This post was last updated on March 4th, 2025 at 02:07 pm
For bibliophiles, also known as “bookworms,” truly great Welsh gifts begin with great Welsh words. The Welsh language itself is mesmerizing. It has a poetic and, to outsiders, almost otherworldly quality. Add to that the colorful and multidimensional history of the land, the people of Wales, and beautiful Welsh names, and you’ve got enough pages to carry you on a lifetime journey.
Below, we’ll dive into seven books that make great Welsh gifts. Wales became a country with King Henry VIII’s Act of Union in 1536. However, its history in no way starts so recently. Before that, what we now know as Cymru consisted of independent kingdoms. The Kingdom of Gwynedd in North Wales is one example.
Independent princes ruled these ancient kingdoms. They shared a common tongue and subscribed to the same laws but weren’t united as a nation. Conflicts abounded until the 13th century when the princes of Gwynedd brought unity to Wales. Many of the books below explore this pivotal period in Welsh history.
This post is about great Welsh gifts for bookworms.
Great Welsh Gifts
Welsh Kings: Warriors, Warlords, and Princes by Kari Maund
In this remarkable book, the author takes us back to the days of Medieval Wales—the good, the bad, and the ugly. The Cymru of this period wasn’t united as a country but was made up of independent kingdoms ruled by kings and princes. Some kingdoms were more powerful than others, with some being minor kingdoms and others being larger and having their own sub-kingdoms. Proud and very often stubborn rulers fought with one another for control of the realm. Although during these turbulent times, there wasn’t a “Kingdom of Wales,” you’ll learn that Gruffudd ap Llywelyn was the only leader who did unify the entirety of Wales for a period. Other powerful leaders, like Rhodri Mawr and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, also sought to rule over the country as a whole and greatly influenced large parts of it.
Kari Maund shows us how these kings left their mark on Welsh history and how they even impacted the world outside Britain. For a complete article about the subject matter of the book, including information about Wales in the Middle Ages, check out the article Power Struggle of the Welsh Kings: Warriors, Warlords and Princes.
Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (Writers of Wales) by Oliver James Padel
From the blurb: Although the legends of Arthur have been popular throughout Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, the earliest references to Arthur are to be found in Welsh literature, starting with the Welsh-Latin Historia Brittonum, which dates from the ninth century. By the twelfth century, Arthur was a renowned figure wherever Welsh and its sister languages were spoken. O. J. Padel provides an overall survey of medieval Welsh literary references to Arthur and emphasizes the importance of understanding the character and purpose of the texts in which allusions to Arthur occur.
Texts from different genres are considered together and shed new light on the use which different authors make of the multifaceted figure of Arthur, from the folk legend associated with magic and animals to the literary hero, soldier, and defender of country and faith. Other figures associated with Arthur, such as Cai, Bedwyr, and Gwenhwyfar, are also discussed. Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature is an important and revealing contribution to Arthurian studies and will appeal to anyone interested in understanding more about the legends of Arthur and their sources in medieval Welsh tradition.
Owain Glyndŵr: The Story of the Last Prince of Wales by Terry Breverton
The story of the Last Prince of Wales, Owain Glyndŵr, is a must on the list of great Welsh gifts for bibliophiles. Today, he is widely recognized among Welsh symbols of independence.
From the blurb: The first ever full-scale biography of the last native Prince of Wales who fought to maintain an independent Wales. If it had not been for Owain Glyndŵr’s 15-year struggle against overwhelming odds, the Welsh would not have survived as Europe’s oldest nation. His war is the defining era in the history of Wales. Yet Glyndŵr is hardly known—a cultured, literate warrior who was never betrayed or captured and vanished into history. No less than six separate invasions were beaten back by Glyndŵr’s army of volunteers before he disappeared into history, his family and children either dead or imprisoned for life, but he was never betrayed. Not for Glyndŵr the brutal public death of Braveheart, nor a grave to desecrate—only an immortal legacy of hope and freedom.
His war of independence led the way for the success of another mab darogan (son of prophecy) seven decades later, when a Welsh army won at Bosworth Field and the Tudor Dynasty was founded. This book tells us how Glyndŵr came to stir Wales into war, and why his name still resonates today as one of the greatest warriors the world has seen.
Welsh Gift Ideas: The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir by Pamela Petro
From the blurb: “Hiraeth” is a Welsh word that’s famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean “long field” but generally translates into English inadequately as “homesickness.” At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence.
In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time.
A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph’s and Financial Times’s Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”
The Welsh Language: A History by Janet Davies
From the blurb: The existence of the Welsh language can come as a surprise to those who assume that English is the foundation language of Britain. However, J. R. R. Tolkien described Welsh as the ‘senior language of the men of Britain’. Visitors from outside Wales may be intrigued by the existence of Welsh and will want to find out how a language which has, for at least fifteen hundred years, been the closest neighbour of English, enjoys such vibrancy, bearing in mind that English has obliterated languages thousands of miles from the coasts of England. This book offers a broad historical survey of Welsh-language culture from sixth-century heroic poetry to television and pop culture in the early twenty-first century.
Great Welsh Gifts: Gwenllian the Welsh Warrior Princess by Peter Newton
From the blurb: ‘They came, they saw, they conquered’—words that accurately describe the actions of the Norman conquest of Britain. In 1097 AD, with the subjugation of England and Scotland complete, the Norman king, William Rufus, gathered his mighty forces at the borders of Wales; his intentions were simply to annihilate the Welsh nation and rule its lands.
Earlier that year, in the royal household of the king of Gwynedd, a princess was born; a child who, in future years, would rise from the ashes of pain and despair to lead her people in body and spirit against these foreign intruders.
Through her valiant, unselfish, and untimely tragic actions, her notoriety grew to rival the infamous Celtic warrior queen Buddug (Boudica). Then, on the eve of battle, when the impassioned Welsh forces stood facing the mightiest army in Europe, a cry resounded from the throats of countless thousands of patriotic Welshmen and women that would ultimately drive them on to victory ‘Gwenllian’!
Great Welsh Gifts: Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales by Jonathan Ceredig Davies
From the author: Welsh folk-lore is almost inexhaustible and of great importance to the historian and others. Indeed, without a knowledge of the past traditions, customs, and superstitions of the people, the history of a country is not complete.
In this book, I deal chiefly with the three counties of Cardiganshire, Carmarthenshire, and Pembrokeshire, technically known in the present day as “West Wales”; but as I have introduced so many things from the counties bordering on Cardigan and Carmarthen, such as Montgomery, Radnor, Brecon, etc., I thought proper that the work should be entitled, “The Folk-Lore of West and Mid-Wales.”
Although I have been for some years abroad, in Patagonia and Australia, yet I know almost every county in my native land; and there is hardly a spot in the three counties of Carmarthen, Cardigan, and Pembroke that I have not visited during the last nine years, gathering materials for this book from old people and others who were interested in such subject, spending three or four months in some districts. All this took considerable time and trouble, not to mention of the expenses in going about; but I generally walked much, especially in the remote country districts, but I feel I have rescued from oblivion things which are dying out and many things which have died out already.
For more great Welsh gifts, visit The Welsh Gift Shop in Tenby or shop The Welsh Gift Shop online.
This post was all about great Welsh gifts for bookworms.
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