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Gwreiddyn Chwerw

Three very different research projects informed the writing of the novel Gwreiddyn Chwerw. First of all, as the plot centers on the birth of a baby at the end of the 19th century, research was conducted on the history of midwifery in Wales and the wider world (an endeavor aided by members of Bangor University’s School of Healthcare Sciences). Secondly, for reasons relating to character development as well as to the exploration of different linguistic registers and literary modes for use in generating the novel’s sentence-level style, research was conducted on the history of Welsh-language botanical writing. This uncovered the importance of the volume Welsh Botanology by Hugh Davies; particular attention was given to the combination of scientific vocabulary and neo-religious rhetoric which characterizes the work’s Welsh-languge introductory essay. Finally, the novel was written in conjunction with a consideration of the fiction of Kate Roberts. Like many of that influential writer’s best-known works, Gwreiddyn Chwerw explores the life of a quarryman’s family in Arfon during the end of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. Also like so much of Kate Roberts’s work, this novel focuses on the way in which that society defined the role of the woman/daughter/wife/mother. Its writing was conditioned in part by an attempt to locate and fill the gaps or chinks in her fictional treatments of those social experiences. For example, while several of those earlier works focus on the relationship between mothers and their children, none of them take as their subject the birth of a child. That was thus selected as the novel’s narrative centre-piece.