Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Rhŷs, John
RHŶS, Sir JOHN (1840–1915), Celtic scholar, was born at Aber Ceirio Fach, Cardiganshire, 21 June 1840, the eldest son of Hugh Rhŷs, yeoman farmer of Ponterwyd, Cardiganshire, by his wife, Jane Mason, who, according to family tradition, was of Scottish extraction. John Rhŷs received his elementary education at Brynhwyth (as he insisted on writing the name), Pant-y-ffynon, and at the British school at Penllwyn, near Aberystwyth. After a course of study at the Bangor Normal College he was appointed master of a school at Rhos-y-bòl in Anglesey. In 1865 he was introduced by Chancellor James Williams, of Llanfairynghornwy, Anglesey, to Dr. Charles Williams, principal of Jesus College, Oxford, who, after a brief oral examination, offered him an exhibition at that college on the spot. Rhŷs went up to Oxford in the same year, obtained a second class in classical moderations in 1867, and a first class in literae humaniores in 1869. Towards the end of the latter year he was elected to a fellowship at Merton College.
Visits to French and German universities in the long vacations of 1868 and 1869, and again in 1870–1871 when he matriculated at Leipzig and attended the lectures of, among others, Georg Curtius and August Leskien, turned Rhŷs's attention definitely towards linguistic research. He contributed to the first volume of the Revue Celtique (1870), and in the course of the following six years, during which he was inspector of schools for the counties of Flint and Denbigh, published a number of articles on Celtic grammar in the same journal. A course of lectures delivered at Aberystwyth in 1874, published later under the title Lectures on Welsh Philology (1877), established his reputation as a Celtic scholar of the first rank; and when the Jesus professorship of Celtic was founded at Oxford in 1877 he was elected first professor. At the same time he was made an honorary fellow of Jesus College, of which he became fellow and bursar in 1881. He filled the office of bursar till 1895, when he was elected principal of the college in succession to Dr. Hugo Harper.
Rhŷs was, first and foremost, a student, and although he served as member of the hebdomadal council from 1906 to 1911, it was clear that the administrative side of academic life had little attraction for him. On the other hand, he was for forty years an unwearied worker in the cause of educational and social advancement. Wales, in particular, owes him an inestimable debt. He served on Lord Aberdare's departmental committee on Welsh education (1881), and was secretary to Sir John Bridge's commission on the tithe agitation in Wales (1887) and to the royal commission on Sunday closing in Wales (1889). He was also a member of the royal commission on land tenure in Wales (1893), of the royal commission on university education in Ireland (1901), of Sir Thomas Raleigh's commission on the Welsh university and colleges (1907), of Chief Baron Palles's commission for a national university of Ireland (1908); and at the time of his death (1915) he was chairman of the royal commission on ancient monuments in Wales and Monmouthshire. In recognition of his public services Rhŷs was knighted in 1907, and in 1911 made a privy councillor. He received the honorary degree of LL.D. from the university of Edinburgh in 1893, and that of D.Litt. from the university of Wales in 1902.
As a scholar, Rhŷs combined with great industry and learning a singularly active, reconstructive imagination. Where a more cautious man would have decided that the data were insufficient he often preferred to suggest a series of alternative theories, sometimes without making it clear that he was presenting in each of them not something intended to be a definitive interpretation of the facts, but simply a suggestion which appeared to deserve consideration even if it should later have to be withdrawn. His researches took him into many fields. Beginning as a grammarian, he resumed and continued his linguistic and epigraphic investigations in The Outlines of the Phonology of Manx Gaelic (1894), in a series of papers read to the British Academy, of which he became a fellow in 1903, in The Celtic Inscriptions of France and Italy (1906), Notes on the Coligny Calendar together with an Edition of the Reconstructed Calendar with a supplement, The Reconstruction of the Coligny Calendar (1910), The Celtic Inscriptions of Gaul: Additions and Corrections (1911), The Celtic Inscriptions of Cisalpine Gaul (1913), and Gleanings in the Italian Field of Celtic Epigraphy (1914). His historical works include Celtic Britain (1879, 2nd ed. 1884, 3rd ed. 1904), Studies in Early Irish History in the Proceedings of the British Academy (1903), The Welsh People (with D. Brynmor-Jones, 1900), Celtae and Galli in Proceedings of the British Academy (1905). To the literature of the history of religion, archaeology, ethnology, and folk-lore he contributed his Hibbert lectures, On the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (1888), his presidential address to the anthropological section of the British Association (1900), his Rhind lectures at Edinburgh on The Early Ethnology of the British Isles (1889), Studies on the Arthurian Legend (1891), Celtic Folk-lore: Welsh and Manx (2 vols., 1901), together with numerous articles in the publications of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion. Almost his only excursion into the field of literary research is represented by The Englyn: The Origin of the Welsh Englyn and the Kindred Metres (vol. xviii of the Cymmrodor, 1905). He was associated with J. Gwenogvryn Evans in the publication of the first three volumes of the series of Old Welsh Texts.
Rhŷs died at the Lodgings, Jesus College, 17 December 1915, and was buried in Holywell cemetery, Oxford. There is a portrait of him by S. J. Solomon, R.A., in the hall of Jesus College (Royal Academy Pictures, 1915). He married in 1872 Elspeth (died 1911), daughter of John Hughes-Davies, of Llanberis, Carnarvonshire, by whom he had two daughters.
[Memoirs in Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1916; Jesus College Magazine, June 1919; private information. See also Proceedings of the British Academy, 1925.]