Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/132

112 corruption of the original cherdorion (bards) into Idewon (Jews) and translates "from contesting with the bards," thus giving the support of the twelfth-century poem to the statement of the prose tale only known to us from a sixteenth century MS.

Tantalising in the extreme are Dr. Evans' fragments of historical commentary upon those enigmatical poems the Avalleneu and the Hoianau. It may be noted that, whereas Skene says Hoianau may be translated "Auscultations," which has a fearsome and bardic look, Dr. Evans renders the refrain Hoian o Barchellan by "Hush-a-bye Piggie" (Eiapopeia Schweinchen, in Dr. Stern's German rendering). The poem is explained as being an esoteric account of a number of events in the history of Wales ranging from 1135 to 1215, except one verse referring to the year 1055. Dr. Evans notes that the poem does not conform to the chronological sequence of events, and one can only say that, if his interpretation is correct, the Welsh poet shows amazing skill in making his allusions as obscure and unintelligible as possible. There are very few men living competent to criticise this theory, but I would put this question:—We possess the authentic poems of a number of bards dating from the first third of the 12th to the end of the 13th century and avowedly referring to contemporary events. Do we find in these that mode of ultra far-fetched allusiveness which Dr. Evans postulates in the case of the Hoianau? Finally it should be noted that, if the interpretation be correct, the writing of the Black Book must be brought down to after 1215.

Dr. Evans' paraphrase of the Llywarch Hen poem on winter (Skene xxxi., vol. i., p. 321) may perhaps be reproached with special pleading. The poem contains a number of most vigorous and picturesque "impressions" of winter, curiously akin in form and tone to the nature-poetry in the Ossianic cycle, but the effect, in translation at least, is weakened by the interspersing of gnomic refrains, and by a literary device which I can only compare with the Malay pantoum: two lines of thought or description, partly analogous and partly contrasting, are intertwined. What Dr. Evans has done is to isolate the one strand,—that picturing the evils of the winter season,—and to present it as a whole. The effect produced, on me at least,