Ieuan ap Hywel Swrdwal (?1430 – ?1480) was a Welsh

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems ( oral or wri ...

, from

Norman Norman or Normans may refer to: Ethnic and cultural identity * The Normans, a people partly descended from Norse Vikings who settled in the territory of Normandy in France in the 10th and 11th centuries ** People or things connected with the Norm ...

stock. He composed primarily in Welsh, but was also responsible for the first known poem in the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...

written by a Welshman. His father Hywel Swrdwal was also a poet, and there are doubts as to whether a number of extant works should be attributed to the father or to the son. He is reputed to have composed a history of Wales, but this has not survived. The ''Hymn to the Virgin'' was written by Ieuan at

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

in about 1470 and uses a Welsh poetic form, the ''

awdl In Welsh poetry, an ''awdl'' () is a long poem in strict metre (i.e. ''cynghanedd''). Originally, an ''awdl'' could be a relatively short poem unified by its use of a single end-rhyme (the word is related to ''odl'', "rhyme"), using cynghanedd; ...

'', and

Welsh orthography Welsh orthography uses 29 letters (including eight digraphs) of the Latin script to write native Welsh words as well as established loanwords. The acute accent (), the grave accent (), the circumflex (, , or ) and the diaeresis mark () a ...

; for example: The poem consists of 96 lines in 13 stanzas. It is an address to Christ through the Virgin Mary. An alternative claim for the first poem in English written by a Welshman is made for

John Clanvowe Sir John Clanvowe (c. 1341 – 17 October 1391) was a Welsh diplomat, poet and chamber knight to Richard II. He was born to a Marcher family and was possibly of mixed Anglo-Welsh origin, holding lands that would lie in the present-day Radnorshi ...

's ''The Book of Cupid, God of Love'' or ''The Cuckoo and the Nightingale'', a long love poem based on ''

The Owl and the Nightingale ''The Owl and the Nightingale'' ( la, Altercatio inter filomenam et bubonem) is a twelfth- or thirteenth-century Middle English poem detailing a debate between an owl and a nightingale as overheard by the poem's narrator. It is the earliest exa ...

''.

References

Garlick, Raymond, and Roland Mathias. ''Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480–1990'' (Bridgend: Seren, 1995).

External links

Full text of the hymn
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ieuan Ap Hywel Swrdwal Welsh-language poets Anglo-Welsh poets Year of birth unknown Year of death unknown 15th-century Welsh poets