Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/134

126 illuminating a book of fairy-tales. Of the six-and-twenty stories comprised within these pale-green covers only two arc new to print, both reported by Mr. Alfred Nutt from the late Mr. D. W. Logic's recitation. Of one of these—"Andrew Coffey"—Mr. Jacobs knows of no parallels but two Irish tales. The other is a variant of "Big Peter and Little Peter", with Big Peter magnified into the firm of Hudden and Dudden. In this form the story is not common, and it has never been reported from Wales in any shape. It may be interesting, therefore, to students to learn that Professor Rhys, as he informs me, remembers hearing it in his boyhood from a farm-servant near Devil's Bridge, in North Cardiganshire. There were two rich brothers in the story, corresponding with Hudden and Dudden, and when the cunning poor man, answering to Donald in Mr. Logic's version, had thrown one of them into the water, bubbles rose above the spot. The other brother asked: "What is he doing?" "Picking out the fattest sheep," replied the cunning fellow. "Then throw me in quick!" And thrown in he accordingly was.

Mr. Jacobs has abridged the famous mabinogi of "Kilhwch and Olwen". In the Mabinogion itself this story always presents itself to me as only half developed. The earlier half is told fully; the latter is no more than an abstract. If the romancer has painted at full length Olwen's wooing, he has greatly foreshortened an important part of it. The demand for her hand and all that led up to the popping of that question, and the laborious gathering of the champions to hunt the mythic boar, are related in detail, but the hunt itself is cut short. Now so many traces remain in Wales of the incidents of the hunt, localised here and there, that I can hardly think the story was always curtailed in this fashion. And what a tale it must have been in the mouths of the old professional bards! If we could have had it as they told it there is not a folk-tale in the world that would have equalled it.

The student will naturally turn to Mr. Jacobs' notes,