Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (Volume 2 of 2)

by Sir John Rhys

Difficulties of the Folklorist

For priests, with prayers and other godly gear,

Have made the merry goblins disappear;

And, where they played their merry pranks before,

Have sprinkled holy water on the floor.—Dryden.

The attitude of the Kymry towards folklore and popular superstitions varies according to their training and religious views; and I distinguish two classes of them in this respect. First of all, there are those who appear to regret the ebb of the tide of ancient beliefs. They maintain that people must have been far more interesting when they believed in the fairies; and they rave against Sunday schools and all other schools for having undermined the ancient superstitions of the peasantry: it all comes, they say, of over-educating the working classes. Of course one may occasionally wish servant maids still believed that they might get presents from the fairies for being neat and tidy; and that, in the contrary case of their being sluts, they would be pinched black and blue during their sleep by the little people: there may have been some utility in beliefs of that kind. But, if one takes an impartial view of the surroundings in which this kind of mental condition was possible, no sane man could say that the superstitious beliefs of our ancestors conduced on the whole to their happiness. Fancy a state of mind in which this sort of thing is possible:—A member of the family is absent, let us say, from home in the evening an hour later than usual, and the whole household is thrown into a panic because they imagine that he has strayed on fairy ground, and has been spirited away to the land of fairy twilight, whence he may never return; or at any rate only to visit his home years, or maybe ages, afterwards, and then only to fall into a heap of dust just as he has found out that nobody expects or even knows him. Or take another instance:—A man sets out in the morning on an important journey, but he happens to sneeze, or he sees an ill-omened bird, or some other dreaded creature, crossing his path: he expects nothing that day but misfortune, and the feeling of alarm possibly makes him turn back home, allowing the object of his journey to be sacrificed. That was not a satisfactory state of things or a happy one, and the unhappiness might be wholly produced by causes over which the patient had absolutely no control, so long at any rate as the birds of the air have wings, and so long as sneezing does not belong to the category of voluntary actions. Then I might point to the terrors of magic; but I take it to be unnecessary to dwell on such things, as most people have heard about them or read of them in books. On the whole it is but charitable to suppose that those who regret the passing away of the ages of belief and credulity have not seriously attempted to analyse the notions which they are pleased to cherish.

Now, as to the other class of people, namely, those who object to folklore in every shape and form, they may be roughly distinguished into different groups, such as those to whom folklore is an abomination, because they hold that it is opposed to the Bible, and those who regard it as too trivial to demand the attention of any serious person. I have no occasion for many words with the former, since nearly everything that is harmful in popular superstition has ceased in Wales to be a living force influencing one’s conduct; or if this be not already the case, it is fast becoming so. 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. 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. If, then, I pretended to be a folklorist, which I can hardly claim to be, I should say that I had absolutely no quarrel with him who condemns superstition on principle. On the other hand, I should not consider it fair of him to regard me as opposed to the progress of the race in happiness and civilization, just because I am curious to understand its history.

With regard to him, however, who looks at the collecting and the studying of folklore as trivial work and a waste of time, I should gather that he regards it so on account, first perhaps, of his forgetting the reality their superstitions were to those who believed in them; and secondly, on account of his ignorance of their meaning. As a reality to those who believed in them, the superstitions of our ancestors form an integral part of their history. However, I need not follow that topic further by trying to show how ‘the proper study of mankind is man,’ and how it is a mark of an uncultured people not to know or care to know about the history of the race. So the ancient Roman historian, Tacitus, evidently thought; for, when complaining how little was known as to the original peopling of Britain, he adds the suggestive words ut inter barbaros, ‘as usual among barbarians.’ Conversely, I take it for granted that no liberally educated man or woman of the present day requires to be instructed as to the value of the study of history in all its aspects, or to be told that folklore cannot be justly called trivial, seeing that it has to do with the history of the race—in a wider sense, I may say with the history of the human mind and the record of its development.

As history has been mentioned, it may be here pointed out that one of the greatest of the folklorist’s difficulties is that of drawing the line between story and history. Nor is that the worst of it; for the question as between fact and fiction, hard as it is in itself, is apt to be further complicated by questions of ethnology. This may be illustrated by reference to a group of legends which project a vanishing distinction between the two kindred races of Brythons and Goidels in Wales; and into the story of some of them Arthur is introduced playing a principal rôle. They seem to point to a time when the Goidels had as yet wholly lost neither their own language nor their own institutions in North Wales: for the legends belong chiefly to Gwyneđ, and cluster especially around Snowdon, where the characteristics of the Goidel as the earlier Celt may well have lingered latest, thanks to the comparatively inaccessible nature of the country. One of these legends has already been summarized as representing Arthur marching up the side of Snowdon towards Bwlch y Saethau, where he falls and is buried under a cairn named from him Carneđ Arthur: see p. 473. We are not told who his enemies were; but with this question has usually been associated the late Triad, iii. 20, which alludes to Arthur meeting in Nanhwynain with Medrawd or Medrod (Modred) and Iđawc Corn Prydain, and to his being betrayed, for the benefit and security of the Saxons in the island. An earlier reference to the same story occurs in the Dream of Rhonabwy in the Red Book of Hergest[1], in which Iđawc describes himself as Iđawc son of Mynio, and as nicknamed Iđawc Corđ Prydain—which means ‘Iđawc the Churn-staff of Prydain’—in reference presumably to his activity in creating dissension. He confesses to having falsified the friendly messages of Arthur to Medrod, and to succeeding thereby in bringing on the fatal battle of Camlan, from which Iđawc himself escaped to do penance for seven years on the Ỻech Las, ‘Grey Stone[2],’ in Prydain or Pictland.

Another story brings Arthur and the giant Rhita into collision, the latter of whom has already been mentioned as having, according to local tradition, his grave on the top of Snowdon: see pp. 474–9. The story is a very wild one. Two kings who were brothers, Nyniaw or Nynio and Peibiaw or Peibio, quarrelled thus: one moonlight night, as they were together in the open air, Nynio said to Peibio, ‘See, what a fine extensive field I possess.’ ‘Where is it?’ asked Peibio. ‘There it is,’ said Nynio, ‘the whole firmament.’ ‘See,’ said Peibio, ‘what innumerable herds of cattle and sheep I have grazing in thy field.’ ‘Where are they?’ asked Nynio. ‘There they are,’ said Peibio, ‘the whole host of stars that thou seest, each of golden brightness, with the moon shepherding them.’ ‘They shall not graze in my field,’ said Nynio. ‘But they shall,’ said Peibio; and the two kings got so enraged with one another, that they began a war in which their warriors and subjects were nearly exterminated. Then comes Rhita Gawr, king of Wales, and attacks them on the dangerous ground of their being mad. He conquered them and shaved off their beards[3]; but when the other kings of Prydain, twenty-eight in number, heard of it, they collected all their armies together to avenge themselves on Rhita for the disgrace to which he had subjected the other two. But after a great struggle Rhita conquers again, and has the beards of the other kings shaved. Then the kings of neighbouring kingdoms in all directions combined to make war on Rhita to avenge the disgrace to their order; but they were also vanquished forthwith, and treated in the same ignominious fashion as the thirty kings of Prydain. With the beards he had a mantle made to cover him from head to foot, and that was a good deal, we are told, since he was as big as two ordinary men. Then Rhita turned his attention to the establishment of just and equitable laws as between king and king and one realm with another[4]. But the sequel to the shaving is related by Geoffrey of Monmouth, x. 3, where Arthur is made to tell how the giant, after destroying the other kings and using their beards in the way mentioned, asked him for his beard to fix above the other beards, as he stood above them in rank, or else to come and fight a duel with him. Arthur, as might be expected, chose the latter course, with the result that he slew Rhita, there called Ritho, at a place said to be in Aravio Monte, by which the Welsh translator understood the chief mountain of Eryri[5] or Snowdon. So it is but natural that his grave should also be there, as already mentioned. I may here add that it is the name Snowdon itself, probably, that underlies the Senaudon or Sinadoun of such Arthurian romances as the English version of Libeaus Desconus, though the place meant has been variously supposed to be situated elsewhere than in the Snowdon district: witness Sinodun Hill in Berkshire[6].