hiraeth

What it means

A Welsh nurse on a night off in a London flat hears a male voice choir through the wall. Nothing is wrong. Her mother is a phone call away and the valley she grew up in is still on the map. She sits down anyway. Hiraeth is that grief-shaped longing for a home, a person or a time that has gone, and it can arrive while the place itself still exists.

The Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, the historical dictionary of Welsh, gives its sense as grief or sadness after the lost or departed, then longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness and homesickness. The order matters. Hiraeth starts from loss: of the dead, of companions, of a country left behind. Wiktionary adds a later sense, longing for a romanticised ideal of Wales or Welsh culture.

In Welsh it is a masculine noun with two plurals, hiraethau and hiraethion. In English it is rare: Wiktionary labels it so, with a first English quotation from 1927.

Where it comes from

GPC analyses the word as hir, “long”, plus -aeth, a suffix that makes nouns. It also leaves a second reading open: the ending may be aeth, an old word GPC glosses as pain, woe, grief, sorrow and longing. Either way, length is built in. The word has relatives across the Celtic languages: Cornish hyreth, Breton hiraezh, and Old Irish sírecht, which GPC glosses as lack, sadness and longing.

GPC’s earliest citation is from the 13th-century Book of Aneirin: blwydyn hiraeth er gwyr gatraeth, a year of hiraeth for the men of Catraeth. A line by the poet Dafydd Benfras, dated 1244 in GPC’s entry for hir, puts both halves together: hiraeth made him draw hir anadleu, long breaths. William Salesbury’s 1547 Welsh-English dictionary glossed it with the English word longing.

How to use it

Mae hiraeth arna i am Aberystwyth. (I miss Aberystwyth; literally, hiraeth is on me for Aberystwyth.) Everyday spoken Welsh. The feeling sits on the person, a construction GPC records in the 1620 Welsh Bible.

Her letters from Toronto were cheerful and full of news, and every one of them was soaked in hiraeth. Literary English, where Wiktionary marks the borrowing as rare.

What it is not

Fernweh. The German word pulls toward places you have never been; Duden defines it as longing for distance and faraway countries. Hiraeth pulls back, toward places and people you had and lost. GPC quotes the 1588 Welsh Bible using it for exiles’ longing to return to their land (Jeremiah 22:27). Fernweh contains no return.

Sehnsucht. Duden defines Sehnsucht as painful desire for someone or something missed or far away, and in German it can attach to an imagined life with no past behind it. Hiraeth is anchored in something that was once present: a person who died, a house, a language heard in childhood. GPC’s 1753 citation spells this out as the grief one takes after parting with friends, or after a person who is dead.

Homesickness. GPC lists homesickness among the senses of hiraeth, but near the end of the list, after grief, sadness, longing and nostalgia. Homesickness usually ends when you get off the train. Hiraeth often survives the trip, because the home it wants includes people and years that are gone. The 1940 folk verse below calls it creulon, cruel.

In the wild

• Dafydd ap Gwilym, 14th century (GPC cites Thomas Parry’s 1952 edition): the poet carries hiraeth “dan fy mron”, under his breast, for fair summer weather.
• Hen Benillion, folk verses edited by T. H. Parry-Williams, 1940: “Hiraeth mawr, a hiraeth creulon, / Hiraeth sydd yn torri ‘nghalon” (great hiraeth and cruel hiraeth, hiraeth that is breaking my heart).
• Bryn Terfel, We’ll Keep a Welcome, Deutsche Grammophon, 2000: track 20 is the traditional song “Hiraeth (Longing)”.