Almost a hundred years ago the essential foundations - linguistic, literary and historical - were laid for the renaissance in medieval Welsh studies which marked the earlier decades of the twentieth century. Of major significance was the work of the expert palaeographer Dr J. Gwenogvryn Evans (1852- 1920) who, between 1907 and 1911 printed and published facsimiles and diplomatic editions of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts which contain nearly all of the oldest Welsh prose and poetry - the Black Book of Carmarthen, the White Book Mabinogion, the Books of Aneirin and Taliesin, the Chirk Codex of the Welsh Laws, the Poetry from the Red Book of Hergest. The Series of Old Welsh Texts which he produced, alone and unaided, on his small hand-press at Pwllheli and later at Llanbedrog, followed the earlier reproductions and facsimiles on which he had collaborated with Sir John Rhys at Oxford, and which were published there: The Mabinogion from the Red Book of Hergest (1887), the Facsimile of the Black Book of Carmarthen (1888), The Text of the Bruts from the Red Book of Hergest (1890) and the Book of Llandāf (1893). Evans's works have rightly been called "milestones in the history of publishing in Wales"; in the words of Sir John Morris- Jones "for the first time they supplied Welsh scholars with reliable texts to work upon". Evans's reproductions laid a secure basis for the exact scholarship of the succeeding generation, and his diplomatic editions have never been superseded. Hardly less important was his Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language which was produced in eight parts for the Historical Manuscripts Commission (London, 1898- 1910); a catalogue whose extensive survey made it possible to locate Welsh manuscripts wherever they were to be found in the libraries of Wales or England, and which gave also a description of their content and an estimate as to their date. This work, too, has never been replaced, although its findings have occasionally been modified in the light of more recent scholarship.
No less significant for the development of Welsh scholarship was the foundation in 1919 of the University's Board of Celtic Studies, with its Bulletin, whose first number was published in October 1921. One name stands out above all others in relation to these two major events, and that is the name of Ifor Williams (1881-1965, `Sir Ifor' from 1947). Sir Ifor's scholarly editions of early Welsh poetry and of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi remain canonical texts to this day, and will long remain so; they are constantly reissued by the University of Wales Press to meet the needs of university teaching in successive generations, as well as to meet the wider needs of scholarship. More than any other individual, Sir Ifor was responsible for initiating the Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies (from 1995 it has been combined with Studia Celtica). From the beginning, Sir Ifor edited the Language and Literature section of the Bulletin, and for many years he was the main contributor to this section: from 1937 he was for ten years also the Bulletin's general editor. Sir Ifor said that he was more proud of his `Tarw Bach' (as he called it) than of any of the other publications with which he had been concerned; and this, he said, was because of the inspiration which the Bulletin had given, particularly to younger scholars, to make available to others the fruits of research without avoidable delay. Against all established tradition, and in the face of some initial opposition, Sir Ifor used Welsh for his lexicographical notes, and for almost everything else which he wrote for the Bulletin - just as he had broken with tradition by progressively employing Welsh in his lectures and classes. And it will be seen from this publication that Welsh was the language of all Sir Ifor's major publications `megis ag y dylai ac y gweddai', as he expressed it. Yet no one would deny that Sir Ifor could be quite as relaxed, fluent and expressive a writer and a lecturer in English as he was in Welsh. This was well exemplified in the lectures and essays which are collected in The Beginnings of Welsh Poetry, as also in his Dublin Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944).