Special guest post by Sarah Tanburn

 THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT OURSELVES: fables for a future Wales

By Sarah Tanburn 

‘We are the people and Cymru is our fortress.’

Children of the Land, my Welsh fantasy novella collection, closes with this line. The five tales are all set in the same not-far-off future Wales but with different characters. Along with monsters of land and sea and some battle-ready heroines, you will find climate change, geopolitics and world trade, and the independence of a small and ancient nation in the mix.

Why should a history blog, albeit with its wonderful focus on Wales, be interested in a bit of futuristic speculation? There is of course the Churchillian shibboleth that ‘those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.’ As I write, in February 2025, there is much to consider in that statement. Nonetheless, it was not my starting point.

In Wales, as artists, writers and activists, we tend to look backwards. History here is written in stone and blood. Castles bestride the landscape, instilling shock and awe across the centuries. Industrial detritus scatters the hills, from ancient slate quarries to a pit 200m deep outside Merthyr Tydfil where Ffos-y-fran mine finally stopped digging less than 18 months ago. The glorious, mythologised past haunts us too. The Mabinogion stories are reworked again and again, while Owain Glyndŵr and his successors are the heroes of many a novel – though we are yet to get a genuine biopic rooted in Wales. 

‘Ahead of her, light’

The Fortress is the fifth of the tales in the book. Its heroine, Mwyn, is abandoned in the tunnels below the Clwyd Mountains. She finds a cavern, and within it, minerals which will change everything.

In Children of the Land, I explore a future Wales. How, I wondered, do we take all that weight and imagine our children’s lives? I didn’t want to think about policy, nor am I a Welsh nationalist; at most I am indy-curious. I asked myself what might have become of those monsters of legend. The murderous hawks of Arthur’s Court or the afancs said to haunt several lakes. If the land itself took a part, what kind of country might we become?

The result is five novellas set in very specific places. In the 2020 lockdown, writing Bones and Fire, I sent a friend to stand in the field where Dai burns her corpses and check you cannot see Worm’s Head. Twyn Dysgwylfa, the place of seeing, where Adain releases the hawks of dust and wine, is just north of Trallong. Old Nine Eyes basks in the sun in Sôr Brook, which winds through the hills west of Carleon. 

Yet this imagined Cymru is isolationist and corrupt. The Aberystwyth government is happy to support almost any venture which will bring in hard currency but censors electronic correspondence. My heroines do business in ways which reveal the changing world: Korea is united but America has become simply geography. Desperate people in Senegal will pay handsomely for turtle meat harvested in the Menai Strait, and China owns power generated in English rivers.

The people of Cymru, like most of us, are content with life if left alone. The rich, the determined and the fluid, as they always have, will find a way to travel but in general people are content to stay where they are: it is a dangerous world out there. Children of the Land does not portray any idealised Celtic romance but neither is it straightforward dystopia.

‘I ignored her history as another contraction rippled through me’ 

Enfys, the narrator of The Flow, cannot afford to listen to an unqualified assistant as labour begins. We tend to ignore history in the making of anything new, yet value true experience as the crisis hits. 

These novellas, which I subtitled Fables for a Future Wales, aims to learn from the stories we tell about ourselves. Some of those are fantasies, possibly rooted in our natural world, our farming or mining past, but filled with magic and blood. Others, still gory, of course are part of the documented record. Any future is messy and compromised, but let it be both informed and imagined, brought into being with true intention together with our dreams.  

Children of the Land is available from all good bookshops or online. At this time, it is only published in print, and not electronically.