Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/432

424 relating to poetry and music are purely Celtic; little has been borrowed in the domain of political organisation, Welsh legal terminology in particular, which is singularly rich and precise, being almost untouched by Latin influence. If I mistake not, nothing in M. Loth's results stands in the way of our believing that the Brythons, whether in England or Brittany, retained many fragments of their pre-Christian beliefs, which fragments have been preserved to us partly by purely Welsh tales and poems, partly by French adaptations of Brythonic stories, derived mostly, though probably not entirely, from Brittany. The mythology which we can reconstruct from these fragments stands in as close relation to that of the Irish Gaels as do the Welsh and Irish laws.

Critical questions have occupied the larger part of this report. But this is a sign that the study of Celtic antiquity has definitely entered a new and fruitful stage. Publication has advanced sufficiently to give scholars a fair basis to build upon, but the perfect building cannot be expected just yet. One thing is certain. Some respectable traditional views may have to vanish. But free criticism will enhance and not diminish the value of what remains to us of Celtic thought and fancy. Nor will it, I believe, do other than confirm the theory that the beliefs and practices and sayings of pre-Christian Celtdom are largely represented both in pre-mediaeval and mediaeval Celtic literature, and in the folk-lore of the living Celtic-speaking peoples.