Welsh Poem Bowl: popular 'Taliesin - The Spirit of Birch' (2)

Welsh Poem Bowl: "Taliesin - The Spirit of Birch" (2)

Size: 8" x 4"x 2" (20.5cm x10cm x 5cm)

A hand-carved bowl of nicely coloured birch wood.

The base retains few areas of bark.

A lovely, tactile object that has a lovely rich feel and a lovely shape to sit in the hand.

Taliesin is the quintessential bardic poet of the British (Welsh) Tradition.
Probably alive during the 5th c. AD, he became the role-model and inspiration of many later bards and poets.
His works are all in Early Medieval Welsh, and have a characteristic simplicity that hides a profound complexity of imagery and meaning.

For this particular bowl, I took a couple of lines from a poem known as "The Battle of the Trees", a long and very enigmatic piece.

The Welsh text is:

A'N DEILAS BLAEN BEDW
A'N DATWRITH DATEDW

which can retranslated as:

The top of the birch puts forth leaves for us.
It's vigour reinforces us"

The decoration of the spiral curvilinear designs represents the flowing, releasing and inspiring energy of the Birch Tree.

The design on the inner bowl can be interpreted in a variety of ways:
-it is the flow of sweet birch sap, of thought, of ideas, as they moves through time and space.

This unique bardic bowl has a lot more going on beneath the surface than at first appears:
as well as acting as a connection to the bardic and druidic streams of British ancestral traditions it connects us with the words of Taliesin and via him to a specific doorway to a multi-level reality beyond the mundane, (known to the Welsh as 'Annwfn' - The deep world within the world).


As a working piece of magical equipment, this little bowl can be used as a way to contact the energy of the Birch Tree Spirit, linked with beginnings, nurture, birth and death.


The Welsh language is one of the oldest languages of the British Isles, a variant of Celtic once spoken throughout lowland Britain. It maintains the Celtic love of interwoven sounds and complex rhythmic structures in its traditional verse forms, and is full of perceptive and inventive descriptions of the natural world. After centuries of suppression, Welsh is being actively promoted in schools and work places in Wales. Language shapes thought and world-view, it holds a people's identity, history and culture. All ancient languages, whether understood or not, carry the voices of our ancestors with them and acknowledge our unbroken popular connection to the past.

This piece can be treated as a sculpture, or as a meditation piece to be held and turned over in the hands, considering the words, or letting them wash over the quiet mind.