TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION tt. 891 



' giahts,' but In the name of Tre'r Ceiri it doubtless wafts down to us au echo of 

 tiie personal conceit of the ancient Picts with their skins tattooed with decorative 

 pictures ; and Welsh literature supplies a parallel to the name Yn?/S Prt/dain in 

 one which is found written Ynys y Cetirt, both of -which may be rendered equally 

 the Island of the Picts, but more literally perhaps some such rendering as ' the 

 Island of the Fine Men ' would more nearly hit the mark. Lastly, with the Song 

 of Don must probably be classed the other peoples of the Mabinogion, such as the 

 families of Llyr, and of Pwyll and Rhiannon. 



All 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 with a mixed language, such as Professor 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 1 ought to explain that the four stories of the 

 Mabinogion were 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 administered 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 P 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 recog- 

 nised 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 Ciichulainn. He belonged to Ulster, and whatever other 

 race may have been in that part of Ireland, there were Picts there : 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 ofi 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 Ciichulainn's baby name was Setanta Beg, or the Little Setantian, 

 which points to the country whence Ciichulainn's father had probably come, 

 namely the district where Ptolemy mentions a harbour of the Setantii, somewhere 

 near the mouth of the Kibble, in what is now Lancashire. At the time alluded to 

 in the story I have in view, Ciichulainn 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 Cuchulainn 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.' 



