5i6 



NA TURE 



[September 20, 1900 



bodies." This is borne out by the names by which the Picts 

 have been known to the Celts. That of Pict is itself in point, 

 and I shall have something to say of it presently ; but one of 

 the other names was in Irish Criiithni, and in Welsh we have 

 its etymological equivalent in Prydyn or Prydain. These 

 vocables are derived respectively from Irish crtith and Welsh 

 pryd, both meaning shape, form, or figure, and it is an old sur- 

 mise that the Picts were called by those names in allusion to the 

 animal forms pricked on their bodies, as described by Herodian 

 and others. The earlier attested of these two names may be 

 said to be Prydyn or Prydain, which the Welsh used to give in 

 the Middle Ages to the Picts and the Pictland of the North, 

 while the term Yiiys Prydain was retained for Great Britain as 

 a whole, the literal meaning being the island of the Picts : that 

 is the only name which we have in Welsh to this day for this 

 island in which we live— F/yj Prydai7t, "The Picts' Island." 

 Now one detects this word Prydain in effect in the Greek 

 UpiraviKai NTjffot given collectively to all the British Isles by 

 ancient authors, such as Strabo and Diodorus. It may be 

 rendered the Pictish Islands, but a confusion seems to have set 

 in pretty early with the name of the Brittanni or Brittones of 

 South Britain: that is to say, Pretanic, "Pictish," became 

 Briitannic or British ; and this is, historically speaking, the 

 only known justification we have for including Ireland in the 

 comprehensive term " The Brhish Isles," to which Irishmen are 

 sometimes found jocularly to object. 



In the next place may be mentioned the Tuatha De Danann 

 of Irish legend, which cannot always be distinguished from the 

 Picts, as pointed out by Mr. MacRitchie. The tradition about 

 them is, that, when they were overcome in war ]>y Mil and his 

 Milesians, they gave up their life above ground and retired into 

 the hills like the fairies, a story of little more value than that of 

 "the extermination of the Picts of Scotland. In both countries 

 'doubtless the more ancient race survived to amalgamate with 

 ■its conquerors. There was probably some amount of amal- 

 gamation between the Tuatha De Danann or the Picts and the 

 Ivittle Moundsmen ; but it is necessary not to confound them. 

 The Tuatha shared with the Little People a great reputation for 

 magic ; but they differed from them in not being dwarfs or of a 

 swarthy complexion : they are usually represented as fair. In 

 the case of Mider, the fairy king, who comes in some respects 

 near the description of the heroes of the Tuatha De Danann, 

 it is to be noticed that he was a wizard, not a warrior. 



Guided by the kinship of the name of the Tuatha De Danann 

 ■on the Irish side of the sea and that of the Sons of Don on this 

 side, I may mention that the Mabinogion place the Sons of Don 

 •on the seaboard of North Wales, in what is now Carnarvon- 

 shire : more precisely their country was the region extending 

 from the mountains to the sea, especially opposite Anglesey. 

 In that district we have at least three great prehistoric sites all 

 on the coast. First conies the great stronghold on the top of 

 Penmaen Mawr ; then we have the huge mound of Dinas Dinlle, 

 eaten into at present by the sea south-west of the western mouth 

 of the Menai Straits ; and lastly there is the extensive fortifi- 

 cation of Tre'r Ceiri, overlooking Dinlle from the heights of the 

 J2ifl. By its position Tre'r Ceiri belonged to the Sons of Don, 

 :and by its name it seems to me to belong to the Picts, which 

 comes, I believe, to the same thing. Now the name Tre'r 

 rCeiri means the town of the Keiri, and the Welsh word ceiri is 

 used in the district in the sense of persons who are boastful and 

 ostentatious, especially in the matter of personal appearance and 

 fine clothing. It is sometimes also confounded with cewri, 

 " giants," but in the name of Tre'r Ceiri it doubtless wafts down 

 • to us an echo of the personal conceit of the ancient Picts with 

 their skins tattooed with decorative pictures ; and Welsh 

 literature supplies a parallel to the name Ynys Prydain in one 

 Avhich is found written Ynys y Ceuri, both of which may be 

 rendered equally the Island of the Picts, but more literallv 

 perhaps some such rendering as " the Island of the Fine Men " 

 would more nearly hit the mark. Lastly, with the Sons of Don 

 •must probably be classed the other peoples of the Mabinogion, 

 such as the families of Llyr, and of Pwyll and Rhiannon. 



AU these peoples of Britain and Ireland were warlike, and 

 such, so far as one can see, that the Celts, who arrived later, 

 might with them form one mixed people witti a mixed language, 

 such as Prof. Morris Jones has been helping to account for. 



Let us now see for a moment how what we read of the state of 

 society implied in the stories of the Mabinogion will fit into the 

 hypothesis which I have roughly sketched. In the first place I 

 ought to explain that the four stories of the Mabinogion were 



NO. 161 2, VOL. 62] 



probably put together originally in the Goidelic of Wales before 

 they assumed a Brythonic dress. Further, in the form in which 

 we know them, they have passed through the hands of a scribe 

 or editor living in Norman times, who does not always appear to 

 have understood the text on which he was operating. To make 

 out, therefore, what the original Mabinogion meant, one has 

 every now and then to read, so to say, between the lines. Let 

 us take, for example, the Mabinogi called after Branwen, 

 daughter of Llyr. She was sister to Bran, king of Prydain, and 

 to Manawyddan, his brother : she was given to wife to an Irish 

 king named Matholwch, by whom she had a son called Gwern. 

 In Ireland, however, she was, after a time, disgraced, and served 

 in somewhat the same way as the heroine of the Gudrun Lay ; 

 but in the course of the time which she spent in a menial position, 

 doing the baking for the Court and having a box on the ear ad- 

 ministered to her daily by the cook, she succeeded in rearing a 

 starling, which one day carried a letter from her to her brother 

 Bran at Harlech. When the latter realised his sister's position 

 of disgrace, he headed an expedition to Ireland, whereupon 

 Matholwch tried to appease him by making a concession, which 

 was, that he should deliver his kingdom to the boy Gwern. 

 Now the question is, wherein did the concession consist? The 

 redactor of the Mabinogi could, seemingly, not have answered, 

 and he has not made it the easier for any one else to answer. 

 In the first place, instead of calling Gwern son of Matholwch, 

 he should have called him Gwern son of Branwen, after his 

 mother, for the key to the sense is, that, in a society which 

 reckoned birth alone, Gwern was not recognised as any relation 

 to Matholwch at all, whereas, being Bran's sister's son, he was 

 Bran's rightful heir. No such idea, however, was present to 

 the mind of a twelfth-century scribe, nor could it be expected. 



Let us now turn to Irish literature, to wit, to one of the 

 many stories associated with the hero Cuchulainn. He belonged 

 to Ulster, and whatever other race may have been in that part 

 of Ireland, there were Picts thei-e : as a matter of fact Pictish 

 communities survived there in historical times. Now Cuchulainn 

 was not wholly of the same race as the Ultonians around him, 

 for he and his father are sharply marked off from all the other 

 Ultonians as being free from the periodical illness connected 

 with what has been called the couvade, to which the other adult 

 braves of Ulster succumbed for a time every year. Then I may 

 mention that Cuchulainn's baby name was Setanta Beg, or the 

 Little Setantian, which points to the country whence 

 Cuchulainn's father had probably come, namely, the district 

 where Ptolemy mentions a harbour of the Setantii, somewhere 

 near the mouth of the Ribble, in what is now Lancashire. At 

 the time alluded to in the story I have in view, Cuchulainn was 

 young and single, but he was even then a great warrior, and 

 the ladies of Ulster readily fell in love with him ; so one day 

 the nobles of that country met to consider what was to be done, 

 and they agreed that Ci'ichulainn would cause them less anxiety 

 if they could find him a woman who should be his fitting and 

 special consort. At the same time alSo that they feared 

 he might die young, they were desirous that he should leave 

 an heir, " for," as it is put in the story, " they knew that it was 

 from himself his rebirth would be." The Ulster men had a 

 belief, you see, in the return of the heroes of previous 

 generations to be born again ; but we have here two social 

 systems face to face. According to the one to which Ci'ichulainn 

 as a Celt belonged, it was requisite that he should be the father 

 of recognised offspring, for it was only in the person of one of 

 them or of their descendants that he was to be expected back. 

 The story reads as if the distinction was exceptional, and as if 

 the prevailing state of things was wives more or less in common, 

 with descent reckoned according to birth alone. Such is my 

 impression of the picture of the society forming the background 

 to the state of things implied by the conversation attributed to 

 the noblemen of Ulster. Here again one experiences difficulties 

 arising from the fact that the stories have been built up in the 

 form in which we know them by men who worked from the 

 Christian point of view, and it is only by scrutinising, as it were, 

 the chinks and cracks that you can faintly realise what the 

 original structure was like. 



Among other aids to that end one must reckon the instances 

 of men being designated with the help of the mother's name, not 

 the father's : witness that of the King of Ulster in Cuchulainn's 

 time, namely Conchobar mac Nessa, that is to say, Conor, son 

 of a mother named Nessa ; similarly in Wales with (iwydion son 

 of Don. Further we have the help of a considerable number of 

 ancient inscriptions, roughly guessed to date from the fifth or 



