Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/349

 Reviews. 331

allusions to legends of these early tribes or gods, evidently familiar at the time the later stories were penned, but now altogether lost. The fact that it is the remains of this very remote cycle that are found in Wales, and not those of the later and very popular Cuchulainn cycle, is certainly a strong argument for the belief that at a very early period the Gael of Ireland and the Goidel of Wales were one undivided race. For had the intermixture been merely one of settlement in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries from Ireland, it is not to be doubted that the later cycle would have been the one to establish itself in Welsh Legend, whereas allusions to Cuchulainn in Welsh literature are extremely rare. The Irish began to euhemerise the Tuatha De Danann cycle as early as the tenth century. Therefore the Welsh stories, which treat them still in their mythological aspect, must certainly be older. Mr. John does not consider them, as we understand, to be purely Goidelic tales at all, but to belong to a common Celtic mythology, which Goidel and Brython shared in common. He says : " We shall therefore treat the four branches of the Mabinogi as the degraded Brythonic development of early Celtic myth- roots, owing their deeper resemblances to Irish tales to original community of myth, and their more super- ficial resemblances to late influence from Irish sources," thus try- ing to combine the opposing theories of Professor Rhys and Dr. Kuno Meyer.

With his argument against the late borrowing of the tales from Ireland we cordially agree. They could not have been so borrowed in their entirety; but we do not see that his explanation throws any fresh light upon, or in any way militates against, the theory of a common Goidelic, as distinct from a Brythonic, origin. For if all the tales spring fron] one common Celtic origin, why have we not in Ireland a large number of tales resembling the other portions of Welsh romance ? Mr. John says : " Are we to sup- pose that the whole jealous bardic system of Wales existed for the sole purpose of retailing exotic Irish legend ? " Certainly not, but that they should retail Goidelic legends in those parts of the country in which Goidelic traditions and races lingered and were reinforced by later immigrations, is as natural as that they should have recited Brythonic tales in the more purely Welsh districts. The tales that we have are, in any case, mere specimens of a body of romance of which much has been lost to us.