Hywel, the son of Owain Gwynedd—the powerful
and effective prince of northern Wales, was a poet as
well as a prince and warrior. His literary efforts include eight extant poems, including five love lyrics
that are unique in 12th-century Welsh court poetry.
Hywel was Owain’s oldest son, a natural child
by an Irish woman called Pyfog. In 1136–37, with
his brother Cadwaladr, Owain raided the English
stronghold of Ceredigion in south Wales, and established his own power there. When his father
died in 1137, Owain claimed the throne of
Gwynedd in the north, and he put Hywel in command of south Ceredigion in 1139. Hywel skirmished with his uncle Cadwaladr, trying to
establish his own authority throughout the region,
but ultimately he was expelled from Ceredigion by
his uncle in 1153. At the same time, he was helping his father consolidate his power in the north.
He supported his father against the English king
HENRY II as Henry tried to reassert English authority in the region. Though suffering a setback in
1157, Owain fomented a general Welsh revolt
against the English in 1165, after which he was able
to expand and protect his own holdings until his
death in 1170.
Upon Owain’s death, Hywel was engaged in a
brief power struggle with his two half-brothers,
Dafyddd and Rhodri, who defeated and killed him
at Pentraeth in Anglesey in 1170. One of his sup-
porters, Peryf ap Cedifor, wrote an elegy expressing
the grief all of Hywel’s retainers felt at his passing.
It is as a poet himself that Hywel is best remembered today. His compositions show that he had
studied the formal process of versification under
someone well versed in Welsh poetic traditions.
Perhaps his instructor was Gwalchmai, Owain
Gwynedd’s court poet, who was older than Hywel
and whose poem entitled Gorhoffedd (that is,
“Boast”) bears the same title as Hywel’s longest
and best-known poem. Hywel’s “Boast” focuses on
three major themes: his prowess in battle (a theme
quite common for a court poet); his love of his native land, expressed in his descriptions of nature;
and his love of women—eight in all that he mentions in his poem, described in a kind of selfmocking tone. Two of his short poems are fairly
conventional celebrations of battle. Five of his
other lyrics are specifically love poems. Hywel
speaks in one breath of the seashore, the green
wood and the nightingale, and in the next of a
childlike waif of a girl whose footstep barely disturbs the rush she walks upon.
Scholars have speculated that Hywel’s position
as prince allowed him a certain freedom from following conventions, thus enabling him to write the
nature poetry and love lyrics that are unique in
Welsh court poetry. Or it may simply be that when
poets of lower social rank wrote personal poems of
this type, they were not thought of by contemporaries as important enough to preserve. In either
case, his self-mockery, his love poetry, and his love
of nature are elements that influenced subsequent
Welsh poetry, looking forward in some ways to the
lyrics of DAFYDD AP GWILYM.
Bibliography
Williams, Gwyn, trans. Welsh Poems, Sixth Century to
1600. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.
Williams, John Ellis Caerwyn. The Poets of the Welsh
Princes. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1994.