And thenceforth remains he till doom a bard.
Three freights of Prydwen went we thither,
But only seven returned from Caer Sidi.
The incidents in these lines are mostly unintelligible to me, but the incarceration of Gweir or Gwair, together with other imprisonments, including that of Arthur in Caer Oeth and Anoeth (p. 619), are mentioned also in the Triads: see i. 50, ii. 7, 49, iii. 61. It is not improbable that the legend about Gwair located his prison on Lundy, as the Welsh name of that island appears to have been Ynys Wair, ‘Gwair’s Isle.’ Pwyỻ and Pryderi did not belong to Annwn, nor did Pryderi’s friend Manawyđan; but the Mabinogi of Pwyỻ relates how for a whole year Pwyỻ exchanged crown and kingdom with Arawn king of Annwn, from whom he obtained the first breed of domestic pigs for his own people (pp. 69, 525).
In the lowlands of Scotland, together with the Orkneys and Shetlands, the Picts have to a certain extent taken the place of our fairies, and they are colloquially called Pechts. Now judging from the remains there ascribed to the Pechts, their habitations were either wholly underground or else so covered over with stones and earth and grass as to look like natural hillocks and to avoid attracting the attention of strangers. This was helped by making the entrance very low and as inconspicuous as possible. But one of the most remarkable things about these síds is that the cells within them are frequently so small as to prove beyond doubt, that those who inhabited them were of a remarkably short stature, though it is demonstrated by the weight of the stones used, that the builders were not at all lacking in bodily strength[31]. Here we have, accordingly, a small people like our own fairies. In Ireland one of the most famous kings of the fairies was called Mider of Brí Léith, where he resided in a síd or mound in the neighbourhood of Ardagh, in the county of Longford; and thither Irish legend represents him carrying away Étain, queen of Eochaid Airem, king of Ireland during a part of Conchobar MacNessa’s time. Now Eochaid was for a whole year unable to find where she was, but his druid, Dalán, wrote Ogams and at last found it out. Eochaid then marched to Brí Léith, and began to demolish Mider’s síd, whereupon Mider was eventually so frightened that he sent forth the queen to her husband, who then went his way, leaving the mound folk to digest their wrath. For it is characteristic of them that they did not fight, but chose to bide their time for revenge. In this instance it did not arrive till long after Eochaid’s day[32]. I may add that Étain was herself one of the síde or fairies; and one of Mider’s reasons for taking her away was, that she had been his wife in a previous stage of existence. Now it is true that the fairy Mider is described as resembling the other heroes of Irish story, in having golden yellow hair and bright blue eyes[33], but he differs completely from them in being no warrior but a great wizard; and though he is not said to have been of small stature, the dwarfs were not far off. For in describing the poet Atherne, who was notorious for his stinginess (p. 635), the story-teller emphasizes his words by representing him taking from Mider three of his dwarfs and stationing them around his own house, in order that their truculent looks and rude words might drive away anybody who came to seek hospitality or to present an unwelcome request[34], a rôle which recalls that of Edern ab Nuđ’s dwarf already mentioned (p. 672). Here the Irish word used is corr, which is probably to be identified with the Brythonic cor, ‘a dwarf,’ though the better known meaning of corr in Irish is ‘crane or heron.’ From the former also is hardly to be severed the Irish corrguinigh, ‘sorcerers,’ and corrguinacht[35], or the process of cursing to which the corrguinigh resorted, as, for instance, when Néde called forth the fatal blisters on Caier’s face (p. 632). The rôle would seem exactly to suit the little people, who were consummate magicians.
Let me for a moment leave the little people, in order to call attention to another side of this question of race. It has recently been shown[36] by Professor J. Morris Jones, of the University College of North Wales, that the non-Aryan traits of the syntax of our insular Celtic point unmistakably to that of old Egyptian and Berber, together with kindred idioms belonging to the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. He has thereby reduced to articulate speech, so to say, the physiognomical convictions of Professor Sayce (p. 665), to which the reader’s attention has been called. To the linguistic argument he appends a statement cited from a French authority and bearing on the question of descent by birth, to the effect, that when among the Berbers the king dies or is deposed, as happens often enough, it is not his son that is called to succeed, but the son of his sister, as in the case of the historical Picts of Scotland down to the twelfth century or thereabouts. Here I would add, that my attention has been called by Professor Sayce to old Egyptian monuments representing the Libyan chiefs with their bodies tattooed, a habit which seems not to be yet extinct among the Touaregs and Kabyles[37]. Lastly, Mr. Nicholson has recently directed attention to the fact that some princes of ancient Gaul are represented with their faces tattooed on certain coins found in the west of France so far south as the region once occupied by the ancient Pictones. We have a compendious commentary on this in the occurrence of a word Chortonicum in a High German manuscript written before the year 814: I allude to the Wessobrunn Codex at Munich, in which, among a number of geographical names connected with Gaul and other countries, that vocable is so placed as to allow of our referring it to Poitou or to all Gaul as the country once of the ancient Pictones. The great German philologist Pott, who called attention to it, brought it at once into relation with Cruithne, plural Cruithni, ‘the Picts of Britain and Ireland,’ a word which has been explained at p. 281 above[38].
Now at last I come to the question, what pre-Celtic race or races make themselves evident in the mass of things touched on in this and the foregoing chapters? The answer must, I think, recognize at least two. First comes the race of the mound folk, consisting of the short swarthy people variously caricatured in our fairy tales. They formed isolated fractions of a widely spread race possessed of no political significance whatsoever; but, with the inconsistency ever clinging to everything connected with the fairies, the weird and uncanny folk emerging from its underground lairs seems to have exercised on other races a sort of permanent spell of mysteriousness amounting to adoration. In fact, Irish literature tells us that the síde were worshipped (p. 678). Owing to his faculty of exaggeration, combined with his inability to comprehend the little people, the Celt was enabled to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs and brownies, a whole world of wizardry and magic. The real race of the little people forms the lowest stratum which we can reach, to wit, at a level no higher, seemingly, than that of the present-day natives of Central Australia. Thus some of the birth stories of Cúchulainn and Étáin seem to have passed through their hands, and they bear a striking resemblance to certain notions of the Lapps (pp. 657–8). In fact, the nature of the habitations of our little people, together with other points which might be mentioned, would seem at first sight to betoken affinity with the Lapps; but I am warned by experts[39] that there are serious craniological difficulties in the way of any racial comparison with the Lapps, and that one must look rather to the dwarf populations once widely spread over our hemisphere, and still to be found here and there in Europe, as, for example, in Sicily. To come nearer our British Isles, the presence of such dwarfs has been established with regard to Switzerland in neolithic times[40].
The other race may be called Picts, which is probably the earliest of the names given it by the Celts; and their affinities appear to be Libyan, possibly Iberian. It was a warlike stock, and stood higher altogether than the mound inhabitants; for it had a notion of paternity, though, on account of its promiscuity, it had to reckon descent by birth (pp. 654–6). To it probably belonged all the great family groups figuring in the Mabinogion and the corresponding class of literature in Irish: this would include the Danann-Dôn group and the Lir-Ỻyr group, together with the families represented by Pwyỻ and Rhiannon, who were inseparable from the Ỻyr group in Welsh, just as the Lir group was inseparable from the Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish legend (pp. 548–9). The Picts made slaves and drudges of the mound-haunting race, but how far any amalgamation may have taken place between them it is impossible to say. Even without any amalgamation, however, the little people, if employed as nurses to their Pictish lords’ children, could not help leaving their impress in time on the language of the ruling nationality. But it may be that the treatment of the Picts, by Scottish legend, as a kind of fairies really points to amalgamation, though it is not impossible that archæology may be able to classify the remains of the dwellings ascribed to the Pechts, that is, to assign a certain class to the warlike Picts of history and another to the dwarf race of the síds. A certain measure of amalgamation may also be the meaning of the Irish tradition, that when the Milesian Irish came and conquered, the defeated Tuatha Dé Danann gave up their life above ground and retired inside the hills like the fairies. This account of them may be as worthless as the story of the extermination of the Picts of Scotland: both peoples doubtless lived on to amalgamate in time with the conquering race; but it may mean that some of them retreated before the Celts, and concealed themselves after the manner of the little people—in underground dwellings in the less accessible parts of the country. In any case, it may well be that they got their magic and druidism from the dwellers of the síds. In the next place, it has been pointed out (pp. 550–1) how the adjective hên, ‘old, ancient,’ is applied in Welsh to several of the chief men of the Dôn group, and by this one may probably understand that they were old not merely to those who told the stories about them in Welsh, but to those who put those stories together in Goidelic ages earlier. The geography of the Mabinogion gives the prehistoric remains of Penmaen Mawr and Tre’r Ceiri to the Dôn group; but by its name, Tre’r Ceiri should be the ‘Town of the Keiri,’ a word probably referring to the Picts (pp. 279–83): this, so far as it goes, makes the sons of Dôn belong by race to the Picts. Lastly, it is the widely spread race of the Picts, conquered by the Celts of the Celtican or Goidelic branch and amalgamating with their conquerors in the course of time, that has left its non-Aryan impress on the syntax of the Celtic languages of the British Isles.
These, it is needless to say, are conjectures which I cannot establish; but possibly somebody else may. For the present, however, they cannot fail to suggest a moral, habitually ignored with a light heart by most people—including the writer of these words—that men in his plight, men engaged in studies which, owing to a rapid accumulation of fresh facts or the blossoming of new theories, are in a shifting condition, should abstain from producing books or anything longer than a magazine article now and then. Even such minor productions should be understood to be liable to be cast into a great bonfire lit once a year, say on Halloween. This should help to clear the air of mistaken hypotheses, whether of folklore and myth or of history and language, and also serve to mark Nos Calangaeaf as the commencement of the ancient Celtic year. The business of selecting the papers to be saved from the burning might be delegated to an academy constituted, roughly speaking, on the lines of Plato’s aristocracy of intellect. Such academy, once in the enjoyment of its existence, would also find plenty of work in addition to the inquisitional business which I have suggested: it should, for example, be invested with summary jurisdiction over fond parents who venture to show any unreasonable anxiety to save their mental progeny from the annual bonfire. The best of that class of writers should be ordered by the academy to sing songs or indite original verse. As for the rest, some of them might be told off to gesticulate to the gallery, and some to administer the consolations of platitude to stragglers tired of the march of science. There is a mass of other useful work which would naturally devolve on an academy of the kind here suggested. I should be happy, if space permitted, to go through the particulars one by one, but let a single instance suffice: the academy might relieve us of the painful necessity of having seriously to consider any further the proposal that professors found professing after sixty should be shot. This will serve to indicate the kind of work which might advantageously be entrusted to the august body which is here but roughly projected.
There are some branches of learning in the happy position of having no occasion for such a body academical. 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. So with regard to him who carries his craze into the more material departments of such a science as chemistry: he may be expected to blow out his own eyes, for the almighty molecule executes its own vengeance. ‘But,’ to quote again from Mr. Freeman, if that man’s ‘craze had been historical or philological’—and above all if it had to do with the science of man or of myth—‘he might have put forth notions quite as absurd as the notion that the earth is flat, and many people would not have been in the least able to see that they were absurd. If any scholar had tried to confute him we should have heard of “controversies” and “differences of opinion.” ’ In fact, the worst that happens to the false prophet who shines in any such a science is, that he has usually only too many enthusiastic followers. The machinery is, so to say, not automatic, and hence it is that we want the help of an academy. But even supposing such an academy established, no one need feel alarmed lest opportunities enough could no longer be found for cultivating the example of those of the early Christians who had the rare grace to suffer fools gladly.