Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/274

238 it satisfied the historical and psychological conditions of the case. It presupposed in Wales what we know existed in Ireland,—an order of men of letters with a settled hierarchical organisation and a definite programme of studies. In view of the clear statements of the Welsh Laws respecting the attributes and prerogatives of the bard, and of the close parallelism between Goidelic culture in Ireland and Brythonic culture in Wales, such a presupposition was inevitable. But a literary class comprising teachers and learners forcedly implies text-books (or their oral equivalents). Finally we have the illuminating parallel of Snorre's Edda. This, avowedly a text-book for apprentice bards or skalds, to use the Icelandic term, contains a series of prose narratives strikingly akin to the Four Branches, a schematic summary of the main features and chief incidents of the mythology.

Now, according to Dr. Evans, "no evidence has been produced in support of this view" of the term mabinog. For him it would be "more correct to say that any narrative which treats of early life is a mabinogi." But unfortunately the only narratives to which the term mabinogi is applied in Wales are the Four Branches series, which, in no sense of the word, treats of "early life." Dr. Evans shows, indeed, that mabinogi occurs in mediæval Welsh as a synonym of the Latin infantia, but this is in the literal, not the figurative, sense. He compares the Norman-French term enfances as applied to a particular genre of story. But this comparison is far from assisting him. Enfances, in this technical sense, is the account of the early years, the apprenticeship, the squire-ship, of a famous warrior; it necessarily implies a secondary stage of story-telling. Primitive and early epic does not take a hero in the cradle; it is only later that the story-teller reverts to the cradle because, knowing the hero, the audience are curious respecting his origins. Nothing of the kind is to be detected in the Four Branches cycle.

For the present, therefore, I see no reason for rejecting Sir John Rhys' explanation, or for withdrawing the deductions from it which both Mr. John and I have made. Needless to waste a word upon the absurdity of the equation,—mabinogi=tale for the young,—which some scholars, who ought to have known better, have approved. Mediæval literature has no "juvenile department."