Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/77

 In Ireland Supernatural Birth stories are very frequent; usually a girl swallows a small animal, which is then reborn as the respective hero or heroine (Conchobar, Conall Cernach, Cúchulainn, Étáin). In the story about Cúchulainn's conception we find, however, the version that in a certain mysterious house a child was born on the same night as two foals. Dechtire adopted the boy, and the foals were given to him (I.T. 1. 138 dobert som na lúrchuiriu do macṡlabri don macc). The boy died, however, very soon, but he was reborn to Dechtire as Cúchulainn, the incarnation of Lug (I.T. 1. 139). This rebirth of the foster-son is only a doublet of the first event, and we are right in assuming that the Compert Conculaind in L.U. is a contamination of two similar stories. According to one story Cúchulainn had a horse, or two horses, which were of the same origin as himself (I think that these horses are identical with Cúchulainn's horses, which are really represented as supernatural beings); according to another story there was no mention of the horses, and so there were tales "how Cúchulainn got his horses." These supernatural birth stories, as represented in Irish, seem sometimes to make a compromise, according to which the child has a nominal human father (whose name the child bears), but the real father is the higher being whose incarnation the child is. These ideas of conception presuppose a very primitive civilisation, such as we find to-day among the Arunta people of central Australia, according to whose ideas the conception is due to an ancestral spirit entering into the woman; when the child is born he is a reincarnation of that ancestral spirit.

Both the last-mentioned motives, especially the last, occur in Mabinogi in a very strange context, and we do not see the reason why they have been introduced. One might, of course, suppose that there was a story of a taboo-breaking woman, and that this story sometimes continued the story of removed barrenness, the taboo-breaking woman being bereft of her child. There was here a possibility of