Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/329

Rh CELTIC LITERATURE 317 Romance dialect, and that of Brittany an allied one. Again, if the Welsh were a remnant of the Romanized Britons driven westward by the conquering Saxons, the Welsh language also should be a Romance dialect, oj its vocabulary shuuld contain a large intermixture of words borrowed from the Latin, and especially of words connected with law;, trades, &c. But this is not so. The fact is the population of Britain was not Romanized to any extent. In the towns the principal citizens no doubt spoke Latin, as they speak English in Calcutta and other large towns in India. A large British population in part bilingual gathered round the, cities and towns, as the Irish did about the Anglo- Nonnati towns of the Pale, and as the Letts, Esthonians, and Russians do about the German towns of the Russian Baltic provinces. We should also not forget that the legionaries in the 2d and 3d centuries were only Roman in name, being recruited from every part of the empire, an 1 consequently could not contribute to Romanizing the inhabitants among whom they were located. The peasantry continued British, but the nobility, no doubt, learned to speak Latin, but not for home use. When afterwards the Saxons on the east and the Irish on the west of what is now Wales displaced the ruling families, the Romanized part of the independent British population, hemmed in between the two hostile peoples, and with an ever- encroaching Saxon frontier on one side, gradually merged into the Celtic-speaking peasantry, and lost the use of the Latin tongue. This was not a state of things favourable for the development of a literature. In the north especially, between the Walls of Hadrian and Antoninus, in the province of Valentia, which never had Roman towns, only camps occu pied by legionaries, who for the most part probably spoke no Latin, the whole population must have remained essentially British after the withdrawal of Roman power. Here if anywhere the first germs of a British literature should show themselves, and accordingly tradition makes Taliessin, Aneurin, Llywarcli Hen, and Myrdin or Merlin, to whom most of the supposed ancient Welsh poems are attributed, natives of this region. Here also the actors in the events referred to in the poems lived, and the places where those events are supposed to have taken place are to be found. The greater part of this region, too, enjoyed substantial independence down to the end of the 9th century, with the exception of the interval from 655, when they were subjected to the kingdom of Northumbria by Oswy, after the defeat of Cadivallawn and Penda, to the battle of Dunnichen in 686, when Ecfrid, king of Northumbria, was defeated. From the 7th to the 9th century Cumbria, including under that nams all the British territory from the Ribble to the Clyde, was the principal theatre of British and Saxon conflict. The rise of the dynasty of Mailcun, who according to Welsh tradition was a de scendant of Cunedda, one of the Gwyddel or Goidelic Picts of the district called Guotodin, brought Wales into close connection with the Cumbrian kingdom, and prepared both North and South Wales for the reception of the northern traditions and the rise of a true Welsh literature. Whether the poets of Cumbria really wrote any of the poems which in a modified form have come down to us or not, there can be no doubt that a number of lays attributed to them lived in popular tradition, and that under the sudden burst of glory which the deeds of Cadwallawn called forth, and which ended in the disastrous defeat of C55, a British literature began to spring up, and was nourished by the hopes of a future resurrection under his son Cadwaladyr, whose death was disbelieved in for so long a time. These floating lays and traditions gradually gathered into North Wales, according as the nobility and bards sought refuge there from the advancing conquests of the Saxon kings in the north. The heroes of Cumbria became Welshmen, and the sites of the battles they fought were identified with places of similar name in Wales and England. When Hoivel JJda became king of all Wales, the legends of the north passed into South Wales, and like the legends of Oisin in Scotland, became so thoroughly identified with their new home, that they seem to have first originated there. Of all the poems attributed to the four ancient Welsh bards, the one which has most claim to be considered genuine, and the only one we can specially allude to here, is that known as y Gododin. As published by Mr Skene from the Book of Aneurin, it consists of 94 stanzas, and is both obscure and fragmentary. The latter character Mr Skene explains, and we think successfully, by supposing that it consists in reality of two distinct poems, referring to two events separated by a long interval of time. The first event is the battle of Cattraeth, the Bellum Miathorum of Adamnan, fought between the Britons and Scots under Aedan, king of Dalriada, and the pagan Saxons and their British subjects in Devyr and Bryneich or Deira and Bernicia, and the half-pagan Picts of Guotodin, a district corresponding to the northern part of the Lothians along the Firth of Forth. Cattraeth was the adjoining district on the Forth where the great Roman wall terminates at Carriden, the Fort of Eidinn. If this view be correct, and it is the best that has yet been proposed, the Mynydau g of the poem was Aedan Mac Gabran, and the battle the one fought in 596, of which Columcille prophesied that Aedan would be unfortunate but victorious, the misfortune being doubtless the loss of his four sons in the battle, one of whom was named Artur (Art). The second and later portion of the poem, Mr Skene thinks, refers to the battle of Strathcairinn, now Strathcarrou, in which Domnal Brec, king of the Dalriadic Scots of Alba, was slain, 642. In the brevity of the narrative, the care less boldness of the actors as they present themselves, the condensed energy of the action, and the fierce exulta tion of the slaughter, together with the recurring elegiac note, this poem (or poems if it be the work of two authors) has some of the highest epic qualities. The ideas and manners are in harmony with the age and country to which it is referred. The poems call ad the Gorchans, which are also found in the Book of Aneurin, and refer to the personages and events of the Gododin, possess many of the characteristics of that poem, and are probably the work of the same time, if not of the same poet. Still more celebrated than Aneurin, the reputed author of y Gododin, was Taliessin, a name which has been inter preted as &quot; Splendid Forehead,&quot; and has consequently been the subject of a good deal of mysticism. The number of poems in the Book of Taliessin supposed to have been written by him is considerable ; in language they are not older than the 12th century, though many of them may be what we have called in other cases popular editions of older poems. Several belong to the fourth class which we have been just considering; the poems which we would include in a special fifth class are those which have been made the subject of bardic speculation in con sequence of their generality and vagueness, such as the Fold of the Bards, Hostile Confederacy, Song to the Wind, Mead Song, Songs to Great and Little Worlds, Elegy of the Thousand Sons, Pleasant things of Taliessin. Many of these poems possess considerable merit, and even as the work of the 1 2th and 1 3th centuries might bear comparison with similar compositions in other European literatures of the period. The poems of the sixth class attributed to Llywarch Hen are in the Red Book, and are the work of some Tupper of the 14th century, too disinterestedly proud of his work to put his own name to it. They are curious They Gododin poems. Poems ascribed to Taliessin. Poems at tributed to Llywarch Illn.