Celtic Literature

But perhaps the best way to get a full sense of the storied antiquity, forming as it were the background to those mediæval documents which in Mr. Nash’s eyes pretty much begin and end with themselves, is to take, almost at random, a passage from such a tale as Kilhwch and Olwen, in the Mabinogion,—that charming collection, for which we owe such a debt of gratitude to Lady Charlotte Guest (to call her still by the name she bore when she made her happy entry into the world of letters), and which she so unkindly suffers to remain out of print.  Almost every page of this tale points to traditions and personages of the most remote antiquity, and is instinct with the very breath of the primitive world.  Search is made for Mabon, the son of Modron, who was taken when three nights old from between his mother and the wall.  The seekers go first to the Ousel of Cilgwri; the Ousel had lived long enough to peck a smith’s anvil down to the size of a nut, but he had never heard of Mabon.  ‘But there is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will be your guide to them.’  So the Ousel guides them to the Stag of Redynvre.  The Stag has seen an oak sapling, in the wood where he lived, grow up to be an oak with a hundred branches, and then slowly decay down to a withered stump, yet he had never heard of Mabon.  ‘But I will be your guide to the place where there is an animal which was formed before I was;’ and he guides them to the Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd.  ‘When first I came hither,’ says the Owl, ‘the wide valley you see was a wooded glen.  And a race of men came and rooted it up.  And there grew a second wood; and this wood is the third.  My wings, are they not withered stumps?’  Yet the Owl, in spite of his great age, had never heard of Mabon; but he offered to be guide ‘to where is the oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.’  The Eagle was so old, that a rock, from the top of which he pecked at the stars every evening, was now not so much as a span high.  He knew nothing of Mabon; but there was a monster Salmon, into whom he once struck his claws in Llyn Llyw, who might, perhaps, tell them something of him.  And at last the Salmon of Llyn Llyw told them of Mabon.  ‘With every tide I go along the river upwards, until I come near to the walls of Gloucester, and there have I found such wrong as I never found elsewhere.’  And the Salmon took Arthur’s messengers on his shoulders up to the wall of the prison in Gloucester, and they delivered Mabon.

Nothing could better give that sense of primitive and pre-mediæval antiquity which to the observer with any tact for these things is, I think, clearly perceptible in these remains, at whatever time they may have been written; or better serve to check too absolute an acceptance of Mr. Nash’s doctrine,—in some respects very salutary,—‘that the common assumption of such remains of the date of the sixth century, has been made upon very unsatisfactory grounds.’  It is true, it has; it is true, too, that, as he goes on to say, ‘writers who claim for productions actually existing only in manuscripts of the twelfth, an origin in the sixth century, are called upon to demonstrate the links of evidence, either internal or external, which bridge over this great intervening period of at least five hundred years.’  Then Mr. Nash continues: ‘This external evidence is altogether wanting.’  Not altogether, as we have seen; that assertion is a little too strong.  But I am content to let it pass, because it is true, that without internal evidence in this matter the external evidence would be of no moment.  But when Mr. Nash continues further: ‘And the internal evidence even of the so-called historic poems themselves, is, in some instances at least, opposed to their claims to an origin in the sixth century,’ and leaves the matter there, and finishes his chapter, I say that is an unsatisfactory turn to give to the matter, and a lame and impotent conclusion to his chapter; because the one interesting, fruitful question here is, not in what instances the internal evidence opposes the claims of these poems to a sixth-century origin, but in what instances it supports them, and what these sixth-century remains, thus established, signify.

So again with the question as to the mythological import of these poems.  Mr. Nash seems to me to have dealt with this, too, rather in the spirit of a sturdy enemy of the Celts and their pretensions,—often enough chimerical,—than in the spirit of a disinterested man of science.  ‘We find in the oldest compositions in the Welsh language no traces,’ he says, ‘of the Druids, or of a pagan mythology.’  He will not hear of there being, for instance, in these compositions, traces of the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, attributed to the Druids in such clear words by Cæsar.  He is very severe upon a German scholar, long and favourably known in this country, who has already furnished several contributions to our knowledge of the Celtic race, and of whose labours the main fruit has, I believe, not yet been given us,—Mr. Meyer.  He is very severe upon Mr. Meyer, for finding in one of the poems ascribed to Taliesin, ‘a sacrificial hymn addressed to the god Pryd, in his character of god of the Sun.’  It is not for me to pronounce for or against this notion of Mr. Meyer’s.  I have not the knowledge which is needed in order to make one’s suffrage in these matters of any value; speaking merely as one of the unlearned public, I will confess that allegory seems to me to play, in Mr. Meyer’s theories, a somewhat excessive part; Arthur and his Twelve (?) Knights of the Round Table signifying solely the year with its twelve months; Percival and the Miller signifying solely steel and the grindstone; Stonehenge and the Gododin put to purely calendarial purposes; the Nibelungen, the Mahabharata, and the Iliad, finally following the fate of the Gododin; all this appears to me, I will confess, a little prematurely grasped, a little unsubstantial.  But that any one who knows the set of modern mythological science towards astronomical and solar myths, a set which has already justified itself in many respects so victoriously, and which is so irresistible that one can hardly now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth;—that any one who knows this, should find in the Welsh remains no traces of mythology, is quite astounding.  Why, the heroes and heroines of the old Cymric world are all in the sky as well as in Welsh story; Arthur is the Great Bear, his harp is the constellation Lyra; Cassiopeia’s chair is Llys Don, Don’s Court; the daughter of Don was Arianrod, and the Northern Crown is Caer Arianrod; Gwydion was Don’s son, and the Milky Way is Caer Gwydion.  With Gwydion is Math, the son of Mathonwy, the ‘man of illusion and phantasy;’ and the moment one goes below the surface,—almost before one goes below the surface,—all is illusion and phantasy, double-meaning, and far-reaching mythological import, in the world which all these personages inhabit.  What are the three hundred ravens of Owen, and the nine sorceresses of Peredur, and the dogs of Annwn the Welsh Hades, and the birds of Rhiannon, whose song was so sweet that warriors remained spell-bound for eighty years together listening to them?  What is the Avanc, the water-monster, of whom every lake-side in Wales, and her proverbial speech, and her music, to this day preserve the tradition?  What is Gwyn the son of Nudd, king of fairie, the ruler of the Tylwyth Teg, or family of beauty, who till the day of doom fights on every first day of May,—the great feast of the sun among the Celtic peoples,—with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of Lear?  What is the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of every first of May foaled, and no one ever knew what became of the colt?  Who is the mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed semblance for a year with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place?  These are no mediæval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological world.  The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;—stones ‘not of this building,’ but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical.  In the mediæval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh.  Kilhwch, in the story, already quoted, of Kilhwch and Olwen, asks help at the hand of Arthur’s warriors; a list of these warriors is given, which fills I know not how many pages of Lady Charlotte Guest’s book; this list is a perfect treasure-house of mysterious ruins:—

‘Teithi Hen, the son of Gwynham—(his domains were swallowed up by the sea, and he himself hardly escaped, and he came to Arthur, and his knife had this peculiarity, that from the time that he came there no haft would ever remain upon it, and owing to this a sickness came over him, and he pined away during the remainder of his life, and of this he died).

‘Drem, the son of Dremidyd—(when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wic in Cornwall, as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain).

‘Kynyr Keinvarvawc—(when he was told he had a son born, he said to his wife: Damsel, if thy son be mine, his heart will be always cold, and there will be no warmth in his hands).’

How evident, again, is the slightness of the narrator’s hold upon the Twrch-Trwyth and his strange story!  How manifest the mixture of known and unknown, shadowy and clear, of different layers and orders of tradition jumbled together, in the story of Bran the Blessed, a story whose personages touch a comparatively late and historic time.  Bran invades Ireland, to avenge one of ‘the three unhappy blows of this island,’ the daily striking of Branwen by her husband Matholwch, King of Ireland.  Bran is mortally wounded by a poisoned dart, and only seven men of Britain, ‘the Island of the Mighty,’ escape, among them Taliesin:—

‘And Bran commanded them that they should cut off his head.  And take you my head, said he, and bear it even unto the White Mount in London, and bury it there with the face towards France.  And a long time will you be upon the road.  In Harlech you will be feasting seven years, the birds of Rhiannon singing unto you the while.  And all that time the head will be to you as pleasant company as it ever was when on my body.  And at Gwales in Penvro you will be fourscore years, and you may remain there, and the head with you uncorrupted, until you open the door that looks towards Aber Henvelen and towards Cornwall.  And after you have opened that door, there you may no longer tarry; set forth then to London to bury the head, and go straight forward.

‘So they cut off his head, and those seven went forward therewith.  And Branwen was the eighth with them, and they came to land at Aber Alaw in Anglesey, and they sate down to rest.  And Branwen looked towards Ireland and towards the Island of the Mighty, to see if she could descry them.  “Alas,” said she, “woe is me that I was ever born; two islands have been destroyed because of me.”  Then she uttered a loud groan, and there broke her heart.  And they made her a four-sided grave, and buried her upon the banks of the Alaw.

‘Then they went to Harlech, and sate down to feast and to drink there; and there came three birds and began singing, and all the songs they had ever heard were harsh compared thereto; and at this feast they continued seven years.  Then they went to Gwales in Penvro, and there they found a fair and regal spot overlooking the ocean, and a spacious hall was therein.  And they went into the hall, and two of its doors were open, but the third door was closed, that which looked towards Cornwall.  “See yonder,” said Manawyddan, “is the door that we may not open.”  And that night they regaled themselves and were joyful.  And there they remained fourscore years, nor did they think they had ever spent a time more joyous and mirthful.  And they were not more weary than when first they came, neither did they, any of them, know the time they had been there.  And it was as pleasant to them having the head with them as if Bran had been with them himself.

‘But one day said Heilyn, the son of Gwyn: “Evil betide me if I do not open the door to know if that is true which is said concerning it.”  So he opened the door and looked towards Cornwall and Aber Henvelen.  And when they had looked, they were as conscious of all the evils they had ever sustained, and of all the friends and companions they had lost, and of all the misery that had befallen them, as if all had happened in that very spot; and especially of the fate of their lord.  And because of their perturbation they could not rest, but journeyed forth with the head towards London.  And they buried the head in the White Mount.’

Arthur afterwards, in his pride and self-confidence, disinterred the head, and this was one of ‘the three unhappy disclosures of the island of Britain.’

There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a detritus, as the geologists would say, of something far older; and the secret of Wales and its genius is not truly reached until this detritus, instead of being called recent because it is found in contact with what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story.

But when we show him things of this kind in the Welsh remains, Mr. Nash has an answer for us.  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘all this is merely a machinery of necromancers and magic, such as has probably been possessed by all people in all ages, more or less abundantly.  How similar are the creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote!  We see in this similarity only an evidence of the existence of a common stock of ideas, variously developed according to the formative pressure of external circumstances.  The materials of these tales are not peculiar to the Welsh.’  And then Mr. Nash points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how certain incidents of these tales have their counterparts in Irish, in Scandinavian, in Oriental romance.  He says, fairly enough, that the assertions of Taliesin, in the famous Hanes Taliesin, or History of Taliesin, that he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower of Babel, and with Alexander of Macedon, ‘we may ascribe to the poetic fancy of the Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance into its present form.  We may compare these statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the Traveller’s Song.’  No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to have a common property in many marvellous stories.  This is one of the most interesting discoveries of modern science; but modern science is equally interested in knowing how the genius of each people has differentiated, so to speak, this common property of theirs; in tracking out, in each case, that special ‘variety of development,’ which, to use Mr. Nash’s own words, ‘the formative pressure of external circumstances’ has occasioned; and not the formative pressure from without only, but also the formative pressure from within.  It is this which he who deals with the Welsh remains in a philosophic spirit wants to know.  Where is the force, for scientific purposes, of telling us that certain incidents by which Welsh poetry has been supposed to indicate a surviving tradition of the doctrine of transmigration, are found in Irish poetry also, when Irish poetry has, like Welsh, its roots in that Celtism which is said to have held this doctrine of transmigration so strongly?  Where is even the great force, for scientific purposes, of proving, if it were possible to prove, that the extant remains of Welsh poetry contain not one plain declaration of Druidical, Pagan, pre-Christian doctrine, if one has in the extant remains of Breton poetry such texts as this from the prophecy of Gwenchlan: ‘Three times must we all die, before we come to our final repose’? or as the cry of the eagles, in the same poem, of fierce thirst for Christian blood, a cry in which the poet evidently gives vent to his own hatred? since the solidarity, to use that convenient French word, of Breton and Welsh poetry is so complete, that the ideas of the one may be almost certainly assumed not to have been wanting to those of the other.  The question is, when Taliesin says, in the Battle of the Trees: ‘I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form.  I have been a narrow blade of a sword, I have been a drop in the air, I have been a shining star, I have been a word in a book, I have been a book in the beginning, I have been a light in a lantern a year and a half, I have been a bridge for passing over three-score rivers; I have journeyed as an eagle, I have been a boat on the sea, I have been a director in battle, I have been a sword in the hand, I have been a shield in fight, I have been the string of a harp, I have been enchanted for a year in the foam of water.  There is nothing in which I have not been,’—the question is, have these ‘statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician’ nothing which distinguishes them from ‘similar creations of the human mind in times and places the most remote;’ have they not an inwardness, a severity of form, a solemnity of tone, which indicates the still reverberating echo of a profound doctrine and discipline, such as was Druidism?  Suppose we compare Taliesin, as Mr. Nash invites us, with the gleeman of the Anglo-Saxon Traveller’s Song.  Take the specimen of this song which Mr. Nash himself quotes: ‘I have been with the Israelites and with the Essyringi, with the Hebrews and with the Indians and with the Egyptians; I have been with the Medes and with the Persians and with the Myrgings.’  It is very well to parallel with this extract Taliesin’s: ‘I carried the banner before Alexander; I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; I was on the horse’s crupper of Elias and Enoch; I was on the high cross of the merciful son of God; I was the chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod; I was with my King in the manger of the ass; I supported Moses through the waters of Jordan; I have been in the buttery in the land of the Trinity; it is not known what is the nature of its meat and its fish.’  It is very well to say that these assertions ‘we may fairly ascribe to the poetic fancy of a Christian priest of the thirteenth century.’  Certainly we may; the last of Taliesin’s assertions more especially; though one must remark at the same time that the Welshman shows much more fire and imagination than the Anglo-Saxon.  But Taliesin adds, after his: ‘I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain,’ ‘I was in the hall of Don before Gwydion was born;’ he adds, after: ‘I was chief overseer at the building of the tower of Nimrod,’ ‘I have been three times resident in the castle of Arianrod;’ he adds, after: ‘I was at the cross with Mary Magdalene,’ ‘I obtained my inspiration from the cauldron of Ceridwen.’  And finally, after the mediæval touch of the visit to the buttery in the land of the Trinity, he goes off at score: ‘I have been instructed in the whole system of the universe; I shall be till the day of judgment on the face of the earth.  I have been in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin, and the whirling round without motion between three elements.  Is it not the wonder of the world that cannot be discovered?’  And so he ends the poem.  But here is the Celtic, the essential part of the poem: it is here that the ‘formative pressure’ has been really in operation; and here surely is paganism and mythology enough, which the Christian priest of the thirteenth century can have had nothing to do with.  It is unscientific, no doubt, to interpret this part as Edward Davies and Mr. Herbert do; but it is unscientific also to get rid of it as Mr. Nash does.  Wales and the Welsh genius are not to be known without this part; and the true critic is he who can best disengage its real significance.

I say, then, what we want is to know the Celt and his genius; not to exalt him or to abase him, but to know him.  And for this a disinterested, positive, and constructive criticism is needed.  Neither his friends nor his enemies have yet given us much of this.  His friends have given us materials for criticism, and for these we ought to be grateful; his enemies have given us negative criticism, and for this, too, up to a certain point, we may be grateful; but the criticism we really want neither of them has yet given us.

Philology, however, that science which in our time has had so many successes, has not been abandoned by her good fortune in touching the Celt; philology has brought, almost for the first time in their lives, the Celt and sound criticism together.  The Celtic grammar of Zeuss, whose death is so grievous a loss to science, offers a splendid specimen of that patient, disinterested way of treating objects of knowledge, which is the best and most attractive characteristic of Germany.  Zeuss proceeds neither as a Celt-lover nor as a Celt-hater; not the slightest trace of a wish to glorify Teutonism or to abase Celtism, appears in his book.  The only desire apparent there, is the desire to know his object, the language of the Celtic peoples, as it really is.  In this he stands as a model to Celtic students; and it has been given to him, as a reward for his sound method, to establish certain points which are henceforth cardinal points, landmarks, in all the discussion of Celtic matters, and which no one had so established before.  People talked at random of Celtic writings of this or that age; Zeuss has definitely fixed the age of what we actually have of these writings.  To take the Cymric group of languages: our earliest Cornish document is a vocabulary of the thirteenth century; our earliest Breton document is a short description of an estate in a deed of the ninth century; our earliest Welsh documents are Welsh glosses of the eighth century to Eutychus, the grammarian, and Ovid’s Art of Love, and the verses found by Edward Lhuyd in the Juvencus manuscript at Cambridge.  The mention of this Juvencus fragment, by-the-by, suggests the difference there is between an interested and a disinterested critical habit.  Mr. Nash deals with this fragment; but, in spite of all his great acuteness and learning, because he has a bias, because he does not bring to these matters the disinterested spirit they need, he is capable of getting rid, quite unwarrantably, of a particular word in the fragment which does not suit him; his dealing with the verses is an advocate’s dealing, not a critic’s.  Of this sort of thing Zeuss is incapable.

The test which Zeuss used for establishing the age of these documents is a scientific test, the test of orthography and of declensional and syntactical forms.  These matters are far out of my province, but what is clear, sound, and simple, has a natural attraction for us all, and one feels a pleasure in repeating it.  It is the grand sign of age, Zeuss says, in Welsh and Irish words, when what the grammarians call the ‘destitutio tenuium’ has not yet taken place; when the sharp consonants have not yet been changed into flat, p or t into b or d; when, for instance, map, a son, has not yet become mab; coet a wood, coed; ocet, a harrow, oged.  This is a clear, scientific test to apply, and a test of which the accuracy can be verified; I do not say that Zeuss was the first person who knew this test or applied it, but I say that he is the first person who in dealing with Celtic matters has invariably proceeded by means of this and similar scientific tests; the first person, therefore, the body of whose work has a scientific, stable character; and so he stands as a model to all Celtic inquirers.

His influence has already been most happy; and as I have enlarged on a certain failure in criticism of Eugene O’Curry’s,—whose business, after all, was the description and classification of materials rather than criticism,—let me show, by another example from Eugene O’Curry, this good influence of Zeuss upon Celtic studies.  Eugene O’Curry wants to establish that compositions of an older date than the twelfth century existed in Ireland in the twelfth century, and thus he proceeds.  He takes one of the great extant Irish manuscripts, the Leabhar na h’Uidhre; or, Book of the Dun Cow.  The compiler of this book was, he says, a certain Maelmuiri, a member of the religious house of Cluainmacnois.  This he establishes from a passage in the manuscript itself: ‘This is a trial of his pen here, by Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m’Bocht.’  The date of Maelmuiri he establishes from a passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, under the year 1106: ‘Maelmuiri, son of the son of Conn na m’Bocht, was killed in the middle of the great stone church of Cluainmacnois, by a party of robbers.’  Thus he gets the date of the Book of the Dun Cow.  This book contains an elegy on the death of St. Columb.  Now, even before 1106, the language of this elegy was so old as to require a gloss to make it intelligible, for it is accompanied by a gloss written between the lines.  This gloss quotes, for the explanation of obsolete words, a number of more ancient compositions; and these compositions, therefore, must, at the beginning of the twelfth century, have been still in existence.  Nothing can be sounder; every step is proved, and fairly proved, as one goes along.  O’Curry thus affords a good specimen of the sane mode of proceeding so much wanted in Celtic researches, and so little practised by Edward Davies and his brethren; and to found this sane method, Zeuss, by the example he sets in his own department of philology, has mainly contributed.