Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/87

 we must put the fact that we have more than one instance of this other motive, and so we must acknowledge that the first part of the Mabinogi of Pwyll, as it is, represents a Mährchen for itself.

It may, however, be objected that I myself have presupposed a Supernatural Birth story for the second part, but I said only that some supernatural birth story has affected this second part of the first branch of the Mabinogi; whether supernatural birth was really analogous to the Mongán story we cannot tell. We cannot, of course, exclude the possibility that Pryderi himself may have had, according to some local tradition, a supernatural origin, but we cannot tell of what kind it was; the motives which point to Pryderi's supernatural birth occur always in stories different from the Mongán type (e.g. the wife takes some magical remedy, or she swallows the incarnation of some supernatural being).

Mr. Gruffydd finally identifies the kidnapping of the young Pryderi with the carrying off of Mongán by Manannán. But in the Welsh story the child is taken by a being which used to take also other beings besides children, and so the only way would be to presuppose that the Mysterious Hand motive was developed from the motive in which the supernatural father takes his son with him. Such a motive we find in some combinations of the Mysterious Hand with Amor and Psyche motives (vide supra), but this motive does not seem to be there in its right place. And so there is only the one way to explain the origin of the Mysterious Hand. The being stealing the children and young beasts is apparently of the same character and nature as other beings which demand the child from their parents for themselves—these beings play the prominent rôle in the Child's Sacrifice-Motives; now, some of these motives are closely connected with that of Removed Barrenness, so, e.g. in the Aitareya Brahmana: Harischandra prays to Varuna for a son, promising to offer the child as a sacrifice to the