of compilers have combined to invent a British worthy who might, had the literary conditions been favourable, have become the centre of a great romantic cycle.
Beli the Great takes us from Ireland to Britain. Prof. Zimmer's work is chiefly valuable to the student of Welsh history and literary history; its importance for the student of romance lies in the insistence on the early and longcontinued relations between Gael and Cymry, relations which have suddenly been carried backwards in point of time and eastwards in point of territory by the unexpected discovery of an Ogham inscription at Silchester.[1] What Prof Zimmer says about the historic Arthur is sound, but neither novel nor concerned with the serious difficulties of the orthodox view.[2]
In the preceding Reports I sketched Prof. Zimmer's theory of the specific Breton origin of the Arthurian romance as we find it in the French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That theory was complicated—and compromised—by connection with Prof Förster's attack upon M. Gaston Paris for arguing that the North-French romance writers received their material from Anglo-Norman intermediaries. Not a trace of these hypothetical intermediaries survives, urged Prof Forster; the French poets got their material from Brittany, urged Prof Zimmer. M. Loth, in the Revue Celtique for October 1892, has to my mind conclusively disproved the Forsterian side of the argument. His reasons can be appreciated by those who are unfamiliar with the minutiæ of historical phonology. He urges that the name Yvains in the French romances can only go back to a written Welsh Ywein. If the name had come to the French orally they would have attempted to
- ↑ See Prof. Rhys in The Academy for Aug. 19.
- ↑ Difficulties which would be singularly lessened (though still graver ones would make their appearance) if Mr. Anscombe's startling ascription of Gildas' Epistola to the year 498 be correct. (A. Anscombe, Chron. Tracts, No. ii: St. Gildas of Ruys and the Irish Regal Chronology of the 6th Century.)
