[45] The Welsh spelling is caws pob, ‘baked (or roasted) cheese,’ so called in parts of South Wales, such as Carmarthenshire, whereas in North Wales it is caws pobi. It is best known to Englishmen as ‘Welsh rabbit,’ which superior persons ‘ruling the roast’ in our kitchens choose to make into rarebit: how they would deal with ‘Scotch woodcock’ and ‘Oxford hare,’ I do not know. I should have mentioned that copies of the Hundred Mery Talys are exceedingly scarce, and that the above, which is the seventy-sixth in the collection, has here been copied from the Cymmrodor, iii. 115–6, where we have the following sapient note:—‘Cause bobe, it will be observed, is St. Peter’s rendering of the phrase Caws wedi ei bobi. The chief of the Apostles apparently had only a rather imperfect knowledge of Welsh, which is not to be wondered at, as we know that even his Hebrew was far from giving satisfaction to the priests of the capital.’ From these words one can only say that St. Peter would seem to have known Welsh far better than the author of that note, and that he had acquired it from natives of South Wales, perhaps from the neighbourhood of Kidwelly. I have to thank my friend Mr. James Cotton for a version of the cheese story in the Bodleian Library, namely in Malone MS. 19 (p. 144), where a certain master at Winchester School has put it into elegiacs which make St. Peter cry out with the desired effect: Tostus io Walli, tostus modo caseus. [↑]
[46] See Choice Notes from ‘Notes and Queries,’ pp. 117–8. [↑]
[47] For instance, when Cúchulainn had fallen asleep under the effect of fairy music, Fergus warned his friends that he was not to be disturbed, as he seemed to be dreaming and seeing a vision: see Windisch’s Irische Texte, p. 208; also the Revue Celtique, v. 231. For parallels to the two stories in this paragraph, see Tylor’s first chapter on Animism in his Primitive Culture, and especially the legend of King Gunthram, i. 442. [↑]
CHAPTER XI
Folklore Philosophy
To look for consistency in barbaric philosophy is to disqualify ourselves for understanding it, and the theories of it which aim at symmetry are their own condemnation. Yet that philosophy, within its own irregular confines, works not illogically.—Edward Clodd.
It will be remembered that in the last chapter a story was given, p. 602, which represented the soul as a little fellow somewhat resembling a monkey; and it will probably have struck the reader how near this approaches the idea prevalent in medieval theology and Christian art, which pictured the soul as a pigmy or diminutive human being. I revert to this in order to point out that the Christian fancy may possibly have given rise to the form of the soul as represented in the Welsh story which I heard in Cardiganshire and Professor Sayce in Monmouthshire; but this could hardly be regarded as touching the other Cardiganshire story, in which the soul is likened to a madfaỻ or lizard. Moreover I would point out that a belief incompatible with both kinds of story is suggested by one of the uses of the Welsh word for soul, namely, enaid. I heard my father, a native of the neighbourhood of Eglwys Fach, near the estuary of the Dyfi, use the word of some portion of the inside of a goose, but I have forgotten what part it was exactly. Professor Anwyl of Aberystwyth, however, has sent me the following communication on the subject:—‘I am quite familiar with the expression yr enaid, “the soul,” as applied to the soft flesh sticking to the ribs inside a goose. The flesh in question has somewhat the same appearance and structure as the liver. I have no recollection of ever hearing the term yr enaid used in the case of any bird other than a goose; but this may be a mere accident, inasmuch as no one ever uses the term now except to mention it as an interesting curiosity.’ This application of the word enaid recalls the use of the English word ‘soul’ in the same way, and points to a very crude idea of the soul as material and only forming an internal portion of the body: it is on the low level of the notion of an English pagan of the seventeenth century who thought his soul was ‘a great bone in his body[1].’ It is, however, not quite so foolish, perhaps, as it looks at first sight; and it reminds one of the Mohammedan belief that the os coccygis is the first formed in the human body, and that it will remain uncorrupted till the last day as a seed from which the whole is to be renewed in the resurrection[2].
On either savage theory, that the soul is a material organism inside a bulkier organism, or the still lower one that it is an internal portion of the larger organism itself, the idea of death would be naturally much the same, namely, that it was what occurred when the body and the soul became permanently severed. I call attention to this because we have traces in Welsh literature of a very different notion of death, which must now be briefly explained. The Mabinogi of Math ab Mathonwy relates how Math and Gwydion made out of various flowers a most beautiful woman whom they named Blodeuweđ[3], that is to say ἀνθώδης, or flowerlike, and gave to wife to Ỻew Ỻawgyffes; how she, as it were to prove what consummate artists they had been, behaved forthwith like a woman of the ordinary origin, in that she fell in love with another man named Gronw Pebyr of Penỻyn; and how she plotted with Gronw as to the easiest way to put her husband to death. Pretending to be greatly concerned about the welfare of Ỻew and very anxious to take measures against his death (angheu), she succeeded in finding from him in what manner one could kill (ỻađ) him. His reply was, ‘Unless God kill me … it is not easy to kill me’; and he went on to describe the strange attitude in which he might be killed, namely, in a certain position when dressing after a bath: then, he said, if one cast a spear at him it would effect his death (angheu), but that spear must have been a whole year in the making, during the hour only when the sacrifice was proceeding on Sunday. Blodeuweđ thanked heaven, she said, to find that all this was easy to avoid. But still her curiosity was not satisfied; so one day she induced Ỻew to go into the bath and show exactly what he meant. Of course she had Gronw with his enchanted spear in readiness, and at the proper moment, when Ỻew was dressing after the bath, the paramour cast his spear at him. He hit him in the side, so that the head of the spear remained in Ỻew, whilst the shaft fell off: Ỻew flew away in the form of an eagle, uttering an unearthly cry. He was no more seen until Gwydion, searching for him far and wide in Powys and Gwyneđ, came to Arfon, where one day he followed the lead of a mysterious sow, until the beast stopped under an oak at Nantỻe. There Gwydion found the sow devouring rotten flesh and maggots, which fell from an eagle whenever the bird shook himself at the top of the tree. He suspected this was Ỻew, and on singing three englyns to him the eagle came lower and lower, till at last he descended on Gwydion’s lap. Then Gwydion struck him with his wand, so that he assumed his own shape of Ỻew Ỻawgyffes, and nobody ever saw a more wretched looking man, we are told: he was nothing but skin and bones. But the best medical aid that could be found in Gwyneđ was procured, and before the end of the year he was quite well again.
Here it will be noticed, that though the fatal wounding of Ỻew, at any rate visibly, means his being changed into the form of an eagle, it is treated as his death. When the Mabinogion were edited in their present form in a later atmosphere, this sort of phraseology was not natural to the editor, and he shows it when he comes to relate how Gwydion punished Blodeuweđ, as follows:—Gwydion, having overtaken her in her flight, is made to say, ‘I shall not kill thee (Ny lađaf i di): I shall do what is worse for thee, and that is to let thee go in the form of a bird.’ He let her go in fact in the form of an owl. According to the analogy of the other part of the story this meant his having killed her: it was her death, and the words ‘I shall not kill thee’ are presumably not to be regarded as belonging to the original story. To come back to the eagle, later Welsh literature, re-echoing probably an ancient notion, speaks of a nephew of Arthur, called Eliwlod, appearing to Arthur as an eagle seated likewise among the branches of an oak. He claims acquaintance and kinship with Arthur, but he has to explain to him that he has died: they have a dialogue[4] in the course of which the eagle gives Arthur some serious Christian advice. But we have in this sort of idea doubtless the kind of origin to which one might expect to trace the prophesying eagle, such as Geoffrey mentions more than once: see his Historia, ii. 9 and xii. 18[5]. Add to these instances of transformation the belief prevalent in Cornwall almost to our own day, that Arthur himself, instead of dying, was merely changed by magic into a raven, a form in which he still goes about; so that a Cornishman will not wittingly fire at a raven[6]. This sort of transformation is not to be severed from instances supplied by Irish literature, such as the story of Tuan mac Cairill, related in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 15a–16b. Tuan relates to St. Finnen of Magbile, in the sixth century, the early history of Ireland from the time of Partholan down, which he was enabled to do because he had lived through it all, passing from one form to another without losing his memory. First of all he was a man, and when old age had come upon him he was transformed into a stag of the forest. For a while he was youthful and vigorous; but again old age overtook him, and he next became a wild boar. When old age and decrepitude overcame him next he was renewed in the form of a powerful bird, called in the original seig. The next renewal was in the form of a salmon: here the manuscript fails us. The form of a salmon was also the one taken by the woman Liban when she was overwhelmed by the flood, which became the body of water known as Lough Neagh: her handmaid at the same time became an otter (fo. 40b). There was an ancient belief that the soul leaves the body like a bird flying out of the mouth of the man or woman dying, and this maybe said to approach the favourite Celtic notion illustrated by the transformations here instanced, to which may be added the case of the Children of Lir, pp. 93, 549, changed by the stroke of their wicked stepmother’s wand into swans, on Lough Erne. The story has, in the course of ages, modified itself into a belief that the swans haunting that beautiful water at all seasons of the year, are the souls of holy women who fell victims to the repeated visitations of the pagan Norsemen, when Ireland was at their cruel mercy[7]. The Christian form which the Irish peasant has given the legend does not touch its relevancy here. Perhaps one might venture to generalize, that in these islands great men and women were believed to continue their existence in the form of eagles, hawks or ravens, swans or owls. But what became of the souls of the obscurer majority of the people? For an answer to this perhaps we can only fall back on the Psyche butterfly, which may here be illustrated by the fact that Cornish tradition applies the term ‘pisky’ both to the fairies and to moths, believed in Cornwall by many to be departed souls[8]. So in Ireland: a certain reverend gentleman named Joseph Ferguson, writing in 1810 a statistical account of the parish of Ballymoyer, in the county of Armagh, states that one day a girl chasing a butterfly was chid by her companions, who said to her: ‘That may be the soul of your grandmother[9].’ This idea, to survive, has modified itself into a belief less objectionably pagan, that a butterfly hovering near a corpse is a sign of its everlasting happiness.
The shape-shifting is sometimes complicated by taking place on the lines of rebirth: as cases in point may be mentioned Lug, reborn as Cúchulainn[10], and the repeated births of Étáin. This was rendered possible in the case of Cúchulainn, for instance, by Lug taking the form of an insect which was unwittingly swallowed by Dechtere, who thereby became Cúchulainn’s mother; and so in the case of Étáin[11] and her last recorded mother, the queen of Etar king of Eochraidhe. On Welsh ground we have a combination of transformations and rebirth in the history of Gwion Bach in the story of Taliessin. Gwion was in the service of the witch Ceridwen; but having learned too much of her arts, he became the object of her lasting hatred; and the incident is translated as follows in Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion, iii. 358–9:—‘And she went forth after him, running. And he saw her, and changed himself into a hare and fled. But she changed herself into a greyhound and turned him. And he ran towards a river, and became a fish. And she in the form of an otter-bitch chased him under the water, until he was fain to turn himself into a bird of the air. Then she, as a hawk, followed him and gave him no rest in the sky. And just as she was about to swoop upon him, and he was in fear of death, he espied a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and he dropped amongst the wheat, and turned himself into one of the grains. Then she transformed herself into a high-crested black hen, and went to the wheat and scratched it with her feet, and found him out and swallowed him. And, as the story says, she bore him nine months, and when she was delivered of him, she could not find it in her heart to kill him, by reason of his beauty. So she wrapped him in a leathern bag, and cast him into the sea to the mercy of God on the twenty-ninth day of April. And at that time the weir of Gwyđno was on the strand between Dyvi and Aberystwyth, near to his own castle, and the value of an hundred pounds was taken in that weir every May eve.’ The story goes on to relate how Gwyđno’s son, Elphin, found in the weir the leathern bag containing the baby, who grew up to be the bard Taliessin. But the fourteenth century manuscript called after the name of Taliessin teems with such transformations as the above, except that they are by no means confined to the range of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. I heard an amusing suggestion of metempsychosis the other day: it is related of a learned German, who was sitting at table, let us say, in an Oxford hotel, with most of his dinner in front of him. Being, however, a man of immediate foresight, and anxious to accustom himself to fine English, he was not to be restrained by scruples as to any possible discrepancy between words like bekommen and become. So to the astonishment of everybody he gravely called out to the waiter, ‘Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh rabbit.’ This would have done admirably for the author of certain poems in the Book of Taliessin, where the bard’s changes are dwelt upon. From them it appears that the transformation might be into anything that the mind of man could in any way individualize. Thus Taliessin claims to have been, some time or other, not only a stag or a salmon, but also an axe, a sword, and even a book in a priest’s hand, or a word in writing. On the whole, however, his history as a grain of corn has most interest here, as it differs from that which has just been given: the passage[12] is sadly obscure, but I understand it to say that the grain was duly sown on a hill, that it was reaped and finally brought on the hearth, where the ears of corn were emptied of their grains by the ancient method of dexterously applying a flame to them[13]. But while the light was being applied the grain which was Taliessin, falling from the operator’s hand, was quickly received and swallowed by a hostile hen, in whose interior it remained nine nights; but though this seemingly makes Taliessin’s mother a bird, he speaks of himself, without mentioning any intervening transformation, as a gwas or young man. Such an origin was perhaps never meant to be other than incomprehensible. Lastly as to rebirth, I may say that it has often struck me that the Welsh habit, especially common in Carnarvonshire and Anglesey, of one child in a family being named, partially or wholly, after a grandparent, is to be regarded as a trace of the survival from early times of a belief in such atavism as has been suggested above[14].