Tuesday 27th July Eisteddfod Meeting

Rotary will have a stand on the Eistreddfod and we are sleeping in the Shelterbox tent for the week, we have tonight finalised the arrangements at a meeting of the clubs involved and are looking forward to the events, including RIBI President Jim attending and he too will sleep in the tent for a night.

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Organisation

The National Eisteddfod is traditionally held in the first week of August and the competitions are all held in the Welsh language. The Eisteddfod Act of 1959 allowed local authorities to give financial support to the event.

Hundreds of tents, pavilions and little stands are erected in an open space to create the maes (field). The space required for this means that it is rare for the eisteddfod to be in a city or town itself but instead somewhere with more space. The car parking for day visitors alone requires several large fields and many people camp there for the whole week. The festival has a heavy druidic flavour, with the crowning and chairing ceremonies for the victorious poets being attended by bards in flowing white costumes, dancing maidens, trumpet fanfares and a symbolic horn of plenty. However, the heritage of this ceremony is of dubious provenance and owes its existence within the Eisteddfod structure to Iolo Morganwg, whose Gorsedd ceremonies were adopted by the Eisteddfod from 1819. Nevertheless, it is taken very seriously, and an award of a crown or a chair for poetry is a great honour. The Chairing and Crowning ceremonies are the highlight of the week, and are presided over by the Archdruid. Other important awards include the Prose Medal (first introduced in 1966).

If no stone circle is there already, one is created out of Gorsedd stones, usually taken from the local area. Such stone circles are icons all across Wales and signify the Eisteddfod having visited a community. As a cost-saving measure, the 2005 Eisteddfod was the first to replace the creation of a permanent stone circle with a temporary "plastic stone" circle for the druidic ceremonies. This also has the benefit of bringing the Gorsedd ceremonies on to the maes, as they were often held many miles away, unbeknownst to much of the public. The ceremonies may still happen elsewhere if the weather on the maes is not suitable. One of the most dramatic events in Eisteddfod history was the award of the 1917 chair to the poet Ellis Humphrey Evans, bardic name Hedd Wyn, for the poem Yr Arwr (The Hero). The winner was announced, and the crowd waited for the winner to stand up to accept the traditional congratulations before the chairing ceremony, but no winner appeared. It was then announced that Hedd Wyn had been killed the previous month on the battlefield in Belgium. These events were portrayed in the Academy Award nominated film Hedd Wyn.