Dragon Has Two Tongues Book

The Dragon Has Two Tongues was of minimal use for my essay, but fascinating in its own way. Glyn Jones' essays are as much reminiscence about himself, the world that made him, and the people he knew and the worlds that formed them. He has a lot of warm, humanising memories of Caradoc Evans, an inside view on Dylan Thomas, a deep admiration for all the men about whom he writes.

He is writing about a genre or movement in literature that at the time was relatively looked down upon, it seems: Anglo-Welsh literature. He has to define this, which I think he does very well, and what makes one an Anglo-Welsh writer when one is writing in English. He puts the views of both sides here, the Welsh-language writers with their questioning of what audience the Anglo-Welsh writers had, and the view of the Anglo-Welsh authors making their own way. I think what he says, that, 'To me, anyone can be a Welshman who chooses to be so and is prepared to take the consequences,' is a very sound idea -- given that were I a writer I'd be aligned with the Anglo-Welsh, since I speak no Welsh and grew up in England, but from the very beginning asserted my identity as a Welsh person.

The shortcomings of the volume are the hyper-masculinity of it, of course. He mentions Margiad Evans and Menna Gallie, for example, without ever making them come alive in the way he does the male authors of the tradition. Margiad Evans and Menna Gallie surely deserve as prominent a place in the tradition as the men.

It's, as a whole, very easy to read, rarely bogged down in technical detail. Even where you haven't read the work he's writing about, it remains clear and interesting, which I can't say for many essay writers.