Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/83

 know how Pryderi comes into this story if all about him refers to Gwri Wallt Euryn. Further, Mr, Grufifydd has not taken account of the results of Sir E. Anwyl's work, where he has proved that in the Mabinogi different local traditions have been contaminated. Owing to this compilatory character of the Mabinogi, we must be very careful in identifying different persons, and, what is more, in reconstructing their original story, because there is always the possibility that one motive belonged originally to one person and the other to another. Now Sir E. Anwyl has made it probable that, in some parts of Dyved, Pwyll was considered as father to Pryderi, but in the districts near Gwent, Teyrnon (O. Gaulish *Tigernonos) passed for his father, and that Gwri Wallt Euryn belongs to the Gloucester tradition; this proves clearly enough that there have been fused together traditions of different local origin. May we now say that these persons were of similar character, and that they were therefore confused? This is, of course, possible, but we can hardly presuppose that the original stories of these persons were the same. We have shown that in the Mabinogi of Pwyll heterogeneous cycles of motives have been confused. Now it remains to be decided when these motives came to be applied to the persons in question. Without further proof we cannot argue that all the respective motives were already associated in pagan times, for example, with Pryderi or Rhiannon. The motives reflect only the old pagan belief in charms, in the Otherworld, and in supernatural beings who stole living creatures, but that is all. Some of these stories may be very old, in so far as they agree with the old poems, though even these may not represent the remotest antiquity.

There is, however, still another problem as to whether these motives are native or whether they are not due to a foreign influence. This would naturally be an Irish