Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/70

 46 the mythical and heroic literature of the two main divisions of Gaeldom—Ireland and Scotland) would seem to have overridden any influences of race. The exception to which I alluded just now confirms, if rightly considered, this view. Of all the Gaelic-speaking districts the Isle of Man has probably the largest admixture of Scandinavian blood. The commingling of the two most imaginative and romantic strains of our mixed population would, one must think, have produced a specially rich folk-literature, yet as a matter of fact if such ever existed it would seem to have utterly died out. Man has retained customs and superstitions in fair abundance and vitality; stories of the saga type, anecdotes that is about supernatural and half-supernatural beings, are fairly numerous, but romantic tales and ballads have disappeared. The only cause I can detect is severance from the main streams of Gaelic traditional literature.

In the Brythonic-speaking area—Wales and South-west England—still more puzzling problems present themselves. Devon and Cornwall have certainly yielded more than their fair share of English folktales and legends, a fact which may fairly be ascribed to the existence within comparatively recent times of a Celtic-speaking population. The bulk of the people in these counties, it may be said, although English-speaking, is really Celtic, and their race colours their folklore. But in Wales, where the people has retained its Celtic speech, where it is certainly more homogeneous than in South-west Britain, where it has preserved its national literary class, in Wales, which possessed in the Middle Ages a romantic literature second only to that of Gaelic Ireland, romance has almost wholly vanished. Is there some underlying racial influence at work; is the Brython less tenacious than the Gael of his traditional romance? He has shown himself possessed of the rarest tenacity in other respects. Why should it have failed him here? The blighting influence of extreme Protestantism has been urged in explanation, but that ha? been at work equally