Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/276

268 has some analogy with the old English saying that "Barnaby bright" betokens a run of fine weather.

Expressing anxiety at a gathering of clouds once at starting on an excursion in Tuscany, the driver quoted a queer saying to reassure us:—

Which I took to be an allusion to some relics he might have carried, but found on enquiry that his "Corpi Santi" denoted our own persons.

Addenda to Branwen (Folk-Lore Record, vol. v.)—Mr. Karl Pearson has pointed out to me the following passage in the Pfaffe Amis, a thirteenth-century South German poem, composed by Der Strieker. The hero, a prototype of Eulenspiegel, who goes through the world gulling and tricking his contemporaries, persuades the good people of a certain town to entrust their money to him by telling them that he has in his possession a very precious relic, which he will show them, the head of St. Brandan, which has commanded him to build a cathedral (Lambl's edition, Leipzig, 1872, p. 32). Mr. Pearson believes that this incident has, like most of the remainder of the poem, gone into one of the many versions of Eulenspiegel, but cannot give the exact reference. It seems permissible to speculate whether there may not be some connection between this head of St. Brandan, which is preserved as a relic and speaks with its owner, and the head of Bran the Blessed, which remains uncorrupted, and which is as pleasant company as ever in the flesh. It is at any rate worth enquiring whether there be any early legend connected with St. Brandan's head. None such appears in the earliest redactions of St. Brandran's Voyage as printed by Schröder, Erlangen, 1871. It may be noted in the same connection that in what is presumably the earliest redaction of R. de Borron's Quête du Saint Graal, printed by Hucher, Le Mans, 1875, the conversion of Britain to Christianity is finally carried out by Brons. Is this a variant of the Welsh tradition which ascribes the conversion to Bran? It is curious that the introductory machinery of one of the two forms (the German one) in which the Brandan-Voyage exists is very similar to that of Walter Mape's Quest of the