Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/66

 42 been less successful in making a compromise with the new faith, and, fatal defect from our point of view, its energies were largely directed to practical contemporary national aims, and were diverted from the preservation of the traditional romance. There exists too considerable doubt respecting the exact nature of what, for us folklorists, is the most valuable part of Welsh literature, the romantic legends known as the Mabinogion, with their accompanying prose and poetic scholia in the Triads and in some of the Bardic poems. These present the most remarkable analogies, alike in matter and style, to Irish mythic romance, and it is questionable how far they should be regarded as truly Welsh. The homogeneity which is so marked a feature of Gaelic is lacking in Welsh literature, and whilst the one community has preserved the traditional romance with marvellous fulness and accuracy, the other has allowed it to perish almost utterly.

If we turn from Celt to Teuton, there can be little doubt but that the Low-German invaders of the fifth-sixth centuries brought with them a great mass of mythic and heroic legend. One considerable poem, Beowulf, some smaller fragments, and a number of scattered references which involve nearly all the chief Teutonic legend-cycles, have come down to us. But taking Anglo-Saxon literature as a whole, it is vastly less archaic, less dominated by earlier mythic and heroic fancies, than is its contemporary Gaelic. In part this may be due to the weaker organisation of the literary class— the scop never seems to have had the same standing and guild-spirit as the Irish file or ollamh, or the Welsh bard; in part due to the fact that the most capable artists in words embraced Christianity more exclusively, if not more zealously, than their Irish fellows. The redactor to whom we owe Beowulf stands almost alone, so far as extant literature is concerned, in his attempt to perpetuate the pre-Christian whilst conciliating the Christian elements of Anglo-Saxon culture. As a source then of modern