What are
the three hundred ravens of Owen, and the nine sorceresses of
Peredur, and the dogs of Annwn the Welsh Hades, and the birds of
Rhiannon, whose song was so sweet that warriors remained spell-bound
for eighty years together listening to them? What is the Avanc, the
water-monster, of whom every lake-side in Wales, and her proverbial
speech, and her music, to this day preserve the tradition? What is
Gwyn the son of Nudd, king of fairie, the ruler of the Tylwyth Teg,
or family of beauty, who till the day of doom fights on every first
day of May,--the great feast of the sun among the Celtic peoples,--
with Gwythyr, for the fair Cordelia, the daughter of Lear? What is
the wonderful mare of Teirnyon, which on the night of every first of
May foaled, and no one ever knew what became of the colt? Who is the
mystic Arawn, the king of Annwn, who changed semblance for a year
with Pwyll, prince of Dyved, and reigned in his place? These are no
mediaeval personages; they belong to an older, pagan, mythological
world. The very first thing that strikes one, in reading the
Mabinogion, is how evidently the mediaeval story-teller is pillaging
an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is
like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or
Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which
he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely;-
-stones 'not of this building,' but of an older architecture,
greater, cunninger, more majestical.
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