BOOK I.
While Cymri's dragon, from the Roman's hold,
Spread with calm wing o'er Carduel's domes of gold.
The Carduel of the Fabliaux is not easily ascertained: it is here identified with Caerleon on the Usk, the favourite residence of Arthur, according to the Welch poets. This must have been a city of no ordinary splendour in the supposed age of Arthur, while still fresh from the hands of the Roman; since, so late as the twelfth century, Giraldus Cambrensis, in his well-known description, speaks as an eye-witness of the many vestiges of its former splendour. "Immense palaces, ornamented with gilded roofs, in imitation of Roman magnificence, a tower of prodigious size, remarkable hot baths, relics of temples," &c. (Giraldus Cambrensis, Sir R. Hoare's translation, vol. i. p. 103.) Geoffrey of Monmouth (1. ix. c. 12) also mentions, admiringly, the gilt roofs of Caerleon, a subject on which he might be a little more accurate than in those other details in his notable chronicle, not drawn from the same ocular experience. The luxurious Romans, indeed, had bequeathed to the chiefs of Britain abodes of splendour and habits of refinement which had no parallel in the Saxon domination. Sir F. Palgrave truly remarks, that even in the fourteenth century the edifices raised in Britain by the Romans were so numerous and costly as almost to excel any others on this side of the Alps. Caerleon (Isca Augusta) was the Roman capital of Siluria, the garrison of the renowned Second or Augustan legion, and the Palatian residence of the Prætor. It was not, however, according to national authority, founded by the Romans, but by the mythical Belin Mawr, three centuries before Cæsar's invasion. It is scarcely necessary to observe, that the dragon was the standard of the Cymry (a word, by the way, which I trust my Welch readers will forgive me for spelling Cymri).
And through the vale the shrill BON-LEF-HER rings.
The shout of war.
So from the Rock of Birds the shout of war.
The Rock of Birds—Craig y Deryn—so called from the number of birds (chiefly those of prey) that breed on them.
And found no billow where its beam could rest.
"Qual d'acqua chiara il tremolante lume," &c.—Ariosto, canto viii., stanza 71.
Where sate Duw-Iou, ere his reign was lost.
Duw-Iou (the Taranus of Lucan), the most solemn and august, though not the most popular of the Druidical divinities; answering to the classic Jupiter.
And the Pale Horse rose ghastly o'er the dead.
The White Horse, the standard of the Saxons.
Shook to the foot-tread of invading Gaul.
Pausan. Phoc. c. 28.
Of polish'd Chivalry, the primal ten.
The ten manly games (Gwrolgampau).
Which Heus, the Guardian, taught the Celt to wield.
Heus is the same deity as Esus, or Hesus, mentioned in Lucan, the Mars of the Celts. According to the Welch triads, Heus (or Hu—Hu Gadarn; i. e. the mighty Guardian, or Inspector) brought the people of Cymry first into this isle, from the summer country called Defrobanni (in the Tauric Chersonese), over the Hazy Sea (the German Ocean). Davies, in his Celtic Researches, observes that some commentator, at least as old as the twelfth century, repeatedly explains the situation of Defrobanni as "that on which Constantinople now stands." "This comment," adds Davies, "would not have been made without some authority; it belongs to an age which possessed many documents relating to the history of the Britons which are now no longer extant."
It would be extremely important towards tracing the origin of the Cymry, if authentic and indisputable records of such traditions of their migration from the East can be found in their own legends at an age before learned conjecture could avail itself of the passages in Herodotus and Strabo, which relate to the Cimmerians, and tend to identify that people with our Cymrian ancestors. We find in the first (1. i. c. 14), that the Cimmerians, chased from their original settlements by the Nomadic Scythians, came to Lydia, where they took Sardis (except the citadel). In this account Strabo, on the authority of Callisthenes and Callinus, confirms Herodotus.
In flying from their Scythian foes, the Cimmerians took their course by the sea-coasts to Sinope, and the Cimmerian Bosphorus, and as, after this flight, the old Cimmerian league was broken up, and the tribes dispersed, this gives us the evident date for such migrations as Hu Gadarn is supposed to head; and the coincidence between Welch traditions (if genuinely ancient) and classical authority becomes very remarkable. For the additional corroboration of the hypothesis thus suggested, which is afforded by the identity between the Cimmerians of Asia and the Cimbri of Gaul, see Strabo (1. vii. p. 424, the Oxford edition, 1807). It is curious to note in Herodotus (1. iv. c. 11) that the same domestic feuds which destroyed the Cymrian empire in Britain destroyed the Cimmerians in their original home. While the Scythians invaded them, they quarrelled amongst themselves whether to fight or fly, and settled the dispute by fighting each other, and flying from the enemy.
[10.—Page 212, stanza lxxvii.]
Our Titan sires from Defrobanni's plain.
"Our Titan sires,"—according to certain mythologists, the Celts, or Cimmerians, were the Titans.
Strides in the circles of unthinking men.
Imitated from Schiller.
And frank Gawaine,
Whom mirth for ever, like a fairy child,
Lock'd from the cares of life.
Some liberty, in the course of this poem, will be taken with the legendary character, less perhaps of the Gawaine of the Fabliaux, than of the Gwalchmai (Hawk of Battle) of the Welch bards. In both, indeed, this hero is represented as sage, courteous, and eloquent; but he is a livelier character in the Fabliaux than in the tales of his native land. The characters of many of the Cymrian heroes, indeed, vary according to the caprice of the poets. Thus Kai, in the Triads, one of the Three Diademed chiefs of battle and a powerful magician, is, in the French romances, Messire Queux, the chief of the cooks; and in the Mabinogion,[A] he is at one time but an unlucky knight of more valour than discretion, and at another time attains the dignity assigned to him in the Triads, and exults in supernatural attributes. And poor Gawaine himself, the mirror of chivalry, in most of the Fabliaux is, as Southey observes, "shamefully calumniated" in the Mort D'Arthur as the "false Gawaine." The Caradoc of this poem is not intended to be identified with the hero Caradoc Vreichvras. The name was sufficiently common in Britain (it is the right reading for Caractacus) to allow to the use of the poet as many Caradocs as he pleases.
Frank youth, high thoughts, crown'd Nature's kings in both.
Lancelot was, indeed, the son of a king, but a dethroned and a tributary one. The popular history of his infancy will be told in a subsequent book.
Welcome Bal-Huan back to yon sweet sky.
Bal-Huan, the sun. Those heaps of stone found throughout Britain (Crugiau or Carneu), were sacred to the sun in the Druid worship, and served as beacons in his honour on May eve. May was his consecrated month. The rocking-stones which mark these sanctuaries were called amber-stones.
May fill with joy the Vale of Melody.
Cwm-pPenllafar, the Vale of Melody—so called (as Mr. Pennant suggests) from the music of the hounds when in full cry over the neighbouring Rock of the Hunter.
NOTES TO BOOK II.
By lips as gay the Hirlas horn is quaft.
The Hirlas, or drinking-horn, made of the buffalo horn, enriched with gold or silver. The Hirlas song of "Owen Prince of Powys" is familiar to all lovers of Welch literature.
Therein Sir Brut, expell'd from flaming Troy.
Caradoc's version of the descent of Brut differs somewhat from that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but perhaps it is quite as true. According to Geoffrey, Brut is great-grandson to Æneas, and therefore not expelled from "flaming Troy." Caradoc follows his own (no doubt authentic) legends, also, as to the aboriginal population of the island, which, according to Geoffrey, were giants, not devils. The cursory and contemptuous way in which that delicious romance-writer speaks of these poor giants is inimitable—"Albion a nemine, exceptis paucis gigantibus, inhabitabatur."—"Albion was inhabited by nobody—except, indeed, a few giants!"
And bids that Saint, who now speaks Welch on high.
Saint bran, the founder of one of the three sacred lineages of Britain, was the first introducer of Christianity among the Cymry.
And thou, fair favourite in the Fairy court.
Gwyn-ab-nudd, the king of the fairies. He is, also, sometimes less pleasingly delineated as the king of the infernal regions; the Welch Pluto—much the same as, in the chivalric romance-writers, Proserpine is sometimes made the queen of the fairies.
"Arthur my name, from Ynys Vel I come.
Ynys Vel; one of the old Welch names for England.
"A witch."—"All women till they're wed are witches!
The witch Mourge, or Morgana (historically Anna), was Arthur's sister.
Loud neigh'd the destrier at the welcome clang.
Destrier;—This word has been objected to, but it is so familiarly used by our Anglo-Norman minstrels, as well as by the great Masters of romantic poetry, that I have ventured, though not without diffidence, to retain it. Montaigne, in his chapter on "the Warhorses called Destriers," derives the word from the Latin Dextrarius.
NOTES TO BOOK III.
Pass from the spear-storm to The Golden Hall!
Walhalla.
Were cross'd by Skulda, in the baleful skein.
Skulda, the Norna, or Destiny, of the Future.
Of him who dares 'The Choosers of the Slain.'
The Valkyrs, the Choosers of the Slain, who ride before the battle, and select its victims; to whom, afterwards (softening their character), they administer in Walhalla.
When Cæsar bridged with marching steel the Rhine.
Plut. in vit. Cæs.—Cæs. Comment. lib. iv.
So bloom'd the Hours, when from the heaving sea.
Hom. Hymn.
Or shy Napææ, startled from their sleep.
Napææ, the most bashful of all the rural nymphs; their rare apparition was supposed to produce delirium in the beholder.
A wise Etrurian chief, forewarn'd ('twas said)
By his dark Cære, from the danger fled.
Cære of the twelve cities in the Etrurian league (though not originally an Etrurian population), imparted to the Romans their sacred mysteries: hence the word Cæremonia. This holy city was in close connection with Delphi. An interesting account of it under its earlier name "Agylla," will be found in Sir W. Gell's "Topography of Rome and its vicinity." The obscure passage in Plutarch's Life of Sylla, which intimates that the Etrurian soothsayers had a forewarning of the declining fates of their country, is well known to scholars; who have made more of it than it deserves.
I may as well observe that the adjective Lartian is derived from Lars (or lord), in contradistinction to the adjective Larian derived from Lar (or household god).
His rod the Augur waves above the ground,
And cries, "In Tina's name I bless the soil."
Tina was the Jove of the Etrurians. The mode in which this people (whose mysterious civilization so tasks our fancy and so escapes from our researches) appropriated a colony, is briefly described in the text. The Augur made lines in the air due north, south, east, and west, marked where the lines crossed upon the earth; then he and the chiefs associated with him sate down, covered their heads, and waited some approving omen from the gods. The Etrurian Augurs were celebrated for their power over the electric fluid. The vulture was a popular bird of omen in the founding of colonies. See Niebuhr, Muller, &c.
Tombs only speak the Etrurian's language;—hurl'd.
The Etrurian language perished between the age of Augustus and that of Julian.—Leitch's Muller on Ancient Art.
[10.—Page 248, stanza lxxxiv.]
To dust the shrines of Naith;—the serpents hiss.
Naith, the Egyptian goddess.
[11.—Page 249, stanza lxxxix.]
The Hister's lyre still thrill'd with Camsee's lays.
Hister, the Etruscan minstrel.—Camsee, Camese, or Camœse, the mythological sister of Janus (a national deity of the Etrurians), whose art of song is supposed to identify her with the Camœna or muse of the Latin poets.—Arretium, celebrated for the material of the Etruscan vases.
and all the honours of the race
Lend their last bloom to smile in Ægle's face.
The Etrurians paid more respect to women than most of the classical nations, and admitted females to the throne. The Augur (a purely Etruscan name and office) was the highest power in the state. In the earlier Etruscan history, the Augur and the king were unquestionably united in one person. Latterly, this does not appear to have been necessarily (nor perhaps generally) the case. The king (whether we call him lars or lucumo), as well as the augur, was elected out of a certain tribe, or clan; but in the strange colony described in the poem, it is supposed that the rank has become hereditary in the family of the chief who headed it, as would probably have been the case even in more common-place settlements in another soil. Thus, the first Etrurian colonist, Tarchun, no doubt had his successors in his own lineage.
I cannot assert that Ægle is a purely Etruscan name; it is one common both with the Greeks and Latins. In Apollodorus (ii. 5) it is given to one of the Hesperides, and in Virgil (Eclog. vi. l. 20) to the fairest of the Naiads, the daughter of the sun; but it is not contrary to the conformation of the Etruscan language, as, by the way, many of the most popular Latinized Etruscan words are, such as Lucumo, for Lauchme; and even Porsena, or, as Virgil (contrary to other authorities) spells and pronounces it, Pors[~e]nna (a name which has revived to fresh fame in Mr. Macaulay's noble "Lays") is a sad corruption; for, as both Niebuhr and Sir William G. remark, the Etruscans had no o in their language. Pliny informs us that they supplied its place by the v. I apprehend that an Etrurian would have spelt Porsena Pvrsna.[B]
The Gods had care of their Tagetian child!
Tages—the tutelary genius of the Etrurians. They had a noble legend that Tages appeared to Tarchun, rising from a furrow beneath his plough, with a man's head and a child's body; sung the laws destined to regulate the Etrurian colonist, then sunk, and expired. In Ovid's Metamorphoses (xvi. 533) Tages is said to have first taught the Etrurians to foretell the future.
The fane of Mantu form'd the opposing bound.
Mantu, or Mandu, the Etrurian God of the Shades.
He leaves the bright hall where the Æsars dwell.
Æsars, the name given collectively to the Etrurian deities.—Suet. Aug. 97. Dio. Cass. xxvi. p. 589.
Of that bright Wanderer from the Olympian sky.
Apollo.
Those forms of dark yet lustrous loveliness.
Whatever the original cradle of the mysterious Etrurians, scholars, with one or two illustrious exceptions, are pretty well agreed that it must have been somewhere in the East; and the more familiar we become with the remains of their art, the stronger appears the evidence of their early and intimate connection with the Egyptians, though in themselves a race decidedly not Egyptian. See Micali, Stor. deg. Antich. Pop. But in referring to this delightful and learned writer, to whom I am under many obligations in this part of my poem, I must own, with such frankness as respect for so great an authority will permit, that I think many of his assumptions are to be taken with great qualification and reserve.
NOTES TO BOOK IV.
Like that in which the far Saronides.
Saronides—the Druids of Gaul: "The Samian Sage"—Pythagoras.. The Augur is here supposed to speak Phœnician as the parent language of Arthur's native Celtic. See note 2.
Exchanged dark riddles with the Samian sage.
Diodorus Siculus speaks with great respect of the Saronides as the Druid priests of Gaul; and Mr. Davis, in his Celtic Researches, insists upon it that Saronides is a British word, compounded from sêr, stars; and honydd, "one who discriminates or points out:" in fine, according to him, the Saronides are Seronyddion, i. e. astronomers. For the initiation of Pythagoras into the Druid mysteries, see Clem. Alex. Strom. L. i. Ex. Alex. Polyhist. It will be observed that the author here takes advantage of the well-known assertions of many erudite authorities that the Phœnician language is the parent of the Celtic, in order to obtain a channel of oral communication between Arthur and the Etrurian;[C] though, contented with those authorities, as sufficing for all poetic purpose, he prudently declines entering into a controversy equally abstruse and interminable, as to the affinity between the countrymen of Dido and the scattered remnants of the Briton. It is not surprising that the Augur should know Phœnician, for we have only to suppose that he maintained, as well as he could in his retreat, the knowledge common among his priestly forefathers. The intercourse between Etruria and the Phœnician states (especially Carthage) was too considerable not to have rendered the language of the last familiar to the learning of the first;—to say nothing of those more disputable affinities of origin and religion, which, if existing, would have made an acquaintance with Phœnicia necessary to the solution of their historical chronicles and sacred books. Nor, when the Augur afterwards assures Arthur that Ægle also understands Phœnician, is any extravagant demand made upon the credulity of the indulgent reader; for, those who have consulted such lights as research has thrown upon Etrurian records, are aware that their more high-born women appear to have received no ordinary mental cultivation.
In Luna's gulf, the sea-beat crews carouse.
Luna, a trading town on the gulf of Spezia, said to have been founded by the Etrurian Tarchun.—See Strabo, lib. v.; Cat. Orig. xxv. In a fragment of Ennius, Luna is mentioned. In Lucan's time it was deserted, "desertæ mœnia Lunæ."—Luc. i. 586.
Cœre foretold hath come Rasena!
Rasena was the name which the Etrurians gave to themselves.—Twiss's NIEBUHR, vol. i. c. vii. Muller, die Etrüsker: Dion. i. 30.
The bliss that Northia singles for your lot.
Northia, the Etrurian deity which corresponds with the Fortune of the Romans, but probably with something more of the sterner attributes which the Greek and the Scandinavian gave to the Fates. I cannot but observe here on the similarity in sound and signification between the Etrurian Northia and the Norna of the Scandinavians. Norna with the last is the general term applied to Fate. The Etrurian name for the deities collectively—Æsars, is not dissimilar to that given collectively to their deities by the Scandinavians; viz. Æsir, or Asas.
Spite of the Knight of Thrace,—Sir Belisair.
Belisarius, whose fame was then just rising under Justinian. The Ostrogoth, Theodoric, was on the throne of Italy.
"Ah," said the Augur—"here, I comprehend
Egypt, and Typhon, and the serpent creed!
It is clear that all which the bewildered Augur could comprehend, in the theological relations by which Arthur (no doubt with equal glibness and obscurity) relieves his historical narrative, would be that, in "worsting Satan," the Emperor of Greece is demolishing the Typhon worship of the Egyptians, and enforcing the adoration of the Dorian Apollo—that deity who had passed a probation on earth, and expiated a mysterious sin by descending to the shades; and it would require a more erudite teacher than we can presume Arthur to be, before the Augur would cease to confuse with the Pagan divinity the Divine Founder of the Christian gospel.
Astolfo spoke from out the bleeding tree.
Ariosto, canto vi.
Lo, now where pure Sabrina on her breast.
Sabrina, the Severn; whose legendary tale Milton has so exquisitely told in the Comus.—Isca, the Usk.
[10.—Page 259, stanza xxxviii.]
Drawn on the sands lay coracles of hide.
The ancient British boats, covered with coria or hydes—"The ancient Britons," as Mr. Pennant observes, "had them of large size, and even made short voyages in them, according to the accounts we receive from Lucan."—Pennant, vol. i. p. 303.
In Cymrian lands—where still the torque of gold.
The twisted chain, or collar, denoted the chiefs of all the old tribes known as Gauls to the Romans. It is by this badge that the critics in art have rightly decided that the statue called "The Dying Gladiator" is in truth meant to personify a wounded Gaul. The collar, or torque, was long retained by the chiefs of Britain—and allusions to it are frequent in the songs of the Welsh.
[12.—Page 261, stanza xlviii.]
The story heard, the son of royal ban.
According to the French romance-writers, Lancelot was the son of King Ban of Benoic, a tributary to the Cymrian crown. The Welch claim him, however, as a national hero, in spite of his name, which they interpret as a translation from one of their own—Paladr-ddelt, splintered spear. (Lady C. Guest's Mabinogion, vol. i. p. 91.) In a subsequent page, Lancelot tells the tale (pretty nearly as it is told in the French romance) which obtained him the title of "Lancelot of the Lake."—See note in Ellis's edition of Way's Fabliaux, vol. ii. p. 206.
On earth's far confines, like the Tree of Dreams.
"In medio ramos," &c.—Virgil, lib. vi. 282.
"An elm displays her dusky arms abroad,
And empty dreams on every leaf are spread."—Dryden.
To the wild faith of Iran's Zendavest.
Zendavest. Compare the winged genius of the Etrurians with the Feroher of the Persians, in the sculptured reliefs of Persepolis. (See Heeren's Historical Researches, art. Persians.) Micali, vol. ii. p. 174, points out some points of similarity between the Persian and Etrurian cosmogony. It was peculiar to the Etrurians, amongst the classic nations of Europe, to delineate their deities with wings. Even when they borrowed some Hellenic god, they still invested him with this attribute, so especially Eastern.
[15.—Page 266, stanza lxxxiii.]
Seem'd as the thread in fairy tales, which strung.
In a legend of Bretagne, a fairy weaves pearls round a sunbeam, to convince her lover of her magical powers.
Of Morn's sweet Maid had died, look'd calm above.
Hom. Odys., lib. v.
O'er the Black Valley, demon shadows fleet.
Cwm Idwal (in Snowdonia). "A fit place to inspire murderous thoughts,—environed with horrible precipices shading a lake lodged in its bottom. The shepherds fable that it is the haunt of demons, and that no bird dare fly over its damned waters."—Pennant, vol. iii. p. 324.
No more from Mantu Pales shall control.
Mantu, the God of the Shades—Pales, the Pastoral Deity.
NOTES TO BOOK V.
First, Muse of Cymri, name the Council Three.
Three counselling knights were in the court of Arthur, which were Cynon the son of Clydno Eiddin, Aron the son of Kynfarch ap Meirchion-gul, and Llywarch hen the son of Elidir Lydanwyn, &c.—Note in Lady Charlotte Guest's edition of the Mabinogion, vol. i. p. 93. In the text, for the sake of euphony to English ears, for the name of Llywarch is substituted that of his father, Elidir.
Next came the Warrior Three. Of glory's charms.
Three knights of battle were in the court of Arthur; Cadwr the Earl of Cornwall, Lancelot du Lac, and Owaine the son of Urien Rheged; and this was their characteristic, that they would not retreat from battle, neither for spear, nor for arrow, nor for sword; and Arthur never had shame in battle the day he saw their faces there, &c.—Lady C. Guest's Mabinog., vol. i. p. 91. In the poem, for Lancelot of the Lake, whose fame is not yet supposed to be matured, is substituted the famous Geraint, the hero of a former generation.
Dark Mona's Owaine shines with golden arms.
Owaine's birth-place and domains are variously surmised: in the text they are ascribed to Mona (Anglesea). St. Palaye, concurrently both with French fabliasts and Welch bards, makes this hero very fond of the pomp and blazonry of arms, and attributes to him the introduction of buckles to spurs, furred mantles, and the use of gloves.
In his plain manhood Cornwall's chief is seen.
Cadwr.
Next the three Chiefs of Eloquence; the kings.
There were three golden-tongued knights in the court of Arthur—Gwalchmai (Gawaine), Drudwas, and Eliwlod.[D]—Lady C. Guest's Mabinog., note, vol. i. p. 118.
"The Knights of Love;" some type the name conveys.
The three ardent lovers of the island of Britain—Caswallawn, Tristan, and Cynon (for the last, already placed amongst the counselling knights, Caradoc is substituted).—Lady C. Guest's Mabinog., vol. i. note to p. 94.
Caswallawn; Trystan of the lion rock.
Trystan's birth-place, Lyonness, is supposed to have been that part of Cornwall since destroyed by the sea. See Southey's note to Morte d'Arthur, vol. ii. p. 477.
In Castel d'Asso's vale of hero-tombs.
Castel d'Asso (the Castellum Axia, in Cicero), the name now given to the valleys near Viterbo, which formed the great burial-place of the Etrurians. Near these valleys, and, as some suppose, on the site of Viterbo, was Voltumna (Fanum Voltumnæ), at which the twelve sovereigns of the twelve dynasties, and the other chiefs of the Etrurians, met in the spring of every year. Views of the rock-temples at Norchea, in this neighbourhood, are to be seen in Inghirami's Etrusc. Antiq.
Here Sethlans, sovereign of life's fix'd domains.
Sethlans, the Etrurian Vulcan. He appears sometimes to assume the attributes of Terminus, though in a higher and more ethereal sense—presiding over the bounds of life, as Terminus over those of the land.
On the Fork'd Hill), abjures his genial smile.
Tinia, the Etrurian Bacchus (son of Tina), identified symbolically with the god of the infernal regions. In the funeral monuments he sometimes assumes the most fearful aspect. The above description of the Etrurian Hades, with its eight gates, is taken in each detail from vases and funeral monuments, most of which are cited by Micali.
[11.—Page 285, stanza lxxxii.]
Woe on the helmet-crown of Dorian kings!
In moonless nights, every eighth year, the Spartan Ephors consulted the heavens; if there appeared the meteor, which we call the shooting-star, they adjudged their kings to have committed some offence against the gods, and suspended them from their office till acquitted by the Delphic oracle, or Olympian priests.—Plut. Agis, 11; Muller's Dorians, b. iii. c. 6.
Etrurian Næniæ, load the lagging wind.
Næniæ, the funeral hymns borrowed by the Romans from the Etrurians.
Bright Cupra braids thy hair.
Cupra, or Talna, corresponding with Juno, the nuptial goddess.
NOTES TO BOOK VI.
Stretch'd o'er the steel-clad hush their swordless hands.
See Tacitus, lib. xiv. cap. 30, for the celebrated description of the attack on the Druids, in their refuge in Mona, under Publius Suetonius.
"You know the proverb—'birds of the same feather,'
A proverb much enforced in penal laws.
In Welch laws it was sufficient to condemn a person to be found with notorious offenders.
'Twould favour white, and raise the deuce in black.
If the celebrated controversy between Black and White, which divided the Cymrian church in King Arthur's days, should seem to suggest a parallel instance in our own,—the Author begs sincerely to say that he is more inclined to grieve than to jest at a schism which threatens to separate from so large a body of the upholders of the English church the abilities and learning of no despicable portion of the English clergy. There is a division more dangerous than that between theologian and theologian—viz., a division between the Pastors and their flocks—between the teaching of the pulpit and the sympathy of the audience. Far from the Author be the rash presumption to hazard any opinion as to matters of doctrine, on which—such as Regeneration by Baptism—it cannot be expected that, for the sake of expediency or even concord, the remarkable thinkers who have emerged from the schools of Oxford should admit of compromise;—but he asks, with the respect due to zeal and erudition, whether it be worth while to inflame dispute, and risk congregations—for the colour of a gown?
(If wine this be) ye come from Huerdan's shore.
Huerdan, i. e. Ireland, pronounced, in the Poem, as a dissyllable.
But never yet the dog our bounty fed
Betray'd the kindness or forgot the bread.
The whole of that part of Sir Gawaine's adventures, which includes the incidents of the sword and the hound, is borrowed (with alterations) from one of Le Grand's Fabliaux.
Of evil fame was Nannau's antique tree,
Yet styled the "hollow oak of demon race."
In the domain of Nannau (which now belongs to the Vaughans) was standing, to within a period comparatively recent, the legendary oak called Derwen Ceubren yr Ellyll—the hollow oak, the haunt of demons.
Or prison'd Mawddach clangs his triple chain.
Mawddach, with its three waterfalls.
And herds of deer as slight as Jura's roe.
The deer in the park of Nannau are singularly small.
Thor ever nursed, or Rana ever knew.
Ran, or Rana, the malignant goddess of the sea, in Scandinavian mythology.
NOTES TO BOOK VII.
Or the Nymph-mother of the silver feet.
'The silver-footed Thetis.'—Homer.
An armèd King—three lions on his shield—
Richard Cœur de Lion;—poetically speaking, the mythic Arthur was the Father of the age of adventure and knighthood—and the legends respecting him reigned with full influence in the period which Richard Cœur de Lion here (generally and without strict prosaic regard to chronology) represents; from the lay of the Troubadour and the song of the Saracen—to the final concentration or chivalric romance in the muse of Ariosto.
NOTES TO BOOK VIII.
Frank were those times of trustful Chevisaunce.
Chevisaunce.—Spenser.
Roved the same pastures when the Mead-month smiled.
The Mead-month, June.
And the strong seid compell'd revealing ghosts.
Magic.
Till the Last Twilight darken round the Gods.
At Ragnarök, or the Twilight of the Gods, the Aser and the Giants are to destroy each other, and the whole earth is to be consumed.
Stands my great Sire—the Saxon's Herman-Saul.
Herman-Saul (or Saule), often corruptly written Irminsula, Armensula, &c., the name of the celebrated Teuton Idol, representing an armed warrior on a column, destroyed by Charlemagne, a.d. 772.
Far from our dangers Astrild woos thy hand.
Astrild, the Cupid of the Northern Mythology.
Than Beorn, the Incarnate Fenris of the main.
Fenris, the Demon Wolf, Son of Asa Lok.
Dark, save when swift and sharp, and griding through.
Griding.—Milton. "The griding sword with discontinuous wound," &c.
Lonely he strays till Æthra sees again
Her starry children smiling on the main.
Both the Pleiades and the Hyades are said to be the daughters of Æthra, one of the Oceanides, by Atlas.
Reign storm-girt Arcas, and the Mother Star.
Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, near the North Pole, supposed by the Poets to be Arcas and his mother.
And from the rapture woke!—All fiercely round, &c.
The reader will perhaps perceive, that the above passage, containing the Vision of Ægle, is partially borrowed from the apparition of Clorinda, in Tasso.—Cant. xii.
Is it the Freya, whom your scalds have sung.
Freya is the goddess of love, beauty, and Hymen; the Scandinavian Venus.
O Dog skoinophagous—a tooth for mine!—
Id est, "rope-eating"—a compound adjective borrowed from such Greek as Sir Gawaine might have learned at the then flourishing college of Caerleon. The lessons of education naturally recur to us in our troubles.
NOTES TO BOOK IX.
Form'd of the frost-gems ages labour forth
The mountains of hard and perfect ice are the gradual production, perhaps, of many centuries.—Leslie's Polar Seas and Regions.
Here did the venturous Ithacan explore.
Ulysses. Odys., lib. xi.
And, with the birth of fairy forests rife,
Blushes the world of white.
The phenomenon of the red snow on the Arctic mountains is formed by innumerable vegetable bodies; and the olive green of the Greenland Sea by Medusan animalcules, the number of which Mr. Scoresby illustrates by supposing that 80,000 persons would have been employed since the creation in counting it.—See Leslie.
The morse emerging rears the face of man.
The Morse, or Walrus, supposed to be the original of the Merman; from the likeness its face presents at a little distance to that of a human being.
Floats the vast ice-field with its glassy blink.
The ice-blink seen on the horizon.
While the dire pest-scourge of the frozen zone.
Though the fearful disease known by the name of the scurvy is not peculiar to the northern latitudes; and Dr. Budd has ably disproved (in the Library of Practical Medicine) the old theory that it originated in cold and moisture; yet the disease was known in the north of Europe from the remotest ages, while no mention is made of its appearance in more genial climates before the year 1260.
And round and round the bark the narwal sweeps.
The Sea Unicorn.
front after front they rise
With their bright stare.
The eye of the Walrus is singularly bright.
The ravening glaucus sudden shooting o'er.
The Larus Glaucus, the great bird of prey in the Polar regions.
Blithe from the turf the Dove the blessèd leaves.
Herbs which act as the antidotes to the scurvy (the cochlearia, &c.) are found under the snows, when all other vegetation seems to cease.
The earthlier half, its own and Heaven's before.
In allusion to the well-known Platonic fancy, that love is the yearning of the soul for the twin soul with which it was united in a former existence, and which it instinctively recognizes below. Schiller, in one of his earlier poems, has enlarged on this idea with earnest feeling and vigorous fancy.
[12.—Page 357, stanza lxxiii.]
Ice-blocks the walls, and hollow'd ice the roof!
The houses of the Esquimaux who received Captain Lyon were thus constructed:—the frozen snow being formed into slabs of about two feet long and half a foot thick; the benches were made with snow, strewed with twigs, and covered with skins; and the lamp suspended from the roof, fed with seal or walrus oil, was the sole substitute for the hearth, and furnished light and fire for cooking.
The Esquimaux were known to the settlers and pirates of Norway by the contemptuous name of dwarfs or pigmies—(Skrœllings).
which certain Norway hags
Had squeezed from heaven and bottled up in bags.
A well-known popular superstition, not, perhaps, quite extinct at this day, amongst the Baltic mariners.
"I was shot
Into a ridge of what they call a floe.
The smaller kind of ice-field is called by the northern whale-fishers "a floe,"—the name is probably of very ancient date.
"The dwarfs, deliver'd, kneel, and pull their noses.
A salutation still in vogue among certain tribes of the Esquimaux.
NOTES TO BOOK X.
A second Sun his lurid front uprears!
The apparition of two or more suns in the polar firmament is well known. Mr. Ellis saw six—they are most brilliant at daybreak—and though diminished in splendour, are still visible even after the appearance of the real sun.
And tread where erst the Sire of freemen trod.
Thor's visit to the realms of Hela and Lok forms a prominent incident in the romance of Scandinavian mythology.
Enormous couch'd fang'd Iguanodon.
Dr. Mantell, in his "Wonders of Geology," computes the length of the Iguanodon (formerly an inhabitant of the Wealds of Sussex) at one hundred feet.
Herds, that through all the thunders of the surge.
The Deinotherium—supposed to have been a colossal species of hippopotamus.
The Troll's swart people, in their inmost home.
In Scandinavian mythology, the evil spirits are generally called Trolls (or Trolds). The name is here applied to the malignant race of Dwarfs, whose homes were in the earth, and who could not endure the sun.
Dreamless of thrones—and the fierce Visigoth.
Visigoth, poeticè for the Spanish ravagers of Mexico and Peru.
Calm brows that brood the doom of breathless kings!
Napoleon.
That calm grand brow the son of Ægir eyed.
Ægir, the God of the Ocean, the Scandinavian Neptune.
And bloodstain'd altars cursed the mountain sod.
The testimony to be found in classical writers as to the original purity of the Druid worship, before it was corrupted into the idolatry which existed in Britain at the time of the Roman conquest, is strongly corroborated by the Welsh triads. These triads, indeed, are of various dates, but some bear the mark of a very remote antiquity—wholly distinct alike from the philosophy of the Romans and the mode of thought prevalent in the earlier ages of the Christian era; in short, anterior to all the recorded conquests over the Cymrian people. These, like proverbs, appear the wrecks and fragments of some primæval ethics, or philosophical religion. Nor are such remarkable alone for the purity of the notions they inculcate relative to the Deity; they have often, upon matters less spiritual, the delicate observation, as well as the profound thought, of reflective wisdom. It is easy to see in them how identified was the Bard with the Sage—that rare union which produces the highest kind of human knowledge. Such, perhaps, are the relics of that sublimer learning which, ages before the sacrifice of victims in wicker idols, won for the Druids the admiration of the cautious Aristotle, as ranking among the true enlighteners of men—such the teachers who (we may suppose to have) instructed the mystical Pythagoras; and furnished new themes for meditation to the musing Brahman. Nor were the Druids of Britain inferior to those with whom the Sages of the western and eastern world came more in contact. On the contrary, even to the time of Cæsar, the Druids of Britain excelled in science and repute those in Gaul; and to their schools the Neophytes of the Continent were sent.
In the Stanzas that follow the description of the more primitive Cymrians, it is assumed that the rude Druid remains now existent (as at Stonehenge, &c.), are coeval only with the later and corrupted state of a people degenerated to idol-worship, and that the Cymrians previously possessed an architecture, of which no trace now remains, more suited to their early civilization. If it be true that they worshipped the Deity only in his own works, and that it was not until what had been a symbol passed into an idol, that they deserted the mountain-top and the forest for the temple, they would certainly have wanted the main inducement to permanent and lofty architecture. Still it may be allowed, at least to a poet, to suppose that men so sensible as the primitive Saronides, would have held their schools and colleges in places more adapted to a northern climate than their favourite oak groves.
And wing'd the shaft of Scythian Abaris.
The arrow of Abaris (which bore him where he pleased) is supposed by some to have been the loadstone. And Abaris himself has been, by some ingenious speculators, identified with a Druid philosopher.
NOTES TO BOOK XI.
Hung on the music, nor divined the death?
See Book ii. pp. 57, 58, from stanza xxvii. to stanza xxx.
Because that soul refined man's common air!
Perhaps it is in this sense that Taliessin speaks in his mystical poem called "Taliessin's History," still extant:—
"I have been an instructor
To the whole universe.
I shall remain till the day of doom
On the face of the earth."
And smote the Heathen with the Angel's sword.
The Bishops Germanus and Lupus, having baptized the Britains in the river Alyn, led them against the Picts and Saxons, to the cry of "Alleluia." The cry itself, uttered with all the enthusiasm of the Christian host, struck terror into the enemy, who at once took to flight. Most of those who escaped the sword perished in the river. This victory, achieved at Maes-Garmon, was called "Victoria Alleluiatica."—Brit. Eccles. Antiq., 335; Bed., lib. i. c. i. 20.
Flash'd the glad claymores, lightening line on line.
"The claymore of the Highlanders of Scotland was no other than the cledd mawr (cle'mawr) of the Welch."—Cymrodorion, vol. ii. p. 106.
No mail defends the Cymrian Child of Song.
No Cymrian bard, according to the primitive law, was allowed the use of weapons.
And Tudor's standard with the Saxon's head.
The old arms of the Tudors were three Saxons' heads.
"Lo, Saxons, lo, what chiefs these Walloons lead!"
Walloons,—the name given by the Saxons, in contumely, to the Cymrians.
'And what is death?—a name for nothingness."
The sublime idea of the nonentity of death, of the instantaneous transit of the soul from one phase and cycle of being to another, is earnestly insisted upon by the early Cymrian bards, in terms which seem borrowed from some spiritual belief anterior to that which does in truth teach that the life of man once begun, has not only no end, but no pause—and, in the triumphal cry of the Christian, "O grave, where is thy victory!"—annihilates death.
NOTES TO BOOK XII.
"The watch-pass 'Vingólf' wins thee thro' the van.
Vingolf. Literally, "The Abode of Friends;" the name for the place in which the heavenly goddesses assemble.
What rites appease thee, Father of the Slain?
Father of the Slain, Valfader.—Odin.
Her sisters tremble at the Urdar spring.
"Her sisters tremble," &c.,—that is, the other two Fates (the Present and the Past) tremble at the Well of Life.
To all the valiant Gladsheim's Halls unclose.
Gladsheim, Heaven: Walhalla ("the Hall of the Chosen") did not exclude brave foes who fell in battle.
The Læca shines beside the bautasten.
The Scin Læca, or shining corpse, that was seen before the bautasten, or burial-stone of a dead hero, was supposed to possess prophetic powers, and to guard the treasures of the grave.
Thy post with Odin—mine with Managarm!
Managarm, the Monster Wolf (symbolically, war). "He will be filled with the blood of men who draw near their end," &c. (Prose Edda).
And the last Fire-God and the Flaming Sword!
"And the last Fire-God and the Flaming Sword," i.e., Surtur the genius, who dwells in the region of fire (Muspelheim), whose flaming sword shall vanquish the gods themselves in the last day. (Prose Edda).
And ghastly legends teem with tales of Faul!
Faul is indeed the name of one of the malignant Powers peculiarly dreaded by the Saxons.
From the paled ranks, that evil Bode dismay'd.
"Bode," Saxon word for Messenger.
The wings of Muspell to consume the world.
Muspell, Fire; the final destroyer.
All save the Cymrian's Ararat—Wild Wales!
"Their Lord they shall praise,
And their language they shall preserve;
Their land they shall lose,
Except Wild Wales!"
Prophecy of Taliessin.
Thy dauntless blood through Gwynedd's chiefs shall roll.
This prediction refers to the marriage of the daughter of Griffith ap Llewellyn (Prince of Gwynedd, or North Wales, whose name and fate are not unfamiliar to those who have read the romance of "Harold, the last of the Saxon Kings") with Fleance. From that marriage descended the Stuarts, and indeed the reigning family of Great Britain.
From Cymri's Dragon England's power shall date,
And peace be born to Cymri from the Dove.
According to Welch genealogists, Arthur left no son: and I must therefore invite the believer in Merlin's prophecy to suppose that it was by a daughter that Arthur's line was continued, and the royalty of Britain restored to the Cymrian kings, through the House of Tudor; from the accession of which House may indeed be dated both the final and cordial amalgamation of the Welch with the English, and the rise of that power over the destinies of the civilized world, which England has since established. The reader will pardon me, by the way, if I have somewhat perplexed him, now and then, by a similarity between the names of "Genevieve" and "Genevra." Both are used by the writers of the French Fabliaux as synonymous with Guenever; and the more shrewd will perhaps perceive that the reason why the name of Lancelot's mistress has been made almost identical with that of Arthur's, is to vindicate the fidelity of the Cymrian Queen Guenever from that scandal which the levity of French romance has most improperly cast upon it, in connection with Lancelot. It is to be presumed that those ancient slanderers were misled by the confusion of names, and that it was his own Genevra, and not Arthur's Genevieve, who received Lancelot's homage.—But indeed my Lancelot is altogether a different personage from the Lancelot represented in the Fabliaux as Arthur's nephew.
FOOTNOTES
[A] I cannot quote the Mabinogion without expressing a grateful sense of the obligations Lady Charlotte Guest has conferred upon all lovers of our early literature, in her invaluable edition and translation of that interesting collection of British romances.
[B] Dryden, with an accurate delicacy of erudition for which one might scarcely give him credit, does not in his translation follow Virgil's quantity, Porsënna, but makes the word short, Porsëna.
[C] It may perhaps occur to the reader that Latin, with which Arthur (in an age so shortly subsequent to the Roman occupation of Britain) could scarcely fail to be well acquainted, might have furnished a better mode of communication between himself and the Augur. But the Latin language would have been very imperfectly settled at the time of the supposed Etrurian emigration; would have had small connection with the literature, sacred or profane, of the Etrurians; and would long have been despised as a rude medley of various tongues and dialects, by the proud and polished race which the Romans subjected.
[D] The w is to be pronounced as oo.