the hymns were first spoken aloud.