Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/428

420 whole with incidents detailed in the Mabinogion of Pwyll and of Manawyddan. We have here a conflict between Pwyll, Pryderi, and Manawyddan on the one hand, and Gwawl son of Clud and Llwyd son of Kil-coed on the other. Pwyll had played upon Gwawl the trick of the badger in the bag; this is avenged by Llwyd, who brings desolation upon the land of Pryderi, Pwyll's son, but Llwyd is finally baffled by Manawyddan, who undoes all his spells.

Prof. Rhys is compelled to assume that his Brythonic mythologists took the wrong side, mythologically speaking. For his Gwawl and Llwyd are divinities of light, his Pwyll and Manawyddan dark divinities. To cite his own summing up of the myth, "this sequence carries with it the reversal of the true meaning of the action of the respective parties in the struggle. For the appearance of the realm as a wilderness is its true aspect, with its hideousness exposed in the light of Llwyd's triumphing countenance. The removal of the Enchantment, so as to make the landscape seem to teem again with life and abundance, is more truly to put the Enchantment on it. It is, in a word, to bring on the glamour and illusion which are essential to the magnificence in which the King of the Otherworld reigns."

I can understand such a simple myth as that which pictures the sun-hero dispelling the glamour of night, and I believe that in the visit of the Grail Quester to the Magic Castle we have a late and romanticised version of such a myth. But I am not prepared to go further.

How does Prof, Heinzel deal with this element in the romance? The legend has its origin, for him, in an account of the conversion of Britain by certain personages of the Apostolic age bringing with them relics of Christ. These are kept by the first Grail possessor for his future successor, son or grandson, who is to make himself known by putting certain questions. But this was too simple for the romance writers, who started the idea of making the Grail Quester