#waling

[one-time-i-dreamt]

My mom and I were leaving the movie theater and as we were pulling out of the parking lot, I saw my friend walking down the road. I wanted to say hi to her but as I rolled down my window, my mom hit her with the car and kept driving. I have never felt so mortified in my life.

#dream #mom #mother #family #movie theater #theater #parking lot #car #driving #friend #waling #hit and run

[dansnaturepictures]

27th March 2024: Beautiful trees in the nice morning sun and sky this evening, phone photo of red deadnettle in Winchester this evening and Goldeneye at RSPB Radipole Lake in January.

Today it was great to see and hear the Great Crested Grebes and chicks, Moorhen, a Treecreeper and Jackdaws flying to roost at Lakeside Country Park on a brief look this evening, Blackcap, Chiffchaff, Song Thrush and Robin at Winnall Moors at lunch time and loads of bluebells and daffodils in Winchester.

#daffodils #bluebells #red deadnettle #goldeneye #sky #trees #blossom #green #photography #radipole lake #duck #january #march #spring #winter #outside #outdoors #waling #2024 #happy #wednesday #jackdaw #europe #hampshire

[unaciertamirada]

La playa . . . #waling #beach #dog #doggy #sea #seascape #sealife #mediterranean #santapola #summerdreams #vacation #travel #travelblogger (en Santa Pola) https://www.instagram.com/p/CjmsMsJDA3g/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#waling #beach #dog #doggy #sea #seascape #sealife #mediterranean #santapola #summerdreams #vacation #travel #travelblogger

[tinogiehd]

Emmy is going to have the best life ever srs srs she is going to have so much love given to her srs -🌻

#WALING #aya.bookclub #aya asks #🌻

[cincinnatiburgoo]

I can’t stop laughing at this 🤣😂🤣

#gos2 #michael sheen #wales #azirasheen #aziraphel #xitter

[tsotc]

fucking obsessed with the uni town i live in

#the char is a lifesize cardboard cutout from what we could see from the ground. obsessed #APPARENTLY the people who im stranded on on a road trip rn know who owns char. hes handmade #edit: the owner has been in contact :D #ALSO YES THIS IS IN WALES. IM WELSH. i saw him again on my snack run to spar at ~2:30 am and it made me smile. hi char

[celestial-kestrel]

It's that time of year again where Mari Lwyd starts to be talked about and shared around and an INCREDIBLY misleading post gets shared a lot. As someone who grew up with Mari Lwyd I wanted to clear some things up.

Also hello, if you are unaware who Mari Lwyd is. This is about the Welsh tradition of the horse skull who visits houses during the Christmas to New Years period in Wales asking for alcohol.

First off and probably the most important one:

Mari Lwyd is not a cryptid!

I can not emphasise this enough. She. Is. Not. A. Cryptid. There is no story or mystery about a ghost or zombie horse roaming the Welsh valleys. She's not even supposed to be a ghost or a zombie. It's just a horse skull on a stick with a guy under a sheet. She's a hobbyhorse and a folk character used to tell Welsh stories and keep songs alive. When people spread the misinformation that she's a cryptid, it's the equivalent of saying Kermit the Frog is a cryptid.

She is actually only one character in a wider cast of characters who go door to door or, in more modern times, pub to pub. The cast of characters can change town to town and village to village but there are some common ones I see time and time again. The Leader, the Merryman, The Jester and The Lady are just some I see regularly. Punch and Judy used to be more popular a few years ago but I haven't seen them in a while as their tradition has mostly fallen out of popularity. In most cases, almost the whole cast will be played by men. Even the characters are considered and referred to as female. Though this again depends and varies by which group is partaking in the Mari Lwyd tradition.

This point also goes onto my second point,

Mari Lwyd does not rap.

I think this comes from a very common misunderstanding of what rap is vs spoken word. Rap is a very specific style of music originating from the African American communities of the USA and has it's own structure and motifs unique to it. It's a lot more complex than people give it credit for as a style of music and just flippantly assign anything similar to it as being rap. If someone is talking fast or reciting poetry, it is not rap. Or anything that is an exchange of words between two people is not a rap battle. Mari Lwyd does not do rap, actually something that gets left out of these posts is the fact Mari Lwyd does not even speak. It's actually the Leader, who does all the speaking and song based banter between the house/pub owner for entry. Mari Lwyd just clicks her mouth, bites people and bobs her head around.

I think Mari Lwyd is a really beautiful and unique part of Welsh culture. She's not actually as wildly celebrated as a lot of the posts make her out to be. Actually, I think most Welsh people themselves learn about Mari Lwyd through the internet as well. Her popularity is increasing thanks to the drive of local groups wanting to keep the traditions alive and a renewed desire to document Welsh traditions before they're gone. Which is why it's such a shame that she's turned into something she's not to earn horror points on the internet. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see the misunderstandings of the culture and the folk tradition. Mari Lwyd's origin is very hot debated as well as how long it's been going on for. But I think it's thanks to a lot of traditions like this that the Welsh language and our stories weren't lost forever. Welsh culture is recovering as is the language. But it's still in a very fragile place. I think it's why it's important to document and correct information when it's spread.

Anyway, if you want to see the tradition in action, here's a lovely video from the Cwmafan RFC going to one of the pubs for charity. It includes the song exchange with the pub owner for entry and the whole pub singing and joining in once Mari Lwyd and the rest are inside.

As well with another video from St Fagan's showcasing the more traditional and door to door form with the larger cast.

#Mari Lwyd #Wales #Welsh #Welsh culture #Youtube

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.

Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.

It is not in English.

Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.

...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.

So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.

I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.

Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.

And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.

I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.

#wales! #closed for cleaning on mondays #mari lwyd #tedious personal details

[illustratus]

Transept of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire by Joseph Mallord William Turner

#joseph mallord william turner #jmw turner #art #tintern abbey #ruins #architecture #transept #monmouthshire #wales #england #britain #ruin #nature #history #j.m.w. turner #romantic #romanticism

[animentality]

#twitter #wales #scotland #ireland #uk #uk politics

[trans-advice]

#uk centric #wales centric

[hiraeth-doux]

#kate middleton #princess of wales #british royal family #brf #British #princess diana #asking real questions #meme #funny memes #ruinedchildhood #lmao

[maureen2musings]

jacklodgephotography

#snowdonia #wales #roman bridge #forest #Lord of the Rings #fairy bridge #curators on tumblr

[angiethewitch]

I am absolutely disgusted to learn that crown owns our castles and the profits are sent to Westminster. Wales is struggling, our economy is struggling, our people are struggling, our health services are struggling, and that money could go to the betterment of our lives - instead it goes to England.

despite the fact we maintain the castles and land, we don't own them. they are in OUR country. ownership should belong to us, the people who built them. we maintain them. we work in them. theyre ours and we should be able to use the profits generated by them to help welsh people, not allow the money be funnelled into the monarchy.

the fact the crown owns so much of wales is such an outdated and medieval concept and has no place in modern society.

petition here:

please sign. I am disgusted.

#angie talks #wales #cymru #cymru am byth #annibyniaeth cymru #welsh independence

[geminicries]

THE TRAILER IS HERE !!!!!!!

#alex claremont diaz #bea rwrb #casey mcquiston #june claremont diaz #nora rwrb #pez okonjo #prince henry of wales #rwrb #rwrb alex #rwrb henry #red white and blue #red white and royal blue #henry rwrb #rwrb on prime #rwrb movie #rwrb film #rwrb trailer

[uroko]

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

#Phil Corless #curators on tumblr #north wales #nature #green #aesthetic #landscape