The materials
of these tales are not peculiar to the Welsh.' And then Mr. Nash
points out, with much learning and ingenuity, how certain incidents
of these tales have their counterparts in Irish, in Scandinavian, in
Oriental romance. He says, fairly enough, that the assertions of
Taliesin, in the famous Hanes Taliesin, or History of Taliesin, that
he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower of Babel, and with
Alexander of Macedon, 'we may ascribe to the poetic fancy of the
Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance
into its present form. We may compare these statements of the
universal presence of the wonder-working magician with those of the
gleeman who recites the Anglo-Saxon metrical tale called the
Traveller's Song.' No doubt, lands the most distant can be shown to
have a common property in many marvellous stories. This is one of
the most interesting discoveries of modern science; but modern
science is equally interested in knowing how the genius of each
people has differentiated, so to speak, this common property of
theirs; in tracking out, in each case, that special 'variety of
development,' which, to use Mr. Nash's own words, 'the formative
pressure of external circumstances' has occasioned; and not the
formative pressure from without only, but also the formative pressure
from within.
Pages:
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78