510 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 301. 



Tre'r Ceiri 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 cew7'i, '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 decora- 

 tive pictures ; and Welsh literature supplies 

 a parallel to the name Yiiys Prydain in one 

 which is found written Ynys y Geuri, 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 Sons of D6n must probably 

 be classed the other peoples of the Mabino- 

 gion, such as the families of Llyr, and of 

 Pwyll and Ehiannon. 



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, I ought to ex- 

 plain 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 liv- 

 ing 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 Bran- 

 wen, 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 G-wern. 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 Har- 

 lech. When the latter realized 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 

 recognized 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 

 vfit, to one of the many stories associated 

 with the hero Ctichulainn. He belonged to 

 Ulster, and whatever other race may have 

 been in that part of Ireland, there were 

 Picts there : as a mater of fact, Pictish com- 

 munities survived there in historical times. 

 Now Ctichulainn 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 



