Early Life
Edward Williams was born at Pen-onn, near Llancarfan in Glamorgan, Wales, and was raised in the village of Flemingston (or Flimston; Trefflemin in Welsh). He followed his father into a career as a stonemason. In Glamorgan he took an interest in manuscript collection, and learned to compose Welsh poetry from poets such as Lewis Hopkin, Rhys Morgan, and especially Siôn Bradford. In 1773 he moved to London where the antiquary Owen Jones introduced him to the city's Welsh literary community. In 1777 he returned to Wales, where he married and tried his hand at farming, but evidently met with no success. It was during this time that he produced his first forgeries.
Williams's son, Taliesin (bardic name, Taliesin ab Iolo), whom he had named after the early medieval bard Taliesin, later went on to collect his manuscripts in twenty six volumes, a selection was published under the title of the Iolo Manuscripts by the Welsh Manuscripts Society in 1848.
Read more about this topic: Iolo Morganwg
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“... the hey-day of a woman’s life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)