Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/255

Rh mainly philological; I greatly doubt whether they could be supported from the myth and custom-store of these races. As far as such portions of Brythonic (Welsh) literature are concerned, which are in any measure entitled to be called mythic, I should not be at all surprised if future research connected them directly with Gaelic (Irish) myth. The problems involved are of the utmost complexity. The literary documents on the Brythonic side fall, broadly speaking, into two classes, the one consisting of poems and tales, found only in Welsh, to which all manner of dates from the 6th to the 12th centuries have been assigned; the other, the Arthurian romance, comprising Welsh, Latin, and French tales and poems, the subject-matter of which is British. It is still disputed whether the heroic and mythic traditions of the first class belong to the North or the South of our island. The former theory, worked out independently by Mr. Skene and Mr. Stuart Glennie, is generally accepted. It assumes that the traditions preserved by the poems associated with the names of Aneurin, Merlin, and Taliessin originated in Southern Scotland and North-Western England, and were transplanted to Wales in the fifth and following centuries; in which case they would seem to be more worthy of attention from the investigator of Celtic origines than if they belonged to the South of England, which was longer subjected to Roman and Christian influence. How fundamentally this affects our usage of the early Welsh documents is evident. No recent contribution has been made towards the settlement of this question. It is to be hoped that Professor Rhys in his forthcoming work on Arthur will discuss the Welsh sources, the genuine pre-Christian character of which was assumed by him in the Hibbert Lectures.

The second class of documents, the Arthurian romance,