Page:Celtic Stories by Edward Thomas.djvu/132

 behind them. Matthew Arnold speaks of the mediaeval storyteller in the Mabinogion pillaging 'an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret'. This is clear in 'The Dream of Rhonabwy', when the storyteller says that 'no one knows the dream without a book, neither bard, nor gifted seer; because of the various colours that were upon the horses, and the many wondrous colours of the arms and of the panoply, and of the precious scarfs, and of the virtue-bearing stones'. It is clearer in the tale of Bran and in the Irish tales; the narrator is speaking of gods or demi-gods where he thinks he is speaking of men. He did not 'make up' these tales. Very little in any of them is 'made up', though they must have been modified to accord with changing taste and custom and belief and were told only for delight. These marvellous men of old time, as the mediaeval storyteller thought them, are now said to be the gods of much earlier pagan generations, changed by the wear and growth of centuries who knew them not as gods. The unravelling of these changes in order to trace the origin of the stories, or at least as early as possible a form of them, is a highly specialized scientific sport. The result of it is that Conachoor turns out to be 'doubtless not a man', but a Celtic Zeus; and his sister Dectora, the mother of Cohoolin, is in one place actually called a goddess. Cohoolin himself is discovered to be a 'sun-hero'; the blacksmith's dog is a sort of a Cerberus; and the gaebolg is not the impossible invention of an author's cruel ingenuity, but 'mythologically speaking, the direction of it from the water upwards would seem to indicate as its interpretation the appearance of the sun as seen from the Plain of Muirthemne (Moorhevna), when rising out of the sea to pierce with his rays the clouds above'. I am quoting from Professor Rhys' Hibbert Lectures. So Finn, again, is 'the counterpart of the Welsh god Gwyn, king of the fairies and the dead', and both of them are shown to have learnt wisdom by sucking their thumbs. The enormous Bran is a 'Celtic Janus'.

Many of these tales have been re-written by poets and others in our own time. I have kept them as nearly as possible in their mediaeval form.