Hiraeth: How Welsh Navigate Feelings of Longing and Belonging
It’s just your typical nine-to-five day. You’re feeling a bit tired seeing your worksheet so you go to the office’s cafeteria to buy a nice brew of coffee. While enjoying your drink, you scroll your social media, maybe Instagram or TikTok or X, and see an old friend’s post of high school days accompanied by all those throwback-related hashtags. That post suddenly jolts your mind with memorabilia.
Since you’re now working in another country or city, getting home is a rare luxury and every time you do that, you notice different things about your hometown. That store where you used to buy toys is now closed and replaced with another kind of store, there are new roads, or that kind elderly lady next door has sadly passed away. With that in mind, you realize that you could never go back to the same old nice days as seen in your friend’s post.
Have you ever feeling that way, when you long for something that has passed and is probably impossible to live just the same again? Well, in English we simply call this emotion nostalgic. In Welsh however there is a word called hiraeth that promises to show a much deeper meaning to such sentiment.
What is hiraeth?
Hiraeth comes from hir which means long and aeth which means sorrow or grief. It’s described as a longing for a person or time or place one can’t go back to, sort of like unattainable longing. Some even describe it as longing for something that never was.
Wait! How exactly do you long for something that never was? One not so ideal albeit not bad example comes from @sparrow.and.wilde who posted an Instagram reel associating hiraeth with how fantasy novel readers long to live in their (not real) favorite fantasy universe. Typical Gen Z answer, but not without a point.
A more serious example is that when someone long to experience a culture that has long vanished. Say an Italian who really miss how life was in the Roman Empire without ever experiencing being a Roman.
To this day, hiraeth still hasn’t found its single-word equivalent in English. So, if we want to understand its meaning the best solution would be to ask the Welsh people themselves. In his article, David Lloyd did just that and here below are some of the feelings of hiraeth as described by the Welsh:
“For me it is a deep feeling of longing and loss: for home, for times gone, perhaps for memories that never were such as summers always being hot or Christmases always being happy in the past. Hiraeth gives me a sense of the irretrievable and the irreversible: the poignancy that is encapsulated in ‘once upon a time’ or ‘once upon a place’ — time passes and moments can never be lived again.” — Jane Fraser, the author of Advent and The South Westerlies
“My relationship with hiraeth is complicated by the fact that I am Welsh by choice, not by birth. However, it is only since moving to Wales that I find myself experiencing a sense of being incomplete when I am away from home and for me, that’s what hiraeth is.” — Carole Hailey, the author of The Silence Project
“l get emotional when people pronounce my name properly. When l went to Carmarthen to give birth to my son, having my name called out properly, matter-of-factly, as no big deal, made me realize how much l miss being with ‘my tribe.’ Just a small thing. Yet I realized its huge to me.” — Sioned-Mair Richards, former Lord Mayor of Sheffield
“With my profession I am so lucky to get to travel and see the world but in the words of the famous Welsh song Cartref ‘does unman yn debyg I gartref’ (there is no place like home).” — Aled Hall, an opera singer
To sum it up, you can say that hiraeth takes elements of nostalgia, homesickness, and the sense of belonging and longing. History even suggests that hiraeth could take the sense of belonging to a whole different level. How so?
How hiraeth kept Wales and its people intact
Back in the 19th century, the Welsh identity was under attack by British rule. The Welsh people were described to be immoral, ignorant, and held back by an antiquated language. Following this attack, large numbers of Welsh emigrants fled to Americas, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and many other destinations. Yet, fear wasn’t the drive behind the exodus. It was hiraeth.
Hiraeth had made the Welsh’s sense of belonging so strong that they left their homeland in order to preserve their culture and language, not out of fear of oppression. Enclaves of Welsh population were soon formed in various parts of the world with Y Wladfa (meaning “The Colony” in Welsh) in the Chubut region of Patagonia, Argentine being the most popular.
Later, it was hiraeth too that drove the Welsh people to long for their ancestral home and go back in between 1870 and 1914. Around 40% of the original emigrants came back from exile, a number much larger than the rest of UK back then. Thus, despite carrying the sense of grief and loss for something long gone, hiraeth has proven itself to be a key to cultural survival.
So, what’s to learn?
Now that we’ve seen what hiraeth is, well, for us non-Welsh aka the rest of the world, what is then to learn? Yes, hiraeth may still largely unfamiliar outside of Welsh and its tight knot with Welsh’s culture and history makes it sounded Welsh-excusive, but there are indeed some insights to take.
Firstly, for countries shown in the graphic below, hiraeth could be an inspiration on tackling the issue of endangered language. Hiraeth saved the Welsh language after all, so perhaps replicating the same intimate sense of belonging could be the key in preserving endangered languages.
Secondly, for each of us, nurturing such feeling could be just what we need to keep going. Having a place or person or memory to long for or belong to helps us telling ourselves that there are still things worth living for. Even if sometimes those things are unattainable, who knows, maybe by keeping them close to hearts then we can one day recreate them but in better tones.
So, the next time you see your old friend posting nostalgic photos, don’t you think maybe it’s the perfect chance for a catch-up?
Read also: Charting Progress: A Look at Gender Equality in Indonesia Today
References
Crossley-Baxter, L. (2021). The untranslatable word that connects Wales. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210214-the-welsh-word-you-cant-translate
Jones, P. A. (2019). Hiraeth. https://www.haggardhawks.com/post/hiraeth
Lloyd, D. (2023). Memoir: Hiraeth — Myth, Memory, Magic. https://nation.cymru/culture/memoir-hiraeth-myth-memory-magic/
