Networks of Letters: Correspondence between Rhys, Stokes, and Bradshaw

Working with an archive of letters is very often like listening to one side of a telephone conversation and having to reconstruct the other. One way of listening to the other side is to use more than one archive. Such is the case with the correspondence of John Rhys: the Sir John Rhys Papers in the National Library of Wales (NLW) is an extremely interesting body of material but of necessity it largely consists of letters sent to him by others and it is often less easy to work out what he was saying to them. However, it is possible to triangulate these letters with correspondence surviving, or at least documented, in other archives so that we can hear both sides of several conversations and on occasions the three sides of a discussion. This is what this paper sets out to do. It is based on research not only on the Rhys papers, but also in the Henry Bradshaw archive in the Cambridge University Library (CUL), and on Whitley Stokes, and seeks to trace conversations on a number of topics relating to Old Welsh and Old Breton over a period of about twenty years from the late 1860s until Bradshaw’s death in 1886