Gareth Morgan

Gareth Morgan was born in Wales in 1928. He read classics at Oxford University, receiving the degree of D.Phil. in 1957. He then taught Greek and Latin at secondary schools in England until 1966, when he emigrated to the United States and became a Professor of Classics and Education at the University of Texas at Austin. In the early 1980s, he began to teach courses in Middle Welsh.

In April 1995, he wrote: "Eight times in the past twelve or so years I have taught an introductory course on Middle Welsh, with enrolments ranging between six and seventeen students. When I embarked on this, I was astonished to find that no elementary textbook existed. It was assumed that people with an interest in the subject would either be Welsh, who could be eased into the mediaeval language fairly simply, or high-powered linguistics students with considerable knowledge of other languages, who could work directly from academic grammars and dictionaries.

"In fact, my students did not come in these categories. A few were interested in linguistic studies. Many more were folklorists, historians, Arthurians. Some were of Welsh origin (but no Welsh language) who took the course as a sort of piety and tardy patriotism. To cope with this demand, I shaped my own material. This year I have been putting it into book form. . . . The book is 95% done."

Gareth Morgan taught Middle Welsh again in Spring 1996 but died that summer without completing the final 5% of Reading Middle Welsh or arranging for its publication. We are making it available online in the hope that it will be useful to others who love language as Gareth Morgan did.

If you find this online book useful, please consider donating what you would have paid for a printed version to the Gareth Morgan Memorial Endowed Excellence Fund, which provides financial assistance for summer language students. The address is:

Gareth Morgan Memorial Endowed Excellence Fund
Department of Classics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712
United States of America