Sir John Rhys

“ To return to Wales, and to illustrate the belief that possession of a part of one’s person, or of anything closely identified with one’s person, gives the possessor of it power over that person, I need only recall the Welsh notion, that if one wished to sell one’s self to the devil one had merely to give him a hair of one’s head or the tiniest drop of one’s blood, then one would be for ever his for a temporary consideration. ”

“ As he first sets his right foot on the land of Erin he sings a lay in which he says, that he is a boar, a bull, and a salmon, together with other things also, such as the sea-breeze, the rolling wave, the roar of the billows, and a lake on the plain. Nor does he forget to pretend to wisdom and science beyond other men, and to hint that he is the divinity that gives them knowledge and sense. ”

“ Enough evil has God done to us when He fashioned us in this shape, without your coming to fight with us.’ Gwrhyr replied: ‘I tell you that Arthur will fight for the comb, the razor, and the shears that are between the ears of Twrch Trwyth.’ ‘Until his life has first been taken,’ said Grugyn, ‘those trinkets shall not be taken, and to-morrow morning we set out hence for Arthur’s own country, and all the harm we can, shall we do there.’
The boars accordingly set out for Wales, while Arthur with his host, his horses, and his hounds, on board his ship Prydwen, kept within sight of them. ”

“ But the existence of the scattered groups of the fairies was in no danger of coming to a violent end: they were safe in consequence of the superstitious beliefs of their stronger neighbours, who probably regarded them as formidable magicians, powerful, among other things, to cause or to cure disease as they pleased. Such, without venturing to refresh my memory by perusing what has been written about dwarf races in other parts of the world, are the impressions made on my mind in the course of analysing and sifting the folklore materials crowded into this volume. ”

“ He was lecturing at Oxford on Celtic literature, and observing ‘how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant,’ Matthew Arnold went on to say, ‘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. ”

“ However, the evidence of folklore is not of a kind to warrant our building any heavy superstructure of theory on the supposition, that the foundations are firmly held together by a powerful sense of consistency or homogeneity. So I should hesitate to do anything so rash as to pronounce the fairies to be all of one and the same origin: they may well be of several. For instance, there may be those that have grown out of traditions about an aboriginal pre-Celtic race, and some may be the representatives of the ghosts of departed men and women, regarded as one’s ancestors ”

“ Thus, if a man will have it that the earth is flat, as flat in fact as some people do their utmost to make it, ‘he will most likely,’ as the late Mr. Freeman in the Saturday Review once put it, ‘make few converts, and will be forgotten after at most a passing laugh from scientific men.’ If a man insists that the sum of two and two is five, he will probably find his way to a lunatic asylum, as the economy of society is, in a manner, self-acting. ”

“ I have long been inclined to identify Ỻwyd, son of Kilcoed, with the Irish Liath, son of Celtchar, of Cualu in the present county of Wicklow. Liath, whose name means ‘grey,’ is described as the comeliest youth of noble rank among the fairies of Erin; and the only time the Welsh Ỻwyd, whose name also means ‘grey,’ appears in the Mabinogion he is ascribed, not the comeliest figure, it is true, or the greatest personal beauty, but the most imposing disguise of a bishop attended by his suite: he was a great magician. ”

“ Now that I have touched on the friendly relations which ought to exist between the science of language and the science of myth, I may perhaps be allowed to notice a point or two where it is possible or desirable for the one to render service to the other. The student of language naturally wants the help of the student of myth, ritual, and religion on matters which most immediately concern his own department of study; and I may perhaps be excused for taking my stand on Celtic ground, and calling attention to some of my own [643] difficulties. ”

“ Besides, those who study folklore do not thereby help to strengthen the hold of superstition on the people. I have noticed that any local peculiarity of fashion, the moment it becomes known to attract the attention of strangers, is, one may say, doomed: a Celt, like anybody else, does not like to be photographed in a light which may perchance show him at a disadvantage. It is much the same, I think, with him as the subject of the studies of the folklorist: hence the latter has to proceed with his work very quietly and very warily. ”

“ The same sort of poetic expectation has not been unknown, for instance, in Ireland. In the summer of 1894, I spent some sunny days in the neighbourhood of the Boyne, and one morning I resolved to see the chief burial mounds dotting the banks of that interesting river; but before leaving the hotel at Drogheda, my attention was attracted by a book of railway advertisement of the kind which forcibly impels one to ask two questions: why will not the railway companies leave those people alone who do not want to travel, and why will they make it so tedious for those who do? ”

“ But why so much importance attached to pigs? I cannot well give a better answer than the reader can himself supply if he will only consider what rôle the pig plays in the domestic economy of modern Ireland. But, to judge from old Irish literature, it was even more so in ancient times, as pigs’ meat was so highly appreciated, that under some one or other of its various names it usually takes its place at the head of all flesh meats in Irish stories. ”

“ Those therefore who condemn superstitions have really no reason to set their faces against the student of folklore: it would be just as if historians were to be boycotted because they have, in writing history—frequently, the more the pity—to deal with dark intrigues, cruel murders, and sanguinary wars. ”

“ For one is sorely tempted to treat this much as a rescue from the wreckage of the solar myth theory, as against those who, having regard mainly to Lug’s professional skill and craft as described in Irish story, make of him a kind of Hermes or Mercury. In other words, we have either to regard a Celtic Lug as having become the centre of certain non-Celtic legends, or else to suppose neither Lug nor his name to be of Aryan origin at all. It is hard to say which is the sounder view to take. ”

“ If I woke the sleeper, the soul would be unable to return; and old Thomas would die, or go crazy; or something serious would happen. I will not trust my memory to fill in details, especially as this incident once formed the basis of what proved an exciting story told to my children in their childhood. A generation hence they may be able to give an astonishing instance of “genuine” Welsh folklore. ”

“ CHAPTER XII Race in Folklore and Myth
The method of philological mythology is thus discredited by the disputes of its adherents. The system may be called orthodox, but it is an orthodoxy which alters with every new scholar who enters the sacred enclosure.—Andrew Lang.
It has been well said, that while it is not science to know the contents of myths, it is science to know why the human race has produced them. ”

“ Supposing, then, the interpretation of the story established for certain, the question of its origin would still remain. Did it originate among the Celts and the Greeks and other nations who relate it? or has it simply originated among one of those peoples and spread itself to the others? or else have they all inherited it from a common source? If we take the supposition that it originated independently among a variety of people in the distant past, then comes an interesting question as to the conditions under which it arose, and the psychological state of the human race in the distant past. ”

“ For I have long suspected that we cannot regard as of Aryan origin the vocal talent so general in Wales, and so conspicuous in our choirs of working people as to astonish all the great musicians who have visited our national festival. Beyond all doubt, race has not a little to do with the artistic feelings: a short-skull may be as unmusical, for example, as I am ”

“ Now the magic power ascribed to them, and the method of disposing of them, combine to lend them a fabulous aspect, while their name, inseparable as it seems from cor, ‘a dwarf,’ warrants us in treating them as fairies, and in regarding their strange characteristics as induced on a real people. If we take this view, that Coraniaid was the name of a real people, we are at liberty to regard it as possible, that their name suggested to the Celts the word cor for a dwarf, rather than that cor has suggested the name of the Corannians. ”

“ At one time I was inclined to fancy that the druids of Gaul had received no unimportant part of their teaching from Greek philosophy by way of Massilia, but I am now more disposed to believe their doctrines to have been gradually developed, in the way above suggested, from the unfailing resources of that folklore which revelled in scenes of shape-shifting and rebirth. Possibly the doctrines of Pythagoras may have themselves had a like origin and a somewhat parallel development, or let us say rather that the Orphic notions had, which preceded Pythagoreanism. ”

“ That is to say, the treasure sank into a mere accessory of the presence of the armed men, who are not guarding any such thing so much as waiting for the destined hour when they are to sally forth to make lost causes win. Originally the armed warriors were in some instances presumably the henchmen of a sleeping divinity, as in the story told to Demetrius; but perhaps oftener they were the guardians of treasure, just as much as the invisible agencies are, which bring on thunder and lightning and portents when any one begins to dig at Dinas Emrys or other spots where ancient treasure lies hidden. ”

“ I was still more exercised by the name of Garry Geerlaug, as I recognized in Garry an Anglo-Irish pronunciation of the Norse name Godhfreydhr, later Godhroedh, sometimes rendered Godfrey and sometimes Godred, while in Man and in Scotland it has become Gorry, which may be heard also in Ireland. I thought, further, that I recognized the latter part of Garry Geerlaug’s designation as the Norse female name Geirlaug. There was no complete lack of Garries in that part of Ireland in the tenth and eleventh centuries ”

“ Now the lessons which the words here grouped together contain for the student of man is, that the Celts, and certain other widely separated Aryans, unless we should rather say the whole of the Aryan family, were once in the habit of closely associating both the soul and one’s name with the breath of life. ”

“ The simplest way to secure this kind of equal justice was, no doubt, to let the offending ancestors live on to see their descendants of the generation for whose time the vengeance had been fixed, and to let them be swept away with them in one and the same cataclysm, as in the Welsh versions of the Syfađon and Kenfig legends, possibly also in those of Ỻyn Tegid and Tyno Helig, which are not explicit on this point. ”

“ Surely no people who considered that they themselves had fathers: it must have been some community so low in the scale of civilization as never to have had any notion whatsoever of paternity: it is their ignorance that would alone render possible the notion of a race all women. That this was a matter of belief in the past of many nations, is proved by the occurrence of widely known legends about virgin mothers17; not to mention that it has been lately established, that there are savages who to this day occupy the low place here indicated in the scale of civilization. ”

“ The other cause, to which I suggested that contempt [571] for folklore was probably to be traced, together with the difficulties springing therefrom to beset the folklorist’s paths, is one’s ignorance of the meaning of many of the superstitions of our ancestors. I do not wish this to be regarded as a charge of wilful ignorance; for one has frankly to confess that many old superstitions and superstitious practices are exceedingly hard to understand. So much so, that those who have most carefully studied them cannot always agree with one another in their interpretation. ”