Chairing of the Bard

[2] A new bardic chair is specially designed and made for each eisteddfod and is awarded to the winning entrant in the competition for the "awdl", poetry written in a strict metre form known as cynghanedd.

[6] The National Eisteddfod ceremony is presided over by the Archdruid, who asks for a representative of judges to comment on the entries, before he announces the identity of the bard, using only the pen name that the winner has used to submit the work.

On 6 September 1917, when the ceremony of Chairing of the Bard took place at the National Eisteddfod, held at Birkenhead Park, England, the adjudicators announced that the winning entry had been submitted under the pseudonym Fleur de Lys.

After the trumpets had summoned the winner three times to stand forth from the audience, Archdruid Dyfed announced that he had been killed in action six weeks earlier.

The chair from that ceremony, which was made by a Belgian carpenter, Eugeen Vanfleteren (1880–1950), who had fled to Britain when Belgium was invaded and had settled in Birkenhead,[7] is on display at Yr Ysgwrn, the poet's former home.