Nash wants to make it the real author
of the whole poetry, one may say, of the sixth century, as well as
its own. No doubt one cannot produce the texts of the poetry of the
sixth century; no doubt we have this only as the twelfth and
succeeding centuries wrote it down; no doubt they mixed and changed
it a great deal in writing it down. But, since a continuous stream
of testimony shows the enduring existence and influence among the
kindred Celts of Wales and Brittany, from the sixth century to the
twelfth, of an old national literature, it seems certain that much of
this must be traceable in the documents of the twelfth century, and
the interesting thing is to trace it. It cannot be denied that there
is such a continuous stream of testimony; there is Gildas in the
sixth century, Nennius in the eighth, the laws of Howel in the tenth;
in the eleventh, twenty or thirty years before the new literary epoch
began, we hear of Rhys ap Tudor having 'brought with him from
Brittany the system of the Round Table, which at home had become
quite forgotten, and he restored it as it is, with regard to
minstrels and bards, as it had been at Caerleon-upon-Usk, under the
Emperor Arthur, in the time of the sovereignty of the race of the
Cymry over the island of Britain and its adjacent islands.
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