248 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY 



possession of the bird and with the help of his magic 

 wand restored him to his proper shape. Blodeuwedd 

 was turned into an owl ; " and for this reason is the owl 

 hateful unto all birds. And even now the owl is called 

 Blodeuwedd." 1 Sir John Rhys commenting on this 

 and other Celtic stories draws attention to the fact that 

 " none of these stories of shape-shifting and of being 

 born again make any allusion to a soul." It is evident 

 that the eagle in whose form Llew Llawgyffes flew 

 away cannot be regarded as his soul. The decayed 

 state of its body, the festering of the wound and the 

 re transformation into a man are conclusive on this 

 point. Yet the fatal wounding of the hero was foretold 

 as his death and is treated in the story as his death. 

 The story reaches us in a late form and only in a 

 single manuscript of the fourteenth century. But its 

 form is probably not later than the eleventh century ; 

 its substance is much earlier. It has undergone, as 

 Sir John Rhys has unanswerably shown, in the process 

 of transmission some misunderstanding as to the 

 metamorphoses, which appears to have resulted in 

 tampering with the original plot. But the aim of that 

 tampering was to obscure the fact of Llew's death, not 

 to blink his transformation. 



Mr. Aston observes on the stories given above from 

 \heNikongi: "The modern name for ghost testifies 

 to the prevalence of this conception [that of bodily 

 metamorphosis at death] in Japan. It is bake-mona, 

 or ' transformation,' and is applied to foxes which 

 change into human form as well as to the ghosts of 

 the dead and to hobgoblins of uncertain origin. . . . 



1 Llyvyr Coch t 75; Mabinogion, 427; Nutt's ed. 74; Rhys, 

 Celtic F. L. 609. 



