Posted April 30, 2004.

Rare Manuscript Returns to Wales

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth purchased an 18th-century Welsh manuscript March 23 through an auction house in Los Angeles, but curators are curious as to how the rare artifact got to North America. The previous owner wishes to remain anonymous and the auction house cannot divulge his or her identity.

Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan, head of the library’s manuscripts unit, told BBC News April 29 that its recent history was a complete mystery. “The obvious theory would be that a Welsh emigrant going to America took it,” she said. “We had no idea it was there.”

The library announced that the document fills a gap in Welsh manuscript history. A transcript of a version of Brut y Tywysogion, a 12th-century chronicle of Welsh rulers by Caradoc of Llancarvan, it was probably based on a copy made around 1716 by the influential Welsh collector James Davies and is possibly identical to one held by the library of the Cymmrodorion Society in London in the 1820s.

The manuscript will be on display for a few weeks at the National Library, after which its provenance will be investigated. “We hope that when we have the peace and quiet to catalog it, some of its secrets will be revealed,” Lloyd Morgan told BBC News.

Posted April 30, 2004.