Cymraes sy’n fardd a hanesydd lleol yn derbyn Cymrodoriaeth er Anrhydedd

Ms Ruth Bidgood (Llun: Liz Flemming-Williams)

Mae’r Gymraes, Ruth Bidgood, sy’n fardd a hanesydd lleol, wedi cael ei hanrhydeddu â Chymrodoriaeth o Brifysgol Aberystwyth.

Yn wreiddiol o Flaendulais, Castell-nedd Port Talbot, bu’n ddisgybl yn ysgol ramadeg Port Talbot cyn mynd ymlaen i astudio Saesneg yng Ngholeg Sant Huw, Prifysgol Rhydychen.

Yn ystod yr Ail Ryfel Byd bu’n ‘Wren’ yng Ngwasanaeth Morol Brenhinol y Menywod, gan weithio’n bennaf fel codiwr yn Alexandria yn yr Aifft.

Wedi’r rhyfel, gweithiodd yn Llundain yn helpu i baratoi argraffiad newydd o’r Chambers's Encyclopaedia. 

Pan symudodd i Abergwesyn, ger Llanwrtyd ym Mhowys yn 1965, dechreuodd ysgrifennu ac ymchwilio i hanes lleol.

Yn ystod gyrfa ysgrifennu o bedwar degawd a mwy, mae wedi cyhoeddi tair cyfrol ar ddeg o farddoniaeth, gan ganfod ei hysbrydoliaeth yn hanes, tirwedd a bywyd cyfoes Canolbarth Cymru sy’n gartref iddi. Mae hefyd wedi cyhoeddi cyfrol o ryddiaith am Gymru, yn ogystal â nifer o erthyglau mewn cyfnodolion hanes sirol.

Cyflwynwyd Ruth Bidgood gan Dr Louise Marshall, Pennaeth yr Adran Saesneg ac Ysgrifennu Creadigol ym Mhrifysgol Aberystwyth, ar ddydd Mercher 17 Gorffennaf 2019. 

Nid oedd modd i Ms Bidgood fynychu’r seremoni, a mynychodd Mrs Mary MacGregor ar ei rhan.   

Mae’r cyflwyniad ar gael isod, yn yr iaith y’i traddodwyd.

Cyflwyno Ms Ruth Bidgood gan Dr Louise Marshall:

Ganghellor, Is-Ganghellor, graddedigion a chyfeillion. Pleser o’r mwyaf yw cyflwyno Ruth Bidgood yn gymrawd Prifysgol Aberystwyth.

Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, graduates and supporters.  It is an honour and a privilege to present Ruth Bidgood as a Fellow of Aberystwyth University.

Ruth Bidgood, with a publishing career that began during the late-1960s and continues apace to the present day, is widely regarded as one of Wales’s most significant English-language poets. A Fellow of the Welsh Academy, a poet, and a local historian, Ruth’s career is as varied as it is well-regarded.  In an interview for the magazine Planet in 1999 Ruth notes, ‘I’ve never written a word or a line that didn’t express the value I set on Wales as my country’. Indeed, Ruth’s oeuvre is not only written in Wales, but it is written of Wales. Ruth’s poetics of Welshness places her writing at the forefront of contemporary Welsh poetry in English and testifies to the relevance of a locative lyrical voice that continues to speak to her readers as clearly and precisely now as it did when it first emerged from the mid-Wales landscape forty-seven years ago.

Ruth Bidgood (née Jones) was born in Blaendulais, Glamorgan, in July 1922. When she was seven the family moved to Aberafan where her father served as the Vicar of St Mary’s Church. Having spent her childhood in South Wales, in 1940 she went up to St Hugh’s College Oxford where she read English. After graduating in 1943 Ruth served as a coder in the WRNS based in Alexandria. Then, at the end of the war, she moved to London and worked on a new edition of the Chambers Encyclopaedia.  Ruth moved to Surrey after marrying David Bidgood and it was here that she raised her family, two sons and a daughter. Throughout this period Ruth remained drawn to Wales and in 1964 she bought a house in the remote north Breconshire village of Abergwesyn, the place she was to make her home in 1974.

It was this return to Wales that unleashed Ruth’s literary creativity. She started writing poetry in 1965, inspired by the landscape, the people, and communities she discovered around her in mid-Wales. Ruth’s first poetry collection The Given Time was published in 1972. Since the mid-1960s Ruth has published an impressive range and variety of critically-acclaimed and prize-winning poetry. Her second collection, Not Without Homage, received a Welsh Arts Council award, and two of her more recent collections were short-listed for Welsh Book of the Year. Time Being, published in 2009, won the prestigious Roland Mathias Prize in 2011. Her most recent collection (her fourteenth full-length collection of poetry), Land-Music/Black Mountains, was published in 2016 and her next poetic project, Lights, is currently forthcoming with Cinnamon press. In addition to her outstanding contributions to poetry over the past five decades Ruth also has an impressive publication record in local history, most notably perhaps in her volume Parishes of the Buzzard (2000) which traces the history of the Abergwesyn area.

Ruth’s significance to the literary landscape of Wales is unequivocal. She is without doubt one of Wales’s most notable English-language poets, and her extensive work in the field of Anglophone Welsh letters has been long due the recognition that the award of this honorary fellowship represents. Indeed, not only has Ruth made a permanent mark on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry from Wales but she stands as an exceptional role model to us all, here today and for the generations to come after us. In her own words taken from the poem ‘All Souls’:

I am a latecomer, but offer

speech to the nameless, those

who are hardly a memory, those

whose words were always faint.

Ganghellor , mae’n bleser gen i gyflwyno Ruth Bidgood i chi yn Gymrawd. 

Chancellor, it is my absolute pleasure to present Ruth Bidgood to you as a Fellow of Aberystwyth University.

Anrhydeddau Prifysgol Aberystwyth 2019

Bydd Prifysgol Aberystwyth yn anrhydeddu naw o bobl yn ystod seremonïau graddio 2019, a gynhelir yng Nghanolfan Gelfyddydau’r Brifysgol rhwng dydd Mawrth 16 Gorffennaf a dydd Gwener 19 Gorffennaf.

Cyflwynir Cymrodoriaethau er Anrhydedd i unigolion sydd â chysylltiad ag Aberystwyth neu Gymru, ac sydd wedi gwneud cyfraniad eithriadol yn eu dewis faes.

Dyma Gymrodyr er Anrhydedd Prifysgol Aberystwyth 2019 (yn y drefn y’u cyflwynir):

• Alan Phillips, athro cerdd peripatetig wedi ymddeol a fu’n gweithio i Wasanaeth Cerdd Ceredigion am 35 mlynedd
• Yr Athro Frank N. Hogg OBE, Pennaeth sefydlol Coleg Llyfrgellyddiaeth Cymru
• Ruth Bidgood, bardd a hanesydd lleol
• Yr Athro R Geoff Richards, Cyfarwyddwr Sefydliad Ymchwil AO Davos (y Swisdir) – un o’r sefydliadau ymchwil sy’n arwain y byd ym maes orthopedeg
• Emyr Jenkins, Cyfarwyddwr cyntaf yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol a Phrif Weithredwr (wedi ymddeol) Cyngor Celfyddydau Cymru
• Yr Athro Virginia Gamba, arbenigwraig ym maes diarfogi a llunio polisi
• Ian Hopwood, a fu’n gweithio ym maes datblygu ers dros 40 mlynedd ym Mhencadlys UNICEF ac mewn aseiniadau maes yn Affrica, Asia, a Thaleithiau’r Gwlff Arabaidd
• Y Gwir Anrh Carwyn Jones AC, cyn-Brif Weinidog Cymru a chyn-Arweinydd y Blaid Lafur yng Nghymru 2009-18
• Judith Diment, sy’n amlwg yn fyd-eang yn yr ymgyrch i gael gwared ar bolio

Rhannu