Professor Emeritus John Ellis Caerwyn Williams, MA, BD, FBA

Caerwyn Williams was born on 17 January 1912 in Gwauncaegurwen, a Welsh-speaking non-conformist community in the Upper Amman Valley, on the western fringes of the Glamorgan coalfield. Life was hard and prospects bleak for a young man, with only the anthracite mines for employment, but the bookish Williams was encouraged by his father, a miner, to aim high. He left Ystalyfera intermediate school to read Latin and Welsh at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and graduated with distinction in each subject in 1933 and 1934. In the following year he gained an MA from the College for an edition of Welsh medieval prose and moved to Dublin in 1939 to carry out further Celtic research at Trinity and University Colleges. These were fruitful years; William forged lasting links with Irish scholars and writers, fell under the spell of traditional Irish storytelling and explored the magical west of Ireland, particularly Connemara.

Returning to Wales in 1941, Williams seriously considered entering the ministry; he studied Greek and church history at the United Theological College, Aberystwyth, graduating with a BD in 1944, and enrolled for a pastoral course at Bala College, but theology lost out to Celtic scholarship and in 1945 he was appointed lecturer in Welsh at Bangor. Shortly afterwards he contracted tuberculosis and spent the best part of two years in Langwyfan hospital, where his doctors sometimes despaired for his life. But nursed devotedly by his wife, whom he met on a blind date in Cardiff in 1946, Williams regained his strength and succeeded to the chair of Welsh in 1953. Head-hunters from California and Ireland tried to lure him from Bangor but when he did wrench himself away from his alma mater it was to go to Aberystwyth where he was appointed the University College’s first professor of Irish, and where he remained until retirement (a misnomer in Williams’s case).

Work was his life; he read voraciously in biblical studies, comparative literature and every aspect of Celtic philology and culture and was a scrupulous editor. He took on the role of honorary consulting editor at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, a research institute he had helped to establish and of which he served as director until 1985, and lectured frequently in America, Ireland and England, as well as Wales. Williams’s myriad publications are listed in Bardos, the Festschrift presented to him on retirement from Aberystwyth and, though most are in the Welsh language, some were written in English, or translated, and so reached a wider audience of medievalists. A major research project was his study of the court poets (Gogynfeirdd, or Poets of the Princes) who flourished in Wales between the first half of the twelfth century and the latter half of the fourteenth, professional craftsmen who extolled the military prowess of their prince in archaic speech and intricate metrical forms. Williams wrote two brilliant studies of these poets, Beirdd y Tywysogion (1973) and The Poets of the Welsh Princes (1978), and the entire corpus has now been published in seven volumes edited by Dr Geraint Gruffydd, a colleague of Williams. The Court Poet in Medieval Ireland (his Rhys lecture to the British Academy) appeared in 1972 and, twenty years later, he co-edited with Patrick Ford the symposium, The Irish Literary Tradition. Williams was appointed editor of Y Traethodydd (The Essayist), in 1965, the most venerable of all Welsh literary journals, published continuously since 1845, and in 1966 he became the first editor of Studia Celtica, the journal of the Board of Celtic Studies. From 1970 onwards Williams served as consulting editor of Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, the Welsh equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, and it is a thousand pities that this gentle, generous scholar did not live to see its publication in 2001. He died in hospital on 8 June 1999.