Every once in a while I pick up a book that has been sitting on my shelf for a while and give it a go. Thus How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn fell into my lap. Frankly, it is superb and should be read.
To be fair, I know I saw the movie years ago, but I have very little memory of it. I still maintain you should watch a movie before you read the book. The book can ruin a movie for you, but the reverse is rarely true.
How Green Was My Valley is an interesting book for a lot of reasons. It is a coming of age story, and involves all of the struggles and challenges you’d expect there. It is the story of unions and social movements at the turn of the 20th century. It is the story of a family struggling to stay together in the face of the forces of the modern world. It is the story of religion and its place between the growing world of business and politics. And it is the story of creation and our responsibility to preserve it, and our short-sighted inability to do so. The valley was green, but now is not for lots of reasons (and you’ll have to read the book to find out what they are). If Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting had lived fifty years earlier, and was from a Welsh mining town, and wrote his memoirs, this might be the book we were left with.
But maybe most jarring to a modern reader is the language. This is written in Welsh dialect, but not in Welsh (in which case I wouldn’t be able to read it). Consider this line:
There is happy are hens.
Each of those words are simple English terms. The sentence has a couple of verbs and nouns, as good sentences do. There is nothing complex here, and no word is longer than five letters. And yet, this is a beast of a sentence. My kids are learning sentence diagramming, so I gave them this one and told them to go to work. There were not happy are kids.
But this might be a lesson on the importance of context in reading dialect. This is the whole paragraph (pg 132-133):
We kept good hens out in the back. Brown, and white, and some good layers that were black from my father’s sister’s. There is happy are hens. All day they peck for sweet bits in the ground, twice they come for corn, and in the mornings they shout the roof off to have you to come and see their eggs. And no trouble to anybody. I do like a little hen, indeed. A minder of her own business, always, and very dainty in her walk and ways.
In context the sentence is still an English muddle, but its meaning is clear enough. Some of this gets a bit much at times, but in general How Green Was My Valley is an excellent picture of the wonder and joy of the English language. Even when we are reading intonations and phrasings that are alien to us, we know well what is being said. I think there’s a good parallel here with how we experience the King James Bible being read aloud. We don’t speak that way any more, but there is a resonance that builds and wafts through us if we let the words work their magic.
Don’t take my word for it, give it a listen for yourself. There are lots of versions out there, but this one is well-reviewed (and I confess I’ve not listened to the whole thing…)
And I know, I know, it’s Saint Patrick’s Day and I’m posting about a Welsh book. I could say something about being an American and bad a geography. Or that it has green in the title and that’s close enough. The honest answer is I didn’t think about it until I had already scheduled the post. So do with that what you will.
Dr. Coyle Neal co-hosts the City of Man Podcast and is an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog). He teaches Political Science, Philosophy, and History in Southwest Missouri.
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