Chapter I: Introduction

In the library of Jesus College, Oxford, is an ancient Welsh MS. called _Llyfr[1] Coch[2] O Hergest_;[3] that is, _The Red Book of Hergest_. This MS. was written in the fourteenth century, though some of the compositions which it has collected are of a much earlier date. It contains a number of poems, together with a body of prose romances called _Mabinogion_.[4]

[Footnote 1: "Llyfr" means _book_ (compare French _livre_, Latin _liber_). Perhaps I can partially indicate the impression which the word makes upon an English ear when pronounced in Welsh, thus: consider it composed of two syllables, _Lly_ and _fr_; for the first syllable reproduce the sound of _yie_ in the English word _yield_ with a strongly lisped or aspirated _l_ before it, and mingled with it, as _lhyie_, for the second, give the sound of _vre_ in the French word _livre_; making _lhyie-vre_, accent on the first syllable.]

[Footnote 2: _Red._ Pronounced _Koch_, with the _ch_ very guttural as in the Scotch _loch_ or the German _ach_, and the _o_ long.]

[Footnote 3: _Hergest_ has the _g_ hard, as in English _begin_.]

[Footnote 4: Pronounced with accent on _o_, which is long and somewhat drawled; the _a_, as in _man_; the _i_'s short; and the _g_ hard, as in _give_; about _Mab-bin-o´-gi-on_. "Mabinogion" is the plural form: the singular is "Mabinogi."]

In the year 1838 Lady Charlotte Guest published a translation of these Mabinogion, accompanied by the text of their Welsh originals and a mass of useful and scholarly notes. Her work bore this gracious dedication:--

TO IVOR AND MERTHYR.

MY DEAR CHILDREN,--Infants as you yet are, I feel that I
cannot dedicate more fitly than to you these venerable relics of
ancient lore, and I do so in the hope of inciting you to cultivate
the Literature of "Gwyllt Walia," in whose beautiful language you
are being initiated, and amongst whose free mountains you were born.

May you become early imbued with the chivalric and exalted sense of
honor, and the fervent patriotism for which its sons have ever been
celebrated.

May you learn to emulate the noble qualities of Ivor Hael, and the
firm attachment to your native country which distinguished that
Ivor Bach, after whom the elder of you was named.

I am your affectionate mother,
C. E. GUEST.

DOWLAIS, Aug. 29, 1838.

Several considerations made me strongly desire to re-edit, upon the same plan with _The Boy's Froissart_ and _The Boy's King Arthur_, the curious old products of Welsh fancy thus rendered available to scholars. The intrinsic charm of the stories themselves in the first place would easily have secured them a position in this series. Though not so rich as the _Arabian Nights_, they are more vigorous, and their fascination is of a more manful quality. Moreover, they are in comparison open-air tales, and do not move in that close, and, if one could think such a thing, gas-poisoned, temperature which often renders the atmosphere of the Eastern tales extremely unwholesome.

But in the second place the Mabinogion all centre, in one way or another, about the court of King Arthur, and present us with views of the domestic life going on in King Arthur's palace, as well as of the wild adventures of his warriors, which were conceived at a very much earlier and ruder period than that of Sir Thomas Malory's book; so that this collection of the earliest Arthurian legends seemed to make a peculiarly happy companion-book to _The Boy's King Arthur_, which was last published in this series. Indeed, it is probable that in these Mabinogion here following we have the original germs of that great growth of Arthurian romances which overspread Europe after Geoffrey of Monmouth published his _History of the Britons_, and of which I gave some account in the Introduction to _The Boy's King Arthur_. Readers of that Introduction will remember the statement there given, in which Geoffrey of Monmouth himself declares that his main material consisted of a Welsh book given him by a certain person since supposed to be Walter Map (or Mapes). Although several of the following Mabinogion have probably received additions from foreign sources in the course of time--an original Welsh story, for example, would be carried by some traveller into other parts of Europe, would there be retold with additions and variations, would find its way back in the new form to Wales, and thus re-appear after a while in Welsh collections; yet others are in a nearly pure state. In order to bring these two classes into striking contrast, and to show how much a foreign admixture of this kind might smooth down the grotesque ruggedness of its Welsh original, I have changed the order of the Mabinogion as given in Lady Guest's arrangement, and have placed the story of _Kilhwch and Olwen_, which is almost hideous in many of its huge fancies and distortions and is pure Welsh, immediately next to the story of _The Lady of the Fountain_, whose daintiness, luxury, black savages, and the like, seem here and there to indicate foreign touches. The general tone and essential spirit, however, of the whole, are distinctly Welsh, and old Welsh. I think it curious indeed to note _how_ curious those old romances, or Mabinogion, seem to us in spite of the long intimacy and nearness between Welsh and English. They impress most readers with a greater sense of foreignness, of a wholly different cultus, than even Chinese or other antipodal tales; and over and above this there is a glamour and sleep-walking mystery which often incline a man to rub his eyes in the midst of a Mabinogi, and to think of previous states of existence.

It is another feature of this same difference between Welsh and English modes of thought which forms a third, and to me the most weighty, reason for bringing these Mabinogion before my young countrymen at this particular time. I can illustrate this difference most vividly by asking you to consider the following group of Welsh conceits and notions which I have assembled from various sources, upon the single thread of their likeness in extravagance, in wildness beyond all tolerance of reason, in lawlessness. Of course they are not to be taken as ordinary representative specimens; and I shall presently counterbalance them with some very beautiful, moderate, and wise examples of Welsh art. But they unquestionably show a tendency so characteristic as to be easily traceable.

Take, for instance, the following story concerning the famous mantle of King Ryence. Readers of _King Arthur_ will remember the young sovereign's manful defiance, when, soon after his elevation to the throne, a messenger came from King Ryence demanding King Arthur's beard (though, indeed, he must have been too young to have one) to complete a mantle which King Ryence was purfling (_bordering_) with kings' beards,--a demand which Arthur pronounced "the most villainous and lewdest message that ever man heard sent to a king." The following version shows what prodigiously different forms the same narrative may assume.

Once upon a time two kings of Old Britain were walking together at night. Their names were Nynniaw and Peibiaw.

"See," said Nynniaw, "what a beautiful and large field I own!"

"Where is it?" said Peibiaw.

"The whole firmament," said Nynniaw.

"And do thou see," said Peibiaw, "what countless herds of cattle and sheep _I_ have, feeding in thy field!"

"Where are they?" said Nynniaw.

"Why, all the stars which thou seest," replied Peibiaw, "with the moon for their shepherdess."

"They shall not graze in my pasture," said Nynniaw.

"They _shall_," said Peibiaw.

"They shall _not_," cried Nynniaw.

And then words arose between these two kings so bitter that they summoned their soldiers and fell to war wherein they continued until the armies of both were nearly destroyed. Seeing that such was the fact, Rhitta the giant, King of Wales (who is Sir Thomas Malory's King Ryens of North Wales), levied war against both, as being madmen dangerous to all their neighbors; and, having defeated their forces, he cut off the beards of kings Nynniaw and Peibiaw. But at this time there were twenty-eight kings in the Island of Britain, and when the others heard of these things, they marched all together against King Rhitta to avenge the insult of the beard. In the battle which followed, however, Rhitta was again victor. "This field is mine," said he, and cut off the beards of _those_ kings. These matters being told abroad, the kings of all the surrounding countries made common cause against Rhitta, and presently waged a great battle with him. Still, Rhitta conquered all these. "The great field is mine," he said again; "and," cutting off all their beards, "these are the herds that fed in my field; but I have driven them out." Then he made a mantle for himself out of all those beards, and although he was a giant twice as large as the largest man ever known, that mantle reached from his head to his heels.

Or take the exactions of a certain messenger called "The Little Peacock" (_Y Paun Bach_), who was sent by a certain David, Prince of North Wales, to fetch Gwgan (_Googan_, nearly) the bard to court. After a long journey, towards the close of the evening the Little Peacock heard sounds of the tuning of a harp from a house in a wooded valley where he had arrived. "The style of playing and the modulation" led him to suspect that this was Gwgan's house; and in order to be sure he advances and pours forth a high-flown speech to Gwgan, who replies in the like lofty vein, finally inquiring what he would have. "I want lodging," quoth Y Paun Bach, "for to-night ... and that not better than I know how to ask for.... A lightsome hall, floored with tile, and swept, in which there has been neither flood nor raindrop for the last hundred years, dressed with fresh green rushes, laid so evenly that one rush be not higher than the other the height of a gnat's eye, so that my foot should not slip either backward or forward the space of a mote in the sunshine of June;" together with similar superb requirements as to the cushion beneath him, the pillow under each elbow, the fire, the supper, the servants' livery, and the quantity of his ale.

Or this itemized account of a monster, which, though not Welsh, is Gælic, and shows the general Keltic proclivity. "... they saw a couple approaching them,--a woman and a man; larger than the summit of ... a mountain was each ... of their members; sharper than a shaving-knife the edge of their shins; their heels and hams [were] in front of them; should a sackful of apples be thrown on their heads not one of them would fall to the ground, but would stick on the points of the strong, bristly hair which grew out of their heads; ... whiter than snow their eyes; a lock of the lower beard was carried round the back of the head, and a lock of the upper beard descended so as to cover the knees; the woman had whiskers, but the man was without whiskers."

Or the King Yspaddaden Penkawr, in the following story of _Kilhwch and Olwen_, whose eyebrows hung over his eyes to such a degree that they had to be propped up with forks; as well as the amazing qualifications of King Arthur's warriors, detailed in the same story,--such as of him whose dagger was so broad that King Arthur's army was accustomed to use it for a bridge in passing rivers; or him who could hear the touch of a gnat's foot on the ground at a great distance, or of him who could see a mote in a sunbeam at either of the four corners of the earth, or him whose red beard lay completely along the twenty-eight rafters of the king's hall, or of him whose lips were so large that he was accustomed to draw the lower down for an apron and to lift up the other for a hood; and others still more marvellously absurd. If we compare these with the wildest flights in Malory's _King Arthur_, nothing can be clearer than the constant presence in the latter of a certain reasonable restraint, a sober proportion, a sense of the supreme value of law, even in the most apparently lawless excursions. It would be going far beyond proper bounds to discuss here how this subtle feeling for the beauty of restraint, this underlying perception of the artistic necessity of law and order, has quietly reigned, not only over the advance of English literature, but has been also the moving spirit, the perpetual King Alfred, of the whole of English development in general. And, as hinted, I have thought this consideration particularly forcible at the present moment in our own country, where the making of statutes increases in exact proportion to the decrease in the popular esteem for them. Daily and endlessly our Legislatures multiply laws and murder Law. But--may I not add, if only as one of those utterances which a boy sometimes profitably remembers, though at first dimly understood--the love of Law beyond all laws would seem to be particularly vital in a republic; being a principle so comprehensive, that at one extreme, in contact with certain tendencies, it flowers into that sense of proportion, of the due relation of all parts of the universe to the whole, which is the artist's largest perception of beauty, and is the main outfit of genius in constructing Mabinogion, in literature, in all art; while at the other extreme, working with certain other tendencies of character, the same love of Law is at once the root of decorous behavior on the part of the private citizen, and of large statesmanship on the part of the public official.

But while this danger of extravagance certainly exists in the products of Welsh fancy, they possess many qualities which have wrought with fine influence upon general English life and literature. Among the oldest remains of Welsh poetic wisdom that have come down to us are what were called _The Triads_, in which wise aphorisms and sayings are effectively grouped together by threes. The four following examples of this form of composition show an insight and breadth which render them instructive to the wisest readers of our own time.