Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/133

 Reviews. 113

is infinitely finer, but is it the effect of the Welsh poem ? Here again the difference between the two translations should be noted. The line which Skene renders " If one but just stands out ", (which makes no sense), is rendered by Dr. Evans " Scarce out can a man remain."

These few instances will induce some readers, I trust, to join with me in clamouring for a version, however plain and simple, of at least the oldest poems in the Black Book.

I must wind up this review with a note of strong dissent. Dr. Evans speaks of this "legacy of noble poetry reaching far back into the ages when as yet England's muse was uncradled." But, as he himself shows, a considerable proportion of the 39 numbers are definitely and avowedly compositions of the 12th or even early 13th century, and when the poems themselves are older the linguistic form in which they appear is largely that of the 12th century. Now at that date English poetry had been out of its cradle for some five hundred years ; centuries had passed, literally centuries., since it had produced masterpieces of a weight and scope and power to which no equal can be adduced from early Welsh poetry, rich though that is in matter which English cannot equal. It may be said — " Oh, but Anglo- Saxon is not English." It cannot be insisted too strongly that the few remains of 7th century and the plentiful remains of 8th and 9th century poetry in England are quite as much E?iglish as that portion of the poetry traditionally connected with Aneurin, Taliessin, and Llywarch Hen, and possibly dating back to the 8th and 7th centuries, is Welsh. What has hap- pened is that we possess the one literature in manuscripts of the loth-iith centuries, and the other in transcriptions of the 12th- 14th centuries. Thus the one is infinitely nearer the original form and differs in consequence more from that which the con- temporary language has assumed. If we can suppose away the Norman Conquest, the evolution of English speech and literature would have followed a normal course. The texts would have continued to be copied, and have been subjected to a steady process of modernisation both in language and subject- matter; the later texts would have survived, and the earlier disappeared. Instead of an Exeter Book written 1000-1050,