Personally, however, I should be against doing anything in a hurry; and, considering how little his fellows dare expect from the man who is just waiting to be final and perfect before he commit himself to type, the establishment of an academy invested with the summary powers which have been briefly sketched might, perhaps, after all, conveniently wait a while: my own feeling is that almost any time, say in the latter half of the twentieth century, would do better than this year or the next. In the meantime one must be content to entrust the fortunes of our studies to the combined forces of science and common sense. Judging by what they have achieved in recent years, there is no reason to be uneasy with regard to the time to come, for it is as true to-day as when it was first written, that the best of the prophets of the Future is the Past.
[1] See Guest’s Mabinogion, iii. 255, where, however, Dôn is wrongly treated as a male. [↑]
[2] One has, however, to admit that the same agency may also mar the picture. Since the above was written I have read in Stokes’ Festschrift, pp. 7–19, a very interesting article by L. Chr. Stern, in which he discusses some of the difficulties attaching to the term Tuatha Dé Danann. Among other things he suggests that there was a certain amount of confusion between Danann and dána, genitive of dán, ‘art or profession’—the word meant also ‘lot or destiny,’ being probably of the same origin as the Latin donum, in Welsh dawn, which means a gift, and especially ‘the gift of the gab.’ But it would invert the natural sequence to suppose any such a formula as Tuatha Dé Dána to have preceded Tuatha Dé Danann; for why should anybody substitute an obscure vocable Danann for dána of well-known meaning? Dr. Stern has some doubts as to the Welsh Dôn being a female; but it would have been more satisfactory if he had proved his surmise, or at any rate shown that Dôn has nothing to do with Danann or Donann. I am satisfied with such a passage in the Mabinogi of Math as that where Gwydion, addressing Math, describes Arianrhod, daughter of Dôn, in the words, dy nith uerch dy chỽaer, ‘thy niece daughter of thy sister’: see the Mabinogion, p. 68, and, for similar references to other children of Dôn, consult pp. 59 and 65. Arianrhod is in the older Triads, i. 40, ii. 15, called daughter of Beli, whom one can only have regarded as her father. So for the present I continue to accept Stokes’ rendering of Tuatha Dé Danann as ‘the Folks of the Goddess Danu.’ [↑]
[3] See the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 102; Guest’s trans., ii. 252. The combination occurs also in the Book of Aneurin: see Stephens’ Gododin (London, 1888), p. 322. [↑]
[4] It will be noticed that there is a discrepancy between the gutturals of these two words: tyngu, ‘to swear’ (O. Ir. tongu, ‘I swear’), has ng—the Kulhwch spelling, tynghaf, should probably be tyngaf—while tynghed and its Irish equivalent imply an nc. I do not know how to explain this, though I cannot doubt the fact of the words being treated as cognate. A somewhat similar difference, however, occurs in Welsh dwyn, ‘to bear, carry, steal,’ and dwg, ‘carries, bears’: see the Revue Celtique, vi. 18–9. [↑]
[5] See the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 100, and Guest’s trans., ii. 249, where it is rendered ‘a wife as a helpmate,’ which is more commonplace than suggestive. [↑]
[6] La Cité antique (Paris, 1864), p. 50; see also Joachim Marquardt’s Privatleben der Römer (Leipsic, 1886), pp. 49–51, and among the references there given may be mentioned Dionysius of Halicarnassus, ii. 25. [↑]
[7] See Vigfusson and Powell’s Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i. 126, 181–3, 197; the Prose Edda in Edda Snorronis Sturlæi (Copenhagen, 1848), i. 90–2, 102, 104, 172–86; and Simrock’s Edda (Stuttgart, 1855), pp. 292–3, 295–6, 299, 316–20. [↑]
[8] Two versions of a story to account for the Ultonian couvade have been published with a translation into German, by Prof. Windisch, in the Berichte der k. sächs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (phil.-hist. Classe) for 1884, pp. 338 et seq. Sundry references to the couvade will also be found in my Hibbert Lectures, where certain mythological suggestions made with reference to it require to be reconsidered. But when touching on this point it occurred to me that the wholesale couvade of the Ultonian braves, at one and the same time of the year, implied that the birth of Ultonian children, or at any rate those of them that were to be reared, took place (in some period or other of the history of their race) at a particular season of the year, namely, about the beginning of the winter, that is when food would be most abundant. I have since been confirmed in this view by perusing Westermarck’s work on the History of Human Marriage, and by reading especially his second chapter entitled ‘A Human Pairing Season in Primitive Times.’ For there I find a considerable body of instances in point, together with a summary treatment of the whole question. But in the case of promiscuity, such as originally prevailed doubtless at the Ultonian Court, the question what men were to go into couvade could only be settled by the confinement of them all, wherein we have an alternative if not an additional reason for a simultaneous couvade. [↑]