Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

evidence to support the inferences drawn therefrom. The author acknowledges his reliance on inferential analysis, but one wishes something more had been provided. This failing of the book stems from the deliberate eschewing of quantitative modes, and rejecting the 'macro' in favour of the 'micro' approach. The study would be improved by utilising 'macro' and 'micro' methods alongside one another, and by use of a wider perspective than that merely of 'time and space'. As a spatial analysis of a single valley system at one point in time, it stands somewhat alone and needs to be put into a wider context. How precisely does the development of the valleys fit in to the overall development of the coalfield and how exactly did differences in mining development affect them? Were they typical in these respects? Despite these criticisms, in the Welsh context this book is a pioneering step in the right direction. Further studies of other valleys at other times, both earlier and later, will be needed, however, before all the answers can be provided. Whilst studies of later censuses must await the release of the appropriate material to researchers, we hope that Jones and others will be stimulated to carry out more studies of this sort, though we plead for a broadening of their scope, particularly away from the reliance on purely inferential reasoning. T. BOYNS Cardiff Business School JOHN MORRIS-JONES. By Allan James. University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council, 1987. Pp. 89. £ 3.50. 'In one sense, he was the creator of the period which has now come to an end.' The words are about Sir John Morris-Jones; they were written by W. J. Gruffydd in an obituary tribute in Y Lienor in 1929 and like so many of Gruffydd's interpretative judgements on Welsh cultural life they are true, essentially. John Morris Jones was indeed one of the principal architects of that renaissance of literary culture which was the most lasting result of the Young Wales movement of the 1880s. His part in the renaissance was that of the nation's teacher as to what was correct and commendable in linguistic usage and in literary standards. It was a role which he accepted for himself as a student at Oxford in the eighties, under the influence of Owen M. Edwards's enthusiasm and John Rhys's tutorship, and it was to govern the rest of his career. The conventions of correct linguistic usage had to be defined and promulgated. This he did in a brilliant article on the Welsh language in 1891 new edition of Y Gwyddoniadur, in his magisterial 1913 Welsh Grammar: historical and comparative, and, just as important, in dozens of articles and angry letters to the press. New literary standards had also to be propagated, in a definitive analysis of the rules of Welsh metrics, in his own exemplary exercises in verse, as well as in his controversial personal views on poetic diction and on the function of poetry. At the same time the proper criteria of historical scholarship had to be applied to disprove bogus claims about the antiquity of the Gorsedd of Bards and to establish the genuineness of poems in Welsh from as early as the late-sixth century.