Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/328

Rh 316 CELTIC LITEKATUEE followed by a chronicle in continuation which, according to an entry in a later hand, was called Brut 1 wysogion, or Chronicle of the Princes. In some manuscripts there is also added a chronicle of Welsh events interspersed with Saxon ones, which is from this called the Brut y Saeson, or Chronicle of the Saxons ; in one manuscript this is attributed to Caradoc of Llancarvan. The chronicle of events from 444 to 954, which is contained in the British Museum manuscript of the History of Nennius, and two other chronicles, already mentioned, bringing events down to 1286 and 1288, have been printed together as the Annales Cambrice. These later chronicles ought not, as Mr Skene properly remarks, to have been incorporated with the older one, which alone possesses th-? special value of having been written before the Norman Conquest, and a century and a half before the Bruts. The Trakls. Besides the chronicles or Bruts there are no historical works properly so called in Welsh, unless we include the Triads, a curious kind of literature peculiar to Wales ; for although there are some Irish Triads they are imitations of the Welsh ones, an imitation which fortunately did not extend very far. The Triads are an arrangement of similar subjects, similar events, or things which might be associated in the mind, or be worthy of remembrance, &c., in series of three, e.g., &quot; Three ornaments of a hamlet a book, a teacher versed in song, and a smith in his smithy ;&quot; or &quot; Three punishments for theft in hand the first is imprisonment, the second is cutting off a limb, the third is hanging.&quot; This kind of composition appears to have come into use in the 12th century, the earliest specimen being the Triads of the Horses, which are in the Black Book. The Triads of Arthur and his warriors are perhaps as old as the 13th century. The Ked Book contains the Triads of the Island of Britain, which include those last men tioned, an enlarged edition of the Triads of the Horses, and many others. The Triads of Dyfnwal Moelmud, a supposed ancient king of Britain, are perhaps as old as the beginning of the 16th century. Welsh The poetic literature of the Welsh, which is very exten- poetry. sive,maybe conveniently divided into (1.) Poems attributed to poets who lived before the 12th century, and anonymous poems in the Black Book; and (2.) Poems written by or attributed to poets who lived in the 12th and succeed ing centuries. The claims of the Welsh to possess an ancient literature rests altogether on the poems of the first category, hence they have been the subject of much dis cussion. The grounds upon which such discussions have hitherto rested have altered considerably within the last few years. The labours of Zeuss and others who have worked at Celtic philology, and the discovery of specimens of Old Welsh in the Cambridge Codex of Juvencus, furnish us with much safer canons of criticism than existed in 1849, when even a learned Welshman, the late Mr Thomas Stephens, who did more than any one else to establish the claims of his country to a real literature, doubted the authenticity of a large number of the poems said to have been written by Taliessin, Aneurin, Merlin, and Llywarch Hen, who are supposed to have lived in the 5th century. Mr AV. F. Skene has done a very great service to A T elsh literature by the publication of the texts of those poems from the four principal manuscripts now known, the Black Book, the Book of Taliessin, the Book of Aneurin, and the Red Book. In addition to the texts Mr Skene has given translations of the poems specially made for him by the Rev. D. Silvan Evans and the Rev. Robert AVilliams, so that next to the Welsh Laws, and Stephens s Literature of the Kymry, his Four Ancient Books of Wales is the most important contribution to AVelsh literature yet made. If we judge by the test of language alone, the poems which we have included in our first category, and which are nearly all to be found in Mr Skene s book, are not in their present form older than the llth century. But while the form may be new the substance may be old, as we have already pointed out in the case of many Irish poems. It is probable that many of the poems attributed to Aneurin, and several of the mythological and religious poems, are only popular editions of much older poems, and further that the change effected in some of them may be so small that we have substantially the original poems. Others again have been so deeply modified that they may be regarded as new poems on an old theme. The following classification of those poems shows their Classifka- origin, and will help to render the few observations we tlou of can offer here more intelligible. older WeMi 1. Poems referring to events in Romanized Britain, or poems, to the east frontier of AVales. 2 Poems referring to events on the Mercian frontier and in South Cumbria. 3. Poems referring to personages and events connected with the Givyddd or Goidelic occupation of Wales and Cornwall. 4. Poems referring to the Gwyr y Goyled, or Men of the North. 5. Poems relating to or attributed to Taliessin of a general character. 6. Proverbial poetry attributed to Llywarch Hen. 7. Poems attributed to poets between the 7th and llth centuries. 8. Anonymous religious poems in the Black Book. 9. Poems referring to personages and events of AVelsh history in the 12th and subsequent centuries. The first class is represented by one poem in the Book of 2 aliessin, The Reconciliation of Llud the Less, which would be unintelligible but for a Mablnoyi to which we shall refer later. The poem has no mark of antiquity about it, and belongs to the 13th century. To the second class belong the Death Song of Jfrof, and other pieces in which that warrior is mentioned, and the Death Song of Uthyr Pendragon, all of which are in the Book of Taliessin, and in form and substance are not older than the 12th century. The poems of the third class are of considerable importance, but here we shall merely give the names of a few as examples, reserving what we have to say concerning them until we come to the Malinogion. The follow ing are good examples of the class The Death Song of Corroi, The Battle of Godeu, and The Chair of Ceridwen, from the Book of Taliessin ; the Freuldeu Anmvn ; Daromvy, and the poems relating to Gwydyon ap Don, from the Black Book, the Book of Taliessin, and the Red Book. The poems which belong to the fourth class are the most numerous and important. Among them may be mentioned first of all the Gododin poems, those relating to Urien Mheged, the war between the sons of Llyivarch Hen and Mwy Mawr Drcfydd, poems relating to the battle of Adderyd, as for instance the Avallmau, or Apple Trees, and poems relating to Cadwallauw and Cadwaladyr. AVe have already explained that y Goijled Extent to was that portion of Britain which lay between the AA alls of which Hadrian and Antoninus, and had been erected into the Ro- Britain vras , -, r, ,. . .,, ., Uomamzecl. man province of Valentia. As it was a loose term, it may have included all the independent British country north of the Ribble. This country, and especially that part of it forming the ancient diocese of Glasgow, was the cradle of the AA 7 elsh language and literature. It was the only part that could have been this. Here the question naturally suggests itself, to what extent was Britain Romanized 1 That it was not so to the extent usually supposed may bo shown in many ways. It is obvious that, if the southern Britons were as thoroughly Romanized as Gaul or Spain, the language of Cornwall should have been a