Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/278

242 with a not inconsiderable romantic mixture, conceived in such a spirit. If Kulhwch really were as old as, or older than, the Four Branches, its matter might be substantially the same, but its manner of telling would, I believe, be far different. In especial the distinct parodistic touch, the presence of which I have noted in it, would be absent.

The effect of Geoffrey upon the Welsh presentment of Arthur is indicated in a phrase of Dr. Evans,—"Geoffrey changed a national into an international hero." Rather, I should say, he completed the process of internationalisation which must have begun at least 100 years before his time, but he completed it in the most thorough and startling manner, and in so doing he burst the moulds in which, as I believe, the Welsh Arthurian epic had hitherto been confined, destroyed the serious, realistic mode of conceiving and presenting it, and made it the sport of romanticising or humorous fancy. Of such fancy both Kulhwch and Rhonabwy, expressed in a manner modelled upon that of the Irish story-tellers of the tenth-eleventh centuries, are, I believe, examples. Thus, whilst I cannot accept Dr. Evans' pre-Geoffrey date for Kulhwch, I can as little accept his date, "second half of the thirteenth century," for Rhonabwy. Both tales are, I believe, products of the same school of story-telling; with the exception of isolated passages in Geraint and The Lady of the Fountain, they are the only examples of that school in Welsh literature. It may be not impossible, but it is in the last degree unlikely, that they should be separated by over a century and a half.

Of the three Welsh tales,—The Lady of the Fountain, Geraint, Peredur,—the subject-matter of which corresponds to that of the French metrical romances, by Crestien de Troies,—Le Chevalier au Lion, Erec, and the Conte del Graal,—Dr. Evans regards the Peredur as the oldest, "distinctly older" than the other two "in language, more Welsh in feeling and atmosphere, less