NATURE 



485 



THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 1901. 



CELTIC TRADITIONS AND ANTHROPOLOGY. 

 Celtic Folk-lore, Welsh and Manx. By John Rhys, M.A., 



D.Litt., Hon. LL.D. of the University of Edinburgh, 



Professor of Celtic, Principal of Jesus College, Oxford. 



2 vols., paged consecutively. Pp. xlviii + 718. (Oxford: 



Clarendon Press, 1901.) Price 215-. 

 T) ROF. RHYS has done well to republish, in these 

 -L two handsome volumes, the collections of Celtic 

 Folk-lore contributed by him to the pages of Y Cymmrodor 

 and the Transactions of the Folk-lore Society. For not 

 only are they thus rendered accessible to a larger number 

 of readers, but he has enriched them with considerable 

 additions, and a valuable commentary. Had he seen 

 his way to recast the original articles, with a view to a 

 more complete classification of their contents, it would 

 have avoided some repetition, and would have set the 

 relations of the various tales in a clearer light. But we 

 must be grateful for the work in its present form. To 

 recast the articles would have been a troublesome pro-" 

 cess, and perhaps no classification would have been 

 entirely satisfactory. Moreover, we should certainly 

 have missed in any such rearrangement much of the 

 genial charm of the collections as they first came from 

 his pen, derived from the personal narrative of the 

 collector. To a large number of his readers this would 

 have been a sacrifice they might not be willing to make, 

 even for the sake of theoretical order. When, however, 

 the severely virtuous student, who, intent only on what 

 he is to learn, would have preferred to make this or any 

 other sacrifice, has calmed his ruffled feelings and settled 

 down to his task of learning, he will speedily realise how 

 important a contribution to anthropology, and in particular 

 to Celtic archaeology, he has before him. 



The chief intent which runs through the commentary 

 is to determine so'far as possible the race-elements that 

 have gone to fashion the composite people of Wales, now 

 so thoroughly welded together in historical memories and 

 in political, religious and artistic aspirations. To this 

 Prof. Rhys makes the whole of his collection subservient. 

 Though he modestly disclaims the title of " folk-lorist," 

 no living man has probably so wide a knowledge of the 

 folk-lore of his native country, and certainly none has 

 brought to its elucidation a scholarship so profound. 

 His open-mindedness and candour are as remarkable as 

 his scholarship. Consequently the present work is 

 greatly in advance of his Hibbert Lectures as an 

 exposition of the origin and real meaning of Celtic tradi- 

 tions. His theory, as summed up in the final chapter, is 

 that in these traditions we have traces of at least two pre- 

 Celtic races : first, a dwarf population inhabiting under- 

 ground dwellings, and at a level of civilisation no higher 

 than that of the present-day inhabitants of Central 

 Australia ; and secondly, the enigmatical people over 

 whom Monkbarns and his guest fought with so much 

 vigour, the Picts, " whose affinities appear to be Libyan, 

 possibly Iberian." That a dwarf race was widely spread 

 over this island cannot be questioned. Whether the bee- 

 hive huts of Scotland and Ireland belonged to them is 

 not quite so certain. In Roman times, and in the south 

 NO. 1638, VOL. 63] 



of what is now England, they occupied ordinary wattle- 

 and-daub huts. Prof. Rhys attributes wholly or partially 

 to them birth-stories like those of Cuchulainn and Etain, 

 of which the chief characteristics are virgin-birth and re- 

 incarnation. He acutely points out that in the Cuchulainn 

 story we have " two social systems face to face in Ulster," 

 one of which recognised fatherhood, while the other did 

 not. But alike the story-incidents and the corresponding 

 superstitions are known practically all over the world. It 

 is therefore impossible to fix the dwarf-race with respon- 

 sibility for them. Besides, upon his own showing, the 

 social organisation of the Picts was founded upon mother- 

 right, and it is.to the Picts that Scottish tradition assigns 

 the mounds as dwellings. 



In my opinion folk-lore seldom yields trustworthy evi- 

 dence of race. What it does yield is evidence, often 

 of the most decisive weight, of social states, of belief 

 and practice. That the Welsh are descended from a 

 people who were organised on the basis of mother-right, 

 and believed in transformation, Prof Rhys has rendered 

 fairly certain from the traditions embodied in their litera- 

 ture, or found by himself in the mouths of the peasantry. 

 Whence the organisation and belief in question were 

 derived must be discovered, if at all, from evidence of 

 another kind, that is to say, from philology and archae- 

 ology. With the aid of his rare philological learning 

 the author has illuminated many a dark place in the 

 Mabinogion and in the folk-tales, though he has failed 

 to solve the riddle which would, perhaps, tell us more 

 of the origin of the fairies and of the descent of the 

 Cymric people than any other incident in the stories, 

 namely, the riddle of the non-Welsh names Penelope, 

 Belene and others attributed to the fairy heroines of so 

 many Welsh tales. 



If, however, the folk-tales of the present day fail to 

 yield sure evidence of race, some of those embodied in 

 the Mabinogion do. But it is to be obtained rather in 

 the names than in the incidents. It is common ground, 

 for example, between Welsh and Irish Celticists, that 

 there is a Goidelic element in the Mabinogion. The 

 question is whether the stories were imported ready- 

 made from Ireland, or grew on the soil of Wales and 

 were adopted and adapted by the Cymric-speaking Celts 

 from the Goidelic and Goidelised peoples they found in 

 occupation of the country when they invaded it. The 

 chapter on place-name stories (and in particular Prof 

 Rhys' analysis of the Hunting of the Twrch Trwyth) has 

 gone far to settle this question. It must now be held, 

 as the better opinion, that the Mabinogion stories which 

 point most strongly to Irish influence, or indeed Irish 

 origin, were taken over from the Goidelic substratum of 

 the nation. 



It would be easy to linger on many a delightful page of 

 these fascinating volumes. Prof. Rhys always writes with 

 humour. His gravest discourses are tempered with a 

 smile. But, for all that, they are none the less grave in 

 purpose. He has done more than any other man to 

 rouse in his fellow-countrymen an intelligent interest in 

 their history, language and literature. In conjunction 

 with Mr. Brynmor Jones he has placed the study of 

 Welsh history and institutions at last on something like a 

 sound basis. So here he begins by laying down the 

 maxim that — 



