Hello from the other side of the world. Could you share a little about hiraeth? It's okay if not, I know you said it was hard to explain, but I'm guessing the Wikipedia article is, ah, very simplistic.
What was the feeling that made it silent like a church? Introspection? Was it because of the specific music of tha song, or is the subject of hiraeth always this impactful?
Sorry if this is dumb or insensitive or something, I really know next to nothing about Welsh culture (my country wasn't even invaded by the British Empire, if you can believe it), but that part of the story really stood out to me, and the way you explained it so casually to your friend and he seems to have just understood makes me feel like I'm missing a very big piece of context.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your adventures and shenanigans with us, and it's okay if this is too complicated for right now.
The number of places Britain didn't try to colonise is so low that makes you a unicorn, I think. Congrats!
Happy to explain though, no worries. Part of it is the song itself, which is worth a listen to get the vibe; I do mean a bit of a hush fell over the moderately busy restaurant. It's got hella vibes.
But yes, hiraeth is a very important concept in Welsh. The best translation is 'homesickness', or maybe 'yearning', but it's more complex and nuanced than that. Sort of hard to explain. I've seen it used to describe the urge Welsh people get, when they've been away from Wales for too long, to reconnect; to journey back and climb a mountain and look down into the valley and let your soul heal. I've seen it described as the feeling of bone-deep belonging, the sense of coming home that some people feel who visit Wales for the first time, and find it speaks to them. The land reaching out for the soul, the mountains into the mind. That's hiraeth.
(There's a poem that turns up on Welsh tourist tea towels a lot, no idea where from, but it sums it up as: "To be born Welsh is to be born privileged. Not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but with music in your blood and poetry in your soul.")
I've also seen it described in internet memes as "longing for a home you can never return to", which in typical Anglophone fashion, is almost right while fundamentally misunderstanding and stripping away the most important part. Because it's the longing for a Wales we can never return to. The version of our past, without English occupation, that can never exist again. Thanks to Wales having had a fairly complex cultural and historical makeup, we were not unified as a single country until after English occupation; plenty of unified elements existed before that (uniting under a dragon to drive out the invading Saxons, for example), but not what in the modern day we'd understand as a country. But we ARE a country now; so it's a sort of shared dream. The country we could have been, should have been, can never be. The lost version of us.
That's hiraeth. It's all hiraeth. And it's all specifically Wales.
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The brain worms are ON ONE tonight folks I am thinking about Cody/Maul/Obi-Wan post order 66 living on tattooine together
like what if Maul sought out Obi-Wan's Commander shortly after O66 to get obsessive freaky closure about how Obes died (feels robbed of the kill, generally mentally ill about it, etc.) and is like "he is useless to me with all this fucking Imperial programing in the way" and does Force Stuff to break Cody's chip and what if Cody Wakes Up and goes "I can use this fucked up little guy to get to my General, who I believe survived, and then I'll just kill him easy peasy and live happily ever after with my husband" so he tells Maul that Obi-Wan is probably alive, actually, and cue a really violent road trip of them retracing Obi-Wan's steps in the hours after O66 via Imperial intel and hyper competence on both of their parts and
OH NO WHAT IF THEY START TO FALL IN LOVE like the forced proximity of it all...LISTEN TO ME. the intimacy of fighting alongside someone and having a functional partnership that's turned Dependency on both of your part's because you were both Traumatized in surprisingly similar ways (raised as a tool of violence for someone else's purpose, same guy actually!) and also have a similar goal via your mutual obsession with this one guy and actually, he's not that bad for a sith/clone, and by the time they get wise to Luke's existence and gun it for Tatooine, Maul is like "if I kill Kenobi this is going to upset Cody. That is Unideal. Can i live with not killing Kenobi?" and Cody is like "I cannot kill him afterall, I like him too much, how the FUCK am I going to explain this to Obi let alone any of the mind control & sorry i tried to kill you shit"
and what if Obi-Wan kept Luke because Reasons and is just so goddamn thankful for some extra childcare help (Luke's in his terrible 2s and he's force sensitive -- Obi's more sleep deprived than he ever was during the clone wars) that he really doesn't give a shit at all that it's his ex that tried to kill him for some mystery reason and motherfucking Maul on his doorstep. help is help 🙏 and they bang and stuff of course okay I'm only human
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