Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/130

 1 1 o Reviews.

The Text of the Black Book of Carmarthen, with Intro- duction, Notes and Index. Reproduced and edited by J. GwENOGORYN EvANS. Pwllheli (Subscribers only), 1907. 8vo, pp. 214.

The form and vesture of this book first demand recognition from a reviewer who is a bookman. Conceived, composed, press- worked, entirely by the editor and one assistant, it represents one of the most remarkable typographical achievements in the four-century record of the printing-press. Dr. Evans has aimed at a typographical reproduction of the MS. with all its variations of hands, its wealth of varying initials, its abbreviations, glossings, marginalia, etc. This has involved the use of " fourteen distinct founts (of type) on different sized bodies," and other technical difficulties out of which the ordinary compositor would emerge a Rockefellar or a corpse. The result is a thing of beauty over which, in the "distant Aidenn" of good typographers, we can imagine Gutenberg and Jenson and the other earliest and still unsurpassed masters of the press weeping tears of joy.

The Welsh student who has this in hand is for all practical purposes on the same footing as the possessor of the oldest Welsh MS. Such a boon is only to be received with deep gratitude, and so I do receive it, and yet — yet I am not satisfied. For Dr. Evans is not only a craftsman with the heart to ensue and the brain and will to attain technical perfection, not only, even, the prince of Welsh palaeographers, but he is also one of the few who by race, and bent, and training are able effectively to advance the interpretation of old Welsh poetry. He had already produced a collotype facsimile of the Black Book ; thus the interests of the textualist, to whom no editorial reproduction can ever replace the MS. page, were provided for. Curious and beautiful masterpiece in its way as is this typographical repro- duction, I grudge the time and labour and cost spent upon it. I crave a simple text with modern Welsh and English renderings, tentative as the latter might be. This, I believe, would stir and stimulate the energies of many a student, Welsh, English, or foreign, would at once mark, decisively, a stage in our know- ledge of early Welsh literature, and would furnish a starting point