Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Cat" to "Celt" / Volume 5, Slice 5

by Various

(iii.) British Arthurian tales, viz. (1) Kilhwch and Olwen; (2) The Dream of Rhonabwy.

(iv.) Later tales of chivalry, viz. (1) The Lady of the Fountain; (2) Peredur, son of Evrawc; (3) Geraint, son of Erbin.

The group of four romances in the first class forms a cycle of legends and is called in the manuscript Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi—the Four Branches of the Mabinogi; so it is only these four tales that can, strictly speaking, be called The Mabinogion. Mabinogion. In these stories we have the relics of the ancient Irish mythology of the Tuatha Dé Danann, sometimes mixed with later myths. The Caer Sidi, where neither disease nor old age affects any one, is the Sid of Irish mythology, the residence of the gods of the Aes Side. It is called in one of the old poems the prison of Gweir, who no doubt represents Gaiar, son of Manandán MacLir, the Atropos who cut the thread of life of Irish mythology. Llyr is the Irish sea-god Lir, and was called Llyr Llediaith, or the half-tongued, implying that he spoke a language only partially intelligible to the people of the country. Bran, the son of Llyr, is the Irish Bran MacAllait, Allait being one of the names of Lir. Manawyddan is clearly the Manandán or Manannán MacLir of Irish mythology. These tales contain other characters which may not have been borrowed from Irish mythology but which are common to both mythologies; for example, Rhiannon, the wife of Pwyll who possessed marvellous birds which held warriors spell-bound for eighty years by their singing, comes from Annwn, or the unseen world, and her son Pryderi gives her, on the death of Pwyll, as a wife to Manawyddan.

Of the second class the first story relates to Lludd, son of Beli the Great, son of Manogan, who became king after his father’s death, while his brother Llevelys becomes king of France and shows his brother how to get rid of the three plagues which devastated Britain:—first, a strange race, the Coranians, whose knowledge was so great that they heard everything no matter how low soever it might be spoken; second, a shriek which came into every house on May eve, caused by the fighting of two dragons; and third, a great giant who carried off all the provisions of the king’s palace every day. The second tale relates how Maxen, emperor of Rome, has a dream while hunting, in which he imagines that he visits Britain, and in Caer Seint or Carnarvon sees a beautiful damsel, Helen, whom he ultimately finds and marries. Both tales are British in origin and are founded on traditions referring to Roman times.

The most important of these tales are undoubtedly those contained in the first class, and the story of Kilhwch and Olwen. The form in which they are found in the Red Book of Hergest is, as we have already said, comparatively speaking, modern. But it is apparent to any one reading these tales that the writers or compilers, as Matthew Arnold has suggested, are “pillaging an antiquity, the secret of which they do not fully possess.” The foundations of the tales are the old Celtic traditions of the gods and the older heroes, and they clearly show Goidelic influence both in the persons they introduce and in their incidents. The tales would at first exist only in oral tradition, and after the advent of Christianity the characters they contain lost their title of divinity and became simply heroes—warriors and magicians. In time the monks began to write these ancient traditions, embellishing them and suppressing no doubt what they considered to be most objectionable. These then are the tales which we now possess—the traditional doings of the old heroes as set in order by Christian writers.

The changes which these later copyists wrought in the substance of the tales fall into two main divisions. In the first place, they attempted to find some connexion between tales or cycles of tales which originally had no connexion whatever, and were therefore forced to invent new incidents or to introduce other incidents from the outside in order to establish this connexion; and secondly, as in the case of the Gododin, the tales were twisted and altered to support references to and explanations of names known to the writer. So we find in the tale of Math vab Mathonwy the incident of the pigs is expanded to explain some place-names which the writer knew. It is this also that gives a local interest to the tales; for instance, Dyvet, the land of Pwyll, has come to be regarded as the home of Hud a Lledrith, of magic and enchantment. Some places in North Wales, especially in the vicinity of Carnarvon, seem to be well known to the writers, and, therefore, to have associated with them to all time the glamour of the Mabinogion.

Besides the scholastic efforts of the monks, which in course of time so greatly changed these old legends, there was another class of men who had no little influence on the form and matter of Welsh, and consequently of European, romance. These were the Welsh jongleurs—the professional story-tellers, against whom the bards proper nursed a deadly hatred because, presumably, their tales drew larger audiences and won greater rewards than the awdlau of the poets. There is little doubt that this order existed in Wales at a very early period, being quite a natural evolution of the older poet who sang in comparatively free metres of the deeds of the great dead. It is these men who invented the term Mabinogi, which is supposed to mean a “tale for young people”; but whatever the word may mean, the fact that they were the stock-in-trade of the professional story-teller will explain a good many of their structural peculiarities.

Thus there existed two distinct classes of tales, though it is to be supposed that the subject matter of both was more or less common; there are, in the first place, the “four branches” and the tales of the second class, and, secondly, tales like those of the third class. With the exception of the Irish influence, which we have already referred to, and some later additions from early continental romance in the third class, we may take it that these three classes are of purely British origin. The pedair cainc are the old tales which were first committed to writing at an early period before the influence of the Armoric Arthur began to be felt, that is to say, about the beginning of the reign of Rhys ab Tewdwr in 1073. The other tales, that is those we have put in the third class, remained for a much longer time unwritten and were not set in writing before the early Arthur of Armoric and British romance had been evolved. This will account for the fact that Arthur is not mentioned in the first class of tales, and that in the third class he is simply a British Arthur. The third class is, therefore, in a sense later than the first and second, but its materials are as old as the oldest of the Mabinogion proper, and they show the influence of Irish mythology to the same extent. In the first class Irish names like Penardim, which have not been assimilated, show conclusively that the tale is a written one, while the eloquence of the descriptions in Kilhwch ac Olwen seem to point to the fact that it was up to a late period a spoken tale. Other such tales there were once, but they have now been lost.

The romances of the fourth class do not claim much notice. They are mostly imitations or translations of Norman French originals, and they belong to the history of European chivalry rather than to the history of Welsh literature.

As literature the Mabinogion may rank among the world’s classics. We cannot here point out their beauties, but it will be sufficient to notice that the unknown writer who gave them their final form was a true artist in every sense of the word. In Branwen verch Lyr, for instance, the whole setting of the story is that of a great tragedy, a tragedy neither Hellenic nor Shakespearean, but the strong and ruthless tragedy of the Celts,—the tragedy of nature among unnatural surroundings, the tragedy which in our times Mr Thomas Hardy has so successfully developed. In this tale, Branwen is introduced as the sister of Manawyddan, the king of all Britain, and as the “fairest maid in the world.” But as the tragedy deepens we read how this woman, dowered with beauty and goodness and nobility of lineage, is simply used as a pawn in a political game, and the full force of the tragedy falls on her own undeserving head. She is subjected to all kinds of indignities in her husband’s court in Ireland, but throughout all her severe trials she preserves the cold and detached haughtiness which characterizes the full-bosomed heroines of the northern sagas; and, in the end, when her brother has delivered her and punished the Irish, and when she has safely reached the shores of her own Môn, she raises her eyes and beholds the two islands, Britain and Ireland. “’Ah God!’ said she, ‘is it well that two islands have been made desolate for my sake?’ And she gave a deep groan and died.” So was her tragedy consummated, and the writer, with a superb tragic touch, mentions the very shape of the grave in which they left her on the bank of the Alaw in Môn.