George Borrow opens his essay not with a book review but with an etymological migration: the Welsh, he insists, call themselves Cymry, a word meaning 'a number of people associated together,' and he traces their journey from Asia through Cambia and the Crimea to Britain. This sweeping origin story, complete with the culture-hero Hu Cadarn who taught the plough, sets the tone for a piece that is as much about national identity as about literature. Borrow writes with the confidence of a philologist and the flair of a storyteller, blending linguistic speculation with vivid historical narrative. The essay was originally published in The London Quarterly Review in 1861, occasioned by Borrow's own translation of Elis Wyn's The Sleeping Bard, and it offers a window into Victorian attitudes toward Welsh culture.

Borrow's Ethnographic Opening

The first pages of the essay are less a literary introduction than an ethnographic and linguistic argument. Borrow derives the name Cymry from a root meaning 'associated together,' and he maps their supposed migration across Eurasia, leaving place-names like Cambia and Crimea. He invokes the figure of Hu Cadarn, a culture-hero who taught ploughing and led his people westward across 'the hazy sea' in wicker-and-skin coracles. This origin myth is presented as fact, without qualification, and it reveals Borrow's method: he treats language as evidence for history, and he writes with a certainty that modern readers may find startling. The passage also establishes his voice—learned, opinionated, and unafraid of sweeping claims.

Six Prose Works as a Canon

Borrow proceeds to enumerate what he considers the six grand prose works of Welsh literature. He describes each with a mixture of summary and judgment. The Mabinogion, he says, 'almost vie with the Arabian Nights,' though he insists they share no common origin with those tales—a claim that contradicts his own earlier assertion that all European tales derive from the same source as the Arabian stories. He praises Lady Charlotte Guest's translation for making 'these strange, glorious stories known to England and all the world.' The list culminates with Elis Wyn's Sleeping Bard, which Borrow himself translated. He recounts how a Welsh bookseller in Smithfield feared the book's 'terrible descriptions of vice and torment' would provoke a prosecution, but Borrow dismisses such fears as 'squeamish nonsense.'

The Sleeping Bard and Its Translator

Borrow devotes considerable space to the work that prompted his essay. He explains that The Sleeping Bard is a moral allegory divided into three visions, each followed by a poem in a unique meter. He notes that the title is a deliberate plagiarism from a poet 'who flourished in the time of the Welsh princes, some nine hundred years before'—a joke Borrow appreciates. The prose, he asserts, is 'graphic and vigorous, almost beyond conception'; the poetry 'wild and singular.' He also reveals that his translation was made in 1830 at the request of a bookseller, but was only published thirty years later. This anecdote frames the essay as both a defense of plain speaking and a vindication of Borrow's own literary judgment.

Voice and Argument in the Essay

Throughout the essay, Borrow's voice is unmistakable: combative, erudite, and occasionally contradictory. He dismisses the 'over fastidious' and celebrates the 'harmless but plain-speaking book' that Albemarle Street was willing to publish in 1860. His judgments are delivered as pronouncements, and he does not hesitate to correct or praise other scholars. The essay is not a neutral survey but a performance of critical authority. For a first-time reader, the most useful approach is to treat Borrow's claims as evidence of Victorian literary culture rather than as objective fact. His etymologies, his canon-making, and his anecdotes all reveal more about the reviewer than about the works he discusses.

Readers coming to this essay for the first time should attend to the way Borrow uses the review format to advance his own literary and cultural agenda. His confidence can be misleading: the etymologies are speculative, the canon is personal, and the judgments are often more revealing than the texts they describe. Treat the essay as a primary document of Victorian criticism, and let Borrow's vigorous prose guide you through a landscape of forgotten works and forgotten arguments.