# Celtic Stories/Note on Sources

NOTE ON SOURCES
These tales are founded upon ancient ones, the work of Welshmen and Irishmen when Wales and Ireland were entirely independent of England. The Welsh tales come from a book now known as the Mabinogion. They were written down at the end of the Middle Ages, and translated from Welsh into English by Lady Guest in the nineteenth century. The original Welsh manuscript (called 'The Red Book of Hergest', because it was once at Hergest in Radnor) belongs to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but the stories had been told over and over again, and probably written down many times, before they were copied into 'The Red Book'. They were being told in the years between the Norman conquest of England and Edward I's conquest of Wales. But the subjects of them were much earlier. Even those who told the tales would, perhaps, have been unable to say when a man as huge as Bran was ruling at Harlech, nor did they consider the matter any more than children to-day consider the tale of 'Jack the Giant-killer' in its relation to scientific fact. But in 'Kilhugh and Olwen' and 'The Dream of Rhonabwy' King Arthur appears. The men who told these two stories were probably thinking of a glorious heroic age, when Arthur was a supreme king, resisting the Roman and Saxon invader. They gave a strange reality to some of the wonders by connecting them with actual places in Wales, so that a man to-day could walk in the steps of Kilhugh and Rhonabwy. Even 'The Dream of Maxen', which is about a Roman emperor, comes to its height and to its end in Wales, and in places which are still to be seen. Very little was known to the mediaeval writers about the age of the Saxon invaders and the seventh-century King Arthur, except that it was one of greater men than any that were living; and therefore they described their heroes as if they were Welsh and Norman warriors in dress and manners, but of greater stature and prowess. They were certain that Arthur had once been king in Britain, and they were ready to come to blows with men who denied it. In one story, 'The Dream of Rhonabwy,' they put along with the King two young princes, Madoc and Iorwerth, who actually belonged to the twelfth century.
The name 'Mabinogion' means something like 'twice-told tales': it means precisely the old tales on which a young writer practised. ​So in Ireland, the tale of Deirdre was one which the poets had to know, and the Irish told their tales over and over again, age after age, adding to them and taking away, as the Welsh did. They were still more clear about their heroes, though the stories as we have them are very little earlier than the Welsh, and were therefore written down long after the events were supposed to have taken place. Consequently, the kind of life described, when it is not in our eyes impossible, is the life of the storyteller's own age in Christian Ireland. As in 'Kilhugh', so in one of the Irish tales, 'There is scarcely a hill, valley, river, rock, mound, or cave in the line of country from Emania in the present county of Armagh to Lusk in that of Dublin, of which the ancient and often varying names and history are not to be found' in it. So also the stories of Cohoolin are said to be invaluable for their details of mediaeval Irish life. Cohoolin and the King Conachoor were supposed to have lived at about the time of Christ: one story relates that Conachoor died of rage on hearing of the death of Christ. After that heroic age followed the Ossianic. The date of Finn's death is given in an old Irish book, called The Annals of the Four Masters, as A.D. 283. The Irish have long believed in the followers of Finn as an order of Knighthood under the Kings of Ireland, which came to an end with the battle of Gabhra in A.D. 283, in the reign of Cairbre, the son of King Cormac: a modern scholar was certain that Finn was as real as Julius Caesar. Probably Finn did exist, or some one of the same name; he is as real as Agamemnon; and as for Arthur, is it not told that he did not die, but passed away? The tales of this Ossianic age were supposed to have been the work of Ossian himself, one of the Fenians, and he was connected with historic times by his meeting with St. Patrick, who belonged to the fourth and fifth centuries. We cannot tell how near to that age lived the first tellers of the tales. Many early manuscripts in Ireland were destroyed by the Norse invaders, and not only did the Norsemen probably destroy old versions of the tales, but they unconsciously changed the tales by figuring in them afterwards. The Norsemen were the storytellers' 'Lochlanners', and their presence shows that the stories took their present form after the invasions. But they were not made then. These Irish and Welsh tales were handed down from generation to generation, like the games of children. They were only in part consciously 'made up'. 'Out of nothing is nothing made' is true of airiest fiction. It is one of the charms under the surface of these stories that we can feel, even if we can never trace, a pedigree of dimmest antiquity ​behind them. Matthew Arnold speaks of the mediaeval storyteller in the Mabinogion pillaging 'an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret'. This is clear in 'The Dream of Rhonabwy', when the storyteller says that 'no one knows the dream without a book, neither bard, nor gifted seer; because of the various colours that were upon the horses, and the many wondrous colours of the arms and of the panoply, and of the precious scarfs, and of the virtue-bearing stones'. It is clearer in the tale of Bran and in the Irish tales; the narrator is speaking of gods or demi-gods where he thinks he is speaking of men. He did not 'make up' these tales. Very little in any of them is 'made up', though they must have been modified to accord with changing taste and custom and belief and were told only for delight. These marvellous men of old time, as the mediaeval storyteller thought them, are now said to be the gods of much earlier pagan generations, changed by the wear and growth of centuries who knew them not as gods. The unravelling of these changes in order to trace the origin of the stories, or at least as early as possible a form of them, is a highly specialized scientific sport. The result of it is that Conachoor turns out to be 'doubtless not a man', but a Celtic Zeus; and his sister Dectora, the mother of Cohoolin, is in one place actually called a goddess. Cohoolin himself is discovered to be a 'sun-hero'; the blacksmith's dog is a sort of a Cerberus; and the gaebolg is not the impossible invention of an author's cruel ingenuity, but 'mythologically speaking, the direction of it from the water upwards would seem to indicate as its interpretation the appearance of the sun as seen from the Plain of Muirthemne (Moorhevna), when rising out of the sea to pierce with his rays the clouds above'. I am quoting from Professor Rhys' Hibbert Lectures. So Finn, again, is 'the counterpart of the Welsh god Gwyn, king of the fairies and the dead', and both of them are shown to have learnt wisdom by sucking their thumbs. The enormous Bran is a 'Celtic Janus'.
Many of these tales have been re-written by poets and others in our own time. I have kept them as nearly as possible in their mediaeval form.