92 Notes on the Catrail. By Miss Russell. 



of the Cymri.) The literal translations are executed by distin- 

 guished Welsh scholars, and Mr Skene did not in any way 

 interfere in them himself, which was no doubt judicious in the 

 circumstances, his theory as editor being, that much of the 

 obscurity of the poems is owing to its having been forgotten that 

 many of them relate to Scottish Cumbria, not to Wales or Corn- 

 wall. This seems probable enough when so stated, and I do not 

 know that it has ever been seriously disputed; but it is so 

 opposed to the received legends — real traditions they are not — 

 that it has never attracted much general attention, though it has 

 had its effect on literature; and the title "The Four Ancient 

 Books of Wales" though I do not know exactly what other 

 could have replaced it, does not attract Scotch readers. The 

 hardest part of it is, that while the A.rthurian legends — for the 

 theory in great part concerns what may be called the historical 

 foundations of the Arthurian romance —have been given up with 

 great reluctance in the west of England, or not given up at all, 

 even on the alleged localities being shown to be impossible ; no- 

 body in the south of Scotland wants them at all ; on the Yarrow 

 in particular they would be considered altogether superfluous. 

 I rather imagine that after the final conquest of Cumbria, the 

 consciousness that something was lost gradually suggested the 

 myth of the Lyonesse, the region between Cornwall and the 

 Scilly Isles, in which Arthur's last battle is said to have been 

 fought, though there was no such land in the time of the 

 Romans, and Sir Charles Lyell pronounced any recent invasion 

 of the sea there to be geologically very improbable. And the 

 same explanation applies to a similar mythical submerged dis- 

 trict off the coast of Wales, in Cardigan Bay. It is conjectured, 

 in one of the notes to the Welsh poems, that the name of the 

 supposed district, Gwaelod, or the Sunken, may be a transposi- 

 tion of the letters Gwaedol, or Wedale, the old name of the dis- 

 trict between the Gala and the Leader in Scotland. 



It is of importance to observe that Arthur's campaigns in Scot- 

 land (he being apparently a Cornish Briton, and holding the 

 office of Guledic, or Imperator, or leader against the Saxons, a 

 remains of Roman organization which has been completely for- 

 gotten, unless it is what the romances mean by the Pendragon ; 

 Pendragon in reality being the name of a castle, which Uthyr 

 may have had as his stronghold) Arthur's campaigns in Scotland 

 do not seem to have been forgotten till^ the fallacies of the 



