Megis archoll yw 'ngholled': Marwnadau Mamau i'w Plant

YB is a long-established and prestigious series of critical literary essays. This 8,600 word essay on elegies by mothers to their children discusses texts that were discovered through original archival research and represents a new contribution to the field of women's writing and gender studies in Wales. (The texts quoted in the essay were edited and published in Charnell-White's 2005 anthology of Welsh women's poetry, 'Beirdd Ceridwen'.) The mothers' elegiac verse is contextualised within women's role in death ritual and the theoretic/generic function of the elegy. It also has a comparative dimension as the tropes and language of the Welsh texts are discussed alongside a broad range of elegies by mothers in other Celtic languages (Irish and Scots Gaelic) and from the more mainstream tradition of English women's verse.