The title stops halfway through a sentence

Whisflo’s score says “Hela’r.” That is not quite a complete Welsh song title. In the documented repertory, the name is Hela’r Ysgyfarnog—“Hunting the Hare.” “Hela” supplies the idea of hunting, while ’r contracts the definite article; the phrase therefore leaves the hunted object unstated when it stops there.

Historical books spell the final word in several ways: Ysgyfarnog, ’Sgyfarnog, Sgwarnog, and Scwarnog. Changes in orthography, mutation, typesetting, and catalogue transcription account for much of that variation. The English gloss is remarkably stable: Hunting the Hare.

For that reason, this article preserves “Hela’r” when discussing the exact Whisflo label but uses “Hela’r Ysgyfarnog” for the fuller repertory item. It does not translate the short label as simply “The Hunt,” because that hides the missing grammatical object and the historical hare.

A Welsh tune with a cross-border paper trail

One early source is Edward Jones’s Musical and Poetical Relicks of the Welsh Bards, published in London in 1784. Jones, later harpist to the Prince of Wales, gathered music, verse, descriptions of instruments, and an account of Welsh bardic tradition. The surviving book includes a tune called “Hunting the Hare.”

The date matters, but so does the way the collection presents itself. Jones aimed to preserve and dignify Welsh musical heritage at a moment when print, antiquarian scholarship, and patronage were helping define national repertories. Inclusion in his book is strong evidence that the tune was being claimed and transmitted as Welsh by 1784. It does not automatically prove where every melodic phrase was first invented.

Music historian Celia Pendlebury adds a crucial complication. In her University of Sheffield study of dance-tune circulation, she identifies Jones’s “Hunting the Hare” as a concordance—a recognisably corresponding tune—with one printed by the London publishing family Thompson in 1777.

That seven-year earlier English print does not make the tune “not Welsh.” Music can cross publishers, dancing rooms, musicians’ manuscripts, military routes, theatres, and domestic instruments while becoming locally meaningful. But it does rule out the easy story that one unchanging, exclusively Welsh melody descended untouched from remote Celtic antiquity.

The best evidence-based description is therefore: an eighteenth-century British dance-tune family that entered the printed Welsh national repertory and became firmly identified with Wales.

Collectors did not merely freeze oral tradition

The National Library of Wales places Jones’s 1784 book within a longer history of Welsh music collecting. Such sources are invaluable, yet each was made by editors who selected, named, harmonised, translated, and marketed music.

Nicholas Bennett’s Alawon fy Ngwlad—The Lays of My Land—offers a vivid later example. Bennett collected more than 700 airs; D. Emlyn Evans selected and arranged 500 for two volumes published in 1896. The second volume prints “Hela’r Ysgyfarnog — Hunting the Hare” as a compact Allegro moderato harp or piano item.

That page confirms name and repertory presence. It is not a field recording. Harmony, keyboard layout, tempo word, and publication sequence all reflect editorial decisions. Printed “national music” is both preservation and presentation.

The scholarly cross-border comparison also asks readers to reconsider labels. A tune can be loved and cultivated in Wales without having originated inside a modern national boundary. Tradition is not weakened by travel; it is often made through travel, memory, and reuse.

From tune title to public song

By the late nineteenth century, the item was visible on major public stages. The programme for the 1887 National Eisteddfod of Wales in London lists “Hela’r ’Sgyfarnog.” This is direct evidence that the name circulated in formal Welsh cultural performance before the large 1890s song collections.

Cambrian Minstrelsie, edited and harmonised by Joseph Parry with Welsh and English words edited by David Rowlands, later printed “Hunting the Hare / Hela’r Scwarnog.” Its voice-and-piano form, tonic sol-fa, bilingual verses, background notes, and extra stanzas show a tune being prepared for singers and music readers, not merely instrumental dancers.

The text turns the title into a scene: dawn over the hills, a hunting horn, restless horses, excited hounds, villagers, and a chase across the landscape. Another text associated with Llew Tegid likewise calls people to the hunt but is not a literal translation of Rowlands’s version.

This distinction is essential. The tune and the various words have overlapping histories, not one indivisible birth. A printed verse from the 1890s should not be labelled “the ancient original Welsh lyric” merely because it fits an older melody.

An Elizabethan metre—and new words in 1906

An account published by the Welsh Folk-Song Society remembers the meeting at which the Society was formed in 1906. Maldwyn Evans of Bangor sang new words to “Hela’r Sgyfarnog.” The organisers initially thought their note-for-syllable pattern modern and improved, then learned that it matched the song’s “original Elizabethan metre.”

That anecdote reveals folk-song revival in action. Musicians were not only finding old objects; they were testing new words, analysing metre, arranging performances, and deciding what counted as national song. “Old” and “new” could coexist within the same item.

The evidence supports an old metrical association, but it does not license us to date every surviving lyric to Elizabeth I’s reign. The Society’s own wording calls the performed text new. Metre, melody, and lyric can each have different dates.

Later catalogues continued the layering. The New National Song Book indexes “Hunting the Hare = Hela’r ’sgyfarnog” with Llew Tegid, while other collections use different bilingual words. There is no single modern lyric that represents all performances.

Harp, concert hall, and composed afterlives

Welsh harp culture helped keep the title in view. John Thomas—Pencerdd Gwalia and harpist to Queen Victoria—made a voice-and-harps setting that remains in modern recordings. Such arrangements are not proof that Thomas composed the underlying traditional tune; they demonstrate how a repertory melody acquired cultivated concert forms.

The National Library of Wales holds another revealing afterlife. David Harries used “Hun Gwenllian” and “Hela’r ’Sgyfarnog” in his 1952 Introduction and Allegro Scherzoso for string quintet. The work won a composition prize at the 1952 National Eisteddfod in Aberystwyth and was performed at University College Wales in 1953. Harries revised it for orchestra in 1959.

In 2008, composer Stephen Goss placed “Hela’r ’Sgyfarnog” at the end of Six Welsh Folksongs, originally for two guitars. His programme note calls it a lively hunting song and explains that the arrangements remain uncluttered so the character of each melody stays audible.

These works show a traditional tune functioning as material rather than a museum object. Voice, harp, strings, guitars, flute, and piano can all redraw its motion while the title remains a point of recognition.

What about the Nantgarw dance?

A modern dance called Hela’r Sgwarnog belongs to the Nantgarw-style repertory documented by the Welsh Folk Dance Society. Current practice can use a hornpipe lilt, and the dance is performed with handkerchiefs.

That connection is real, but its chronology needs restraint. Modern accounts place the dance’s addition to the repertory in the late twentieth-century revival. They do not prove that Jones’s 1784 tune was always paired with precisely those figures, nor that one uninterrupted Morris custom reaches back to antiquity.

This is a useful example of living tradition. Revival dancers did not falsify the past by creating or reconstructing within an inherited style. They gave older materials a new social life. The mistake would be to erase their creative work and call every modern feature ancient.

The hunting subject also reads differently today. The historical verses enjoy speed, horns, horses, dogs, and communal excitement. A modern performer may treat that as cultural imagery without endorsing hare hunting. Music can preserve an activity’s language while audiences change their ethical relationship to it.

Playing the complete traditional melody

Whisflo now follows the documented traditional transcription in C major and 6/8. The expanded practice score has 24 bars: the four-bar A strain is played twice, followed by the eight-bar B strain twice. Its range is C4 to F5, using all seven natural notes with the slide released.

Count two dotted-quarter pulses per bar. The score’s 168 quarter-note BPM equals the source’s dotted-quarter pulse of 112. First learn bars 1–4 slowly: the octave leap C5–C4 and the following climb E4–F4–G4 define the tune far more clearly than the former three-note placeholder.

The B strain begins with rapid E5–D5–C5 cells and reaches F5 before returning to the A material. Practise its first four bars separately, then join the return. Preserve the 4+4+8+8 form and let the harp voice keep the lively hunting motion rounded rather than piercing.