Author: ap Gwilym, Dafydd
Biography:
AP GWILYM, Dafydd (c. 1315-1350: DWB)
Dafydd ap Gwilym, a prior author, is regarded as one of Wales’s greatest poets. He was a native of Ceredigion (Cardiganshire) where his family was well-established and affluent; he is believed to have inherited land through his family. He learned the art of Welsh verse from an uncle and his corpus of over 150 surviving poems (the website dafyddapgwilym.net lists 171) shows a mastery of Welsh verse forms and, in particular, of Welsh “cywydd” metre. Many of his poems celebrate love, particularly in a woodland setting. Dafydd ap Gwilym may have died of the black death and he is believed to have been interred at the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in Ceredigion. The Welsh original of Edward Williams’s The Fair Pilgrim has not been identified and the poem may be a composition by Williams who also contributed spurious poems to the collection Barddoniaeth Dafydd Ab Gwilym (1789) which was edited by William Owen Pughe (q.v.) and Owen Jones. (DWB 6 Jan. 2025; ODNB 6 Jan. 2025; dafyddapgwilym.net 6 Jan. 2025)
Other Names:
- Davyth ap Gwilym