Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/94

86 though the family tradition would have been a more convincing case had he felt at liberty to mention names and other particulars. Even more striking instances, however, might have been mentioned, such as that one referred to by Mr. Boyd Dawkins in his Early Man in Britain, which discloses the record of a local fact handed down by tradition for something like two thousand years. A barrow called Bryn-yr-Ellyllon (Fairy Hill), near Mold, was said to be haunted: a ghost clad in golden armour had been seen to enter it. The ghost was explained when the barrow was opened, in the year 1832, by the discovery of a skeleton wearing a corselet of gold of beautiful Etruscan workmanship. It is very desirable that some student unwarped by any prepossession, theological or historical, should endeavour, by a collection of instances and their comparison on scientific principles, to establish how far reminiscences of fact can be preserved in folk-lore, and what amount of distortion, or transformation, they may, in given circumstances, be expected to undergo. I hardly know any problem that can be attacked with a greater likelihood of practical results.

Mr. Nutt's paper on Problems of Heroic Legend deals with this subject in its application to the cycles of the Celtic and Teutonic heroes. In this limited field his keen criticism is successful in showing that the recollection extends to little, if anything, more than the mere names of a few of the personages. The old mythic material of the race is the real stuff of the legends to which these names attach themselves. With the mythic material are mingled recollections, more or less vague, of the last important struggle in which the nation was engaged before the legend assumed final shape. The struggle may or may not have been that in which the heroes whose names are made use of took part. Summing up this part of his paper, the author says: "Had we heroic legend alone, we should know worse than nothing of history, we could only guess at false history. History may seem to give the form