To leave the Mery Talys and come back to the instances mentioned, all of them may be said to illustrate the way in which a part, or an adjunct, answered for the whole of a person or thing. In fact, having due regard to magic as an exact science, an exceedingly exact science, one may say that according to the wisdom of our ancestors the leading axiom of that science practically amounted to this: the part is quite equal to the whole. Now the name, as a part of the man, was once probably identified with the breath of life or with the soul, as we shall see later; and the latter must have been regarded as a kind of matter; for I well remember that when a person was dying in a house, it was the custom about Ponterwyd, in North Cardiganshire, to open the windows. And a farmer near Ystrad Meurig, more towards the south of the county, told me some years ago that he remembered his mother dying when he was a boy: a neighbour’s wife who had been acting as nurse tried to open the window of the room, and as it would not open she deliberately smashed a pane of it. This was doubtless originally meant to facilitate the escape of the soul; and the same idea has been attested for Gloucestershire, Devon, and other parts of the country[46]. This way of looking at the soul reminds one of Professor Tylor’s words when he wrote in his work on Primitive Culture, i. 440: ‘and he who says that his spirit goes forth to meet a friend, can still realize in the phrase a meaning deeper than metaphor.’
Then if the soul was material, you may ask what its shape was; and even this I have a story which will answer: it comes from the same Modryb Mari who set her face against caws pobi, and cherished a good many superstitions. Therein she differed greatly from her sister, my mother, who had a far more logical mind and a clearer conception of things. Well, my aunt’s story was to the following effect:—A party of reapers on a farm not far from Ponterwyd—I have forgotten the name—sat down in the field to their midday meal. Afterwards they rested awhile, when one of their number fell fast asleep. The others got up and began reaping again, glancing every now and then at the sleeping man, who had his mouth wide open and breathed very loudly. Presently they saw a little black man, or something like a monkey, coming out of his mouth and starting on a walk round the field: they watched this little fellow walking on and on till he came to a spot near a stream. There he stopped and turned back: then he disappeared into the open mouth of the sleeper, who at once woke up. He told his comrades that he had just been dreaming of his walking round the field as far as the very spot where they had seen the little black fellow stop. I am sorry to say that Modryb Mari had wholly forgotten this story when, years afterwards, I asked her to repeat it to me; but the other day I found a Welshman who still remembers it. I happened to complain, at a meeting of kindred spirits, how I had neglected making careful notes of bits of folklore which I had heard years ago from informants whom I had since been unable to cross-examine: I instanced the story of the sleeping reaper, when my friend Professor Sayce at once said that he had heard it. He spent part of his childhood near Ỻanover in Monmouthshire; and in those days he spoke Welsh, which he learned from his nurse. He added that he well remembered the late Lady Ỻanover rebuking his father for having his child, a Welsh boy, dressed like a little Highlander; and he remembered also hearing the story here in question told him by his nurse. So far as he could recall it, the version was the same as my aunt’s, except that he does not recollect hearing anything about the stream of water.
Several points in the story call for notice: among others, one naturally asks at the outset why the other reapers did not wake the sleeping man. The answer is that the Welsh seem to have agreed with other peoples, such as the Irish[47], in thinking it dangerous to wake a man when dreaming, that is, when his soul might be wandering outside his body; for it might result in the soul failing to find the way back into the body which it had temporarily left. To illustrate this from Wales I produce the following story, which has been written out for me by Mr. J. G. Evans. The scene of it was a field on the farm of Cadabowen, near Ỻan y Byđair, in the Vale of the Teifi:—‘The chief point of the madfaỻ incident, which happened in the early sixties, was this. During one mid-morning hoe hogi, that is to say, the usual rest for sharpening the reaping-hooks, I was playing among the thirty or forty reapers sitting together: my movements were probably a disturbing element to the reapers, as well as a source of danger to my own limbs. In order, therefore, to quiet me, as seems probable, one of the men directed my attention to our old farm labourer, who was asleep on his back close to the uncut corn, a little apart from the others. I was told that his soul (ened) had gone out of his mouth in the form of a black lizard (madfaỻ đu), and was at that moment wandering among the standing corn. 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. In the meanwhile, I can bear testimony to that “black lizard” being about the most living impression in my “memory.” I see it, even now, wriggling at the edge of the uncut corn. But as to its return, and the waking of the sleeper, my memory is a blank. Such are the tricks of “memory”; and we should be charitable when, with bated breath, the educated no less than the uneducated tell us about the uncanny things they have “seen with their own eyes.” They believe what they say, because they trust their memory: I do not. I feel practically certain I never saw a lizard in my life, in that particular field in which the reapers were.’ Mr. Evans’ story differs, as it has been seen, from my aunt’s version in giving the soul the shape of a lizard; but the little black fellow in the one and the black lizard in the other agree not only in representing the soul as material, but also as forming a complete organism within a larger one. In a word, both pictures must be regarded as the outcome of attempts to depict the sleeper’s inner man.
If names and souls could be regarded as material substances, so could diseases; and I wish to say a word or two now on that subject, which a short story of my wife’s will serve to introduce. She is a native of the Ỻanberis side of Snowdon; and she remembers going one morning, when a small child, across to the neighbourhood of Rhyd-đu with a servant girl called Cadi, whose parents lived there. Now Cadi was a very good servant, but she had little regard for the more civilized manners of the Ỻanberis folk; and when she returned with the child in the evening from her mother’s cottage, she admitted that the little girl was amazed at the language of Cadi’s brothers and sisters; for she confessed that, as she said, they swore like colliers, whereas the little girl had never before heard any swearing worth speaking of. Well, among other things which the little girl saw there was one of Cadi’s sisters having a bad leg dressed: when the rag which had been on the wound was removed, the mother made one of her other children take it out and fix it on the thorn growing near the door. The little girl being inquisitive asked why that was done, and she was told that it was in order that the wound might heal all the faster. She was not very satisfied with the answer, but she afterwards noticed the same sort of thing done in her own neighbourhood. Now the original idea was doubtless that the disease, or at any rate a part of it—and in such matters it will be remembered that a part is quite equal to the whole—was attached to the rag; so that putting the rag out, with a part of the disease attached to it, to rot on the bush, would bring with it the disappearance of the whole disease.
Another and a wider aspect of this practice was the subject of notice in the chapter on the Folklore of the Wells, pp. 359–60, where Mr. Hartland’s hypothesis was mentioned. This was to the effect that if any clothing, or anything else which had been identified with your person, were to be placed in contact with a sacred tree, sacred well, or sacred edifice, it would be involved in the effluence of the divinity that imparts its sacred character to the tree, well, or temple; and that your person, identified with the clothing or other article, would also be involved or soaked in the same divine effluence, and made to benefit thereby. We have since had this kind of reasoning illustrated, pp. 405–7 above, by the modern legend of Crymlyn, and the old one of Ỻyn Ỻiwan; but the difficulty which it involves is a very considerable one: it is the difficulty of taking seriously the infantile order of reasoning which underlies so much of the philosophy of folklore. I cannot readily forget one of the first occasions of my coming, so to say, into living contact with it. It was at Tuam in Connaught, whither I had gone to learn modern Irish from the late Canon Ulick J. Bourke. There one day in 1871 he presented me with a copy of The Bull ‘Ineffabilis’ in Four Languages (Dublin, 1868), containing the Irish version which he had himself contributed. On the blue cover was a gilt picture of the Virgin, inscribed Sine Labe Concepta. No sooner had I brought it to my lodgings than the woman who looked after the house caught sight of it. She was at once struck with awe and admiration; so I tried to explain to her the nature of the contents of the volume. ‘So the Father has given you that holy book!’ she exclaimed; ‘and you are now a holy man!’ I was astonished at the simple and easy way in which she believed holiness could be transferred from one person or thing to another; and it has always helped me to realize the fact that folklorists have no occasion to invent their people, or to exaggerate the childish features of their minds. They are still with us as real men and real women, and at one time the whole world belonged to them; not to mention that those who may, by a straining of courtesy, be called their leaders of thought, hope speedily to reannex the daring few who are trying to tear asunder the bonds forged for mankind in the obscurity of a distant past. I shall never forget the impression made on my mind by a sermon I heard preached some years later in the cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna. That magnificent edifice in a great centre of German culture was crowded with listeners, who seemed thoroughly to enjoy what they heard, though the chief idea which they were asked to entertain could not possibly be said to rise above the level of the philosophy of the Stone Age.
[1] The Oxford Mabinogion, p. 147; Guest’s Mabinogion, ii. 398. [↑]
[2] This may have meant the ‘Blue Slate or Flagstone’; but there is no telling so long as the place is not identified. It may have been in the Pictish district of Galloway, or else somewhere beyond the Forth. Query whether it was the same place as Ỻech Gelyđon in Prydyn, mentioned in Boneđ y Saint: see the Myvyrian Archaiology, ii. 49. [↑]
[3] The story of Kulhwch and Olwen has a different legend which represents Nynio and Peibio changed by the Almighty into two oxen called Ychen Bannaỽc: see the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 121, also my Arthurian Legend, p. 304, and the remarks which are to follow in this chapter with respect to those oxen. [↑]
[4] For the story in Welsh see the Iolo MSS., pp. 193–4, where a footnote tells the reader that it was copied from the book of ‘Iaco ab Dewi.’ From his father’s manuscript, Taliesin Williams printed an abstract in English in his notes to his poem entitled the Doom of Colyn Dolphyn (London, 1837), pp. 119–20, from which it will be found translated into German in the notes to San-Marte’s Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniæ, pp. 402–3. [↑]