Thursday, June 6, 2013

By Nathan Bevan New York perfume-makers create new scent after sniffing out a slice of Welsh literary history



It's one of the earliest surviving Welsh poems, and tells of a small band of Celtic warriors who met their end at the hands of Anglo-Saxon hordes.

But while Y Gododdin’s grisly images of slashing broadswords and ravens pecking at the dead might seem a shoo-in for a Hollywood script, the odds against them inspiring a fragrance seem as overwhelming as those faced by the doomed army of whose heroism it sang.

Yet that hasn’t stopped hip New York-based perfume designers DS & Durga using the ancient manuscript as the basis for their latest scent – Bitter Rose, Broken Spear.

“All our fragrances start out with me researching something I find interesting and I’ve always been a bit of a history nut,” says David Seth Moltz, a Brooklyn musician whose olfactory cottage industry – set up with his architect wife Kavi in 2007 – has featured in the pages of such global style bibles as GQ and Esquire.

“I’d been reading The Wanderings of Oisin by WB Yeats and its mention of mystical places like Avalon made me want to find out more.

“So I jumped in at the deep end and got my hands on lots of old texts, but it was Y Gododdin, which is from the Book of Aneirin, which just floored me with its talk of these tough ignoble guys who got utterly annihilated in one almighty battle.

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