In Search of Dic Aberdaron: An Inquiry into a Welsh Tramp with the Gift of Tongues

High on codeine and metaphysical speculation, Bill Rees conducts an idiosyncratic investigation into the life and times of the eccentric peripatetic scholar known as Dic Aberdaron. Richard Roberts Jones was born in 1779 on the Llŷn Peninsula and raised there in utmost poverty. He died penniless at St. Asaph in 1843, having dedicated his life to the study of languages. A life marked by chronic deprivation and intense intellectual endeavour. Biographies were later written, trying to explain the enigma of how an impoverished and unschooled man taught himself umpteen languages including Greek and Hebrew. Undoubtedly there was an element of romance about his story, which appealed to poets. Several attempted to capture the essence of his character. R.S. Thomas called him a ‘hedge poet, scholar by rush light,’ and the implied notion of a gypsy scholar was enough to quickly hook Bill Rees, a book dealer by trade. However, the search to find out more about Dic Aberdaron was a long business. It was important, Rees sensed, to link Dic Aberdaron’s life and times to landscape; to find an entry point into history. The book consequently begins on the Menai Strait where it also ends. By immersing himself in a disparate array of writers (ranging from William James to a PhD candidate) and travelling to places where Dic Aberdaron lived, a number of things became increasingly apparent to the author. The sheer poverty that dogged Dic Aberdaron all his life, the remarkable facility and love he had for learning languages, the contrasting attitudes in the people with whom he came into contact, close or otherwise. The author’s sporadic bouts of research reveal what is at heart a rather sad story. Life, as ever, more complex than myth. Even the commonly accepted year of Dic Aberdaron’s birth turns out to be wrong. He lived in tumultuous and changing times (Napoleonic war, the enclosure acts, industrialisation) alongside various competing creeds. Striving to make sense of the character’s enduring appeal, Rees appears, at times, as unbalanced as the subject of his obsession; revelling in the Romantic era’s collective cast of mind - a reverence for all that is mental.Born and raised by the sea, Dic Aberdaron lived most of his adult life on the margins of land and water, which, converted into metaphor, served as a potential insight into his linguistic obsessions. He put enormous effort into compiling a Welsh, Greek and Hebrew dictionary, tantalizingly mentioned in antiquarian travel guides, but which Rees despairingly fails to track down.