Sexy fairies. Sexy fairies everywhere.
At least, that was what it briefly felt like at the start of this month, when a small storm over the use of Welsh language and mythology in fantasy fiction erupted all over my social media feeds. The Guardian, the BBC and the Daily Mail got in on it. Academics were asked to comment, and a YouTube video by a bloke calling himself The Welsh Viking went low-key viral. The video’s title asks, “Is Romantasy Ruining Welsh (and Scottish and Irish) Culture?”. No doubt Mr Viking was being deliberately provocative for clicks, and well done: it got me to watch it, despite a severe allergy to video essays.
There are some perfectly good points here. Pan-Celticism can smush together related but different countries and languages as if they’re all the same thing. If you’re going to use a language you don’t speak or a mythology you’re not familiar with, it is a good idea to do your research or run your work by someone who speaks the language, just so you know you’re not spouting gobbledygook. And no, Cymraeg isn’t an artifact of a mysterious, ancient fantasy land; it’s a living language used every day by many real people, most of whom (unless they’re Casi Wyn) are not fey, whimsical elves.
But there’s nothing here that hasn’t been said before. As historian Rhys Kaminski-Jones pointed out on Bluesky, “Anglo fantasy novelists have been doing cringe Celticism for over a century now, it's not become a crisis because the books are now explicitly aimed at women and have more hot fairy sex”. He’s right. Bits of Welsh or cod-Welsh thrown in because successive generations raised on Tolkein have learned to hear it as the language of fantasy are nothing new; nor are extremely loose interpretations of Welsh mythology. One can’t help detecting a whiff of prurience and, yes, sexism in the fact that it’s this particular type of fantasy that sparked comment in the national media. (I’ve never seen the words “fairy porn” so many times in my life.)
If there’s a part of me that wants to nod along with the criticisms, it’s not really because I’m outraged at romantasy. (I don’t read a lot of it, because most mainstream hetero romance is not my cup of tea – call me when we get the fairy equivalents of Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler, I guess?) It’s because, while Wales is in the DNA of fantasy, speculative fiction that reflects Welsh experiences – particularly the contemporary kind – gets comparatively little fanfare.
Give me them or give me nowt.
When I wrote my first novel – a Mabinogi-inspired urban fantasy set in contemporary Cardiff – the successful fantasy writer who mentored me warned that I was unlikely to have much luck with London publishers, because it was “too Welsh”. (She was right.) Even the Welsh mythology-based fantasy close to my own heart is often by English or American writers (Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion novels; Alan Garner’s The Owl Service). I was delighted when I looked in the window of Waterstones last week and discovered that the current Welsh Book of the Month was a fantasy novel, The Drowned Woods by Emily Lloyd-Jones, only to discover that the author is apparently from Oregon in the US. That’s not to say it’s a bad book, or even one not grounded in real Wales – for all I know, Lloyd-Jones grew up spending every summer at her nan’s in Pembrokeshire – but is there really nobody in contemporary Wales writing noteworthy SFF?
Of course not. It’s just scattered and takes a little effort to find, because the Welsh literary scene is so small and underfunded. When the arts are valued and supported, there’s room for all sorts, including the exuberant, inventive weirdness that fantasy and speculative fiction at their best produce. When they’re not, the range of what gets published narrows to the things that sell, or that can justify their existence by appeals to public utility. If you’re a reader in Wales (and don’t live under a rock), you’re probably aware of the recent cuts to Books Council Wales funding that ended long-running literary magazine Planet and came precariously close to doing for New Welsh Review too. Just this week, Cardiff University announced plans to merge its School of English, Communication and Philosophy, where I did my postgrad studies, into a new School of Global Humanities, with jobs likely to be lost in the process. Paring down opportunities to study literature says something about how we value it, too.
In other words, if you’re worried about Welsh culture, then sexy fairies ought to be way down your list of priorities.
There are people out there doing their bit, of course. Gwyllion magazine champions Welsh SFF fiction, including some Welsh-language stuff, and Lucent Dreaming is certainly open to the fantastic. Seren recently put out an open call for Gothic and fantasy fiction, while Ammanford-based indie press Wizard’s Tower is putting out acclaimed fantasy novels. On the Cymraeg side, academic Nathaniel Harrington maintains a masterlist of SFF in Celtic languages and recently reviewed classic Welsh SF novel Y Dydd Olaf for Ancillary Review of Books. But it’s not easy.
So, I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is, and list a few speculative fiction books by Welsh and Wales-based authors that I love, as well as a few that haven’t yet made it to the top of my TBR, but that I’m looking forward to. If you’re an SFF reader interested in going beyond the bestsellers list and supporting Welsh culture, might I suggest starting here?
I feel like I never shut up about this novel – ironic, because it’s set in an alternate version of Cardiff plagued by mysterious pockets of silence. It’s tender, unsettling, and beautifully written, with plenty to say about exclusion, public space and who it belongs to, and the importance of being heard.
Machen often gets shouted out as a minor Gothic author; he’s less often recognised as one of the grandfathers of folk horror. Though he moved to London at a young age, Machen was from Caerleon. His work is animated not only by a fin-de-siecle tension between science and mysticism, but by a deep, uneasy ambivalence about his Welsh identity. The title story of this collection is, IMO, his masterpiece.
We’re straying into SF territory here, with Ros’s spare YA novel about a mother and son isolated in North Wales after a mysterious disaster. There’s a touch of the unreal about the emptied-out world they inhabit. The novel is at times stark and unflinching, but it’s never without compassion.
I think Welshness should be expansive and welcoming; if you choose to live in Wales and contribute to its culture, community, whatever, you get to be Welsh if you want to. I’ve no idea if Figgis, an Irish writer who moved to Wales in the sixties and lived here until her death in 2014, wanted to be Welsh, but I’m counting her as an honorary Cymraes for the purposes of recommending this dense, hypnotic, and occasionally darkly funny timeslip novel in which a recluse hiding out in a mid-Wales cottage finds himself spiraling back into a brutal Arthurian past.
Another lightly dystopian novel, set in an unnamed library that’s pretty clearly the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. Unlike in Star-Shot, there’s nothing supernatural happening here, but there’s a kind of playful, gothic unreality at work that makes it feel like a fabulist tale. By turns dark and wry, Dafydd’s novel manages to skewer privileged writerly egos and loom thoughtfully at the ways culture gets erased – not through violent acts of censorship, but with a shrug and a “So what?”
Lloyd’s more recent novel, Fox Bites, set in Zimbabwe, is also excellent, and probably more clearly fantasy. Bad Ideas\Chemicals gets the mention here because its setting – the utterly bizarre and somehow utterly recognisable Goregree – is based on the author’s hometown of Bridgend. It’s a story of misfit friends on a night out gone very wrong, in a town where the residents are either high on (literal) beetle juice or waiting for the mothership to take them home. Trust me, you just need to read it.
And a couple from the TBR list:
A 2021 New Welsh Writing Awards winner, Festival of the Ghost is about a young man searching for his dead sister’s PhD thesis while dodging a serial-killer cult and finding that he can see into the past. Joshua Jones called it “Courageous, daring, humorous and deeply human,” and Josh is smart so I’m gonna read it.
This is the first in a series of Gothic horror novels by Welsh-Turkish writer C.M. Rosens, set in the seaside town of Pagham-on-Sea. I don’t
think
it’s supposed to be in Wales, but a Gothic tourist town certainly seems like the kind of setting that lends itself to a Welsh perspective. Plus, apparently a woman falls in love with a haunted house in it, and that sounds like my jam. (Also, if you’re interested in delving further into the Welsh Gothic, the author has a series of very in-depth blog posts
about the topic – you could certainly do worse than start there.)
This one’s a historical Gothic. I recently read an interview with the author where she talks about dark and unsettling aspects of Wales, its folklore and landscape, but in a way that’s clearly informed by deep familiarity and experience, not any kind of wishy-washy Celticism. I’m excited to read!
This entry in the new Seren Welsh Gothic series collects supernatural stories by Elizabeth Walter, a writer who published several collections in the sixties and seventies but hasn't been remembered as some of her contemporaries are. I love a classic ghost story, so this looks right up my street.
I think I've exhausted myself (and probably you too) with recommendations there, so I'll spare you the 'what I've been reading' for this month.
Just one little piece of writing news for January: my story "Coblyn" came out in
Wyldblood Magazine
16 at the start of the month.
It's a creepy little piece about a woman haunted by a strange creature only she can see, in the mould of Le Fanu's "Green Tea" or Machen's The Green Round. If that sounds like your cup of weirdness, why not take a look?That's all from me for this month. 'Til next time.JL