Williams who in 1937 had been imprisoned for his part in an act of arson at Penyberth in the Lleyn peninsula he edited

Williams, who in 1937 had been imprisoned for his part in an act of arson at Penyberth in the Lleyn peninsula, he edited a collection of his stories, Y Gaseg Ddu (“The Black Mare”, 1970), and wrote with affection about him.It was a source of great satisfaction to J. During the 1960s, when the Welsh Language Society began challenging the law in an attempt to secure official status for Welsh, he was fined for minor offences on several occasions and was often to be seen at its demonstrations, one of the senior figures in Welsh academic life who backed the robust but non-violent campaign.A friend of the veteran nationalist D.J. Lloyd, Studies in Pharaonic Religion and Society (1992).Griffiths strove to marry his classical interests with his commitment to the Welsh language by translating from Latin and Greek. A selection of his essays was published as Atlantis and Egypt in 1991 and his Triads and Trinity appeared in 1996.A full bibliography of his scholarly works, including his contributions to the journal of the Deutsches Arch?ogisches Institut and to the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, which he edited from 1970 to 1978, is found in the Festschrift edited by A.B.

His editions of Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (1970) and Apuleius of Madauros’ The Isis-Book (1975), the last book of The Golden Ass, are both magisterial and brought him a worldwide reputation among scholars in the field.He went on to write The Origins of Osiris and his Cult (1980) and The Divine Verdict: a study of divine judgement in the ancient religions (1991). He was editor of Y Ddraig Goch (“The Red Dragon”), the party’s newspaper, between 1948 and 1952, and wrote a number of political pamphlets in which he set out his belief in international co-operation.During his time at Swansea, where he was appointed Lecturer in the Classics Department in 1946 and given a personal Chair in 1973, he published several scholarly works, beginning with The Conflict of Horus and Seth (1960). Gwyn Griffiths himself left the ivory tower and entered “the thick of battle” on behalf of Plaid Cymru. He stood as the party’s candidate on two occasions: in the Gower constituency at the general election of 1959 and again in 1964. Here he tackled the question of whether the writer should be politically engaged, tracing it to Virgil and Martial, and taking in European writers like Moses Hess, Karel Capek and Rilke before examining the pressures on Welsh writers to address issues affecting the moral condition of the nation.J. Catullus rubs shoulders with Howell Harris, leader of the Methodist Revival in Wales, and Gwynfor Evans with Beethoven, while the references are to the Koran, Mithras, Toledo, Osiris, Wotan, Olympus, the Madonna degli Alpini, Hecate, Gentileschi, the Lorelei Rock, the Via Appia and, as if to strain the learning of his readers to the full, to Champollion – the founder of Egyptology who is credited with having been the first, in 1832, to decipher hieroglyphics.Such a gallimaufry of allusions, together with his fondness for a macaronic style, goes a long way to making Griffiths the Welsh counterpart of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid.The same astonishing multilingual range is to be found in his literary criticism, collected in the volume I Ganol y Frwydr (“Into the Thick of Battle”, 1970). His poems are sometimes in traditional forms, frequently the sonnet, but the language and metaphors he employed were often too provocative or too obscure for the reader used to the pretty lyrics of the Welsh bucolics.Patriotic and sometimes propagandist, they take Wales as their theme but in the wider context of the European and classical civilisation in which he was steeped.

His poems about Cairo, where he was Visiting Professor in 1968, reflect his profound regard for Egypt while his fifth book, perhaps his most accomplished, was largely written during a sabbatical year at All Souls College, Oxford.Even so, they range over a huge variety of subjects unconfined by time and place. Gwyn Griffiths, but many younger bloods, including the iconoclastic poet Bobi Jones, now himself an elder statesman of the literary scene, had their fling in the pages of Y Fflam It was here, too, that R.S. Thomas made his d?t as a Welsh prose-writer of great gravitas and nationalist fire.Griffiths’s own verse was published in five volumes: Yr Efengyl Dywyll (“The Dark Gospel”, 1944), the group symposium Cerddi Cadwgan (“Cadwgan Poems”, 1953), Ffroenau’r Ddraig (“The Dragon’s Nostrils”, 1961), Cerddi Cairo (“Cairo Poems”, 1969) and Cerddi’r Holl Eneidiau (“All Souls Poems”, 1981). Gruffydd, Professor of Welsh at Cardiff, a Labour man and editor of the influential journal Y Llenor (“The Man of Letters”), its main aim was to provide a new platform for younger writers who were politically engaged with Plaid Cymru.Some of the most effective grapeshot aimed at the grey eminence was the work of J. Launched partly in response to what Cadwgan thought were the reactionary views of W.J. Griffiths had been born, a son of the Baptist manse, at nearby Porth in 1911 and, after reading Classics at the universities of Cardiff, Liverpool and Oxford, had his first teaching job at his old grammar school.In Pentre he and his wife formed a literary circle known as Cadwgan, the name of a local chieftain after whom Moel Cadwgan, a hill above the town, had been named and which they also gave to their house in St Stephen’s Avenue; it was to become one of the most famous literary addresses in Wales. A scholar of Egyptology in her own right, she was for many years Keeper of Archaeology at Swansea Museum and Honorary Curator of the Wellcome Museum in the city.Their first home was at Pentre in the Rhondda Valley.

There was always a whiff of the exotic about him and he could be deadpan and offbeat in the acerbic things he had to say about his contemporaries.The German influence on him was reinforced when, in 1939, he married K? Bosse, a Jewish refugee, who shared not only his literary tastes, including the frank treatment of sexual topics, but also his professional interests. He was able, moreover, to pursue both with distinction and to move easily between the ancient world and the modern.He was unusual among Welsh intellectuals in that, despite his academic responsibilities, he preferred a Bohemian way of life that paid scant attention to the bearded orthodoxies and sometimes expressed itself in writing that owed more to the European avant-garde, including Kurt Schwitters, the collagiste and Dadaist, than to the conservative niceties of Welsh letters. But the Second World War intervened, and his service in Bomber Command aircrew was notable. After a full tour of operations in Lancasters, he came forward for a second full tour and was assigned this time to Mosquitos He won the DFC in 1944 Such moral fibre wins deep admiration But he almost never spoke of those years.