Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/78

 confusion with tales having the Mysterious Hand as the leading motive. This confusion would in our case result in the following way: The Mysterious Hand remained as the leading motive, but there were introduced important motives from other cycles: the smearing of Rhiannon's face with blood and the accusation of cannibalism (her proposed punishment, cf. Abandoned Wife) and the introduction (cf. Removed Barrenness) contributed only some inorganic details. But are we justified in such a theory? We have, no doubt, good reasons to believe that there were in Wales cycles of the Mysterious Hand, Abandoned Wife, etc., but we have no proof that the motive of the female taboo-breaker was introduced by the motive of removed barrenness.

Now, there is another possibility, i.e. that at least some of these stories were applied to Rhiannon, and that the compiler of Mabinogi knew different stories about one and the same event (in one case the birth of Pryderi), and that he aimed at reconciling the different versions by combining one with another. It seems to me highly probable that the story of the imputed cannibalism was introduced to explain why Rhiannon was once degraded to a mule or donkey. Is it impossible that there existed still another tale about Pryderi's birth? It would presuppose that either Pwyll was not the real father of Pryderi, the latter being a reincarnation of some "divinity" (or rather some equivalent of Ir. síde), or that this divinity was Pwyll himself (and that Pryderi had another human father, and the name of this mortal father in later times gave way to that of the "divine" father, both personalities having been confused). Or, finally, there may have been different tales about Pryderi's birth and different tales about Pwyll, according to which the whole character of the various persons was differently represented. Now it is possible that Pryderi himself was in older tales represented as an incarnation of some spirit, for this would account for the fact that Pryderi