CHAPTER VIII
THE MYTHS OF THE BRITISH CELTS
THE surviving myths of the British Celts (Brythons), as distinguished from the Irish Celts (Goidels), exist in the form of romantic tales in the Mabinogion and similar Welsh stories and in the Arthurian and Tallesin literature, or are referred to in the Triads and Welsh poems. Have the divinities who there figure as kings and queens, heroes and heroines, magicians and fairies, retained any of their original traits and functions? The question is less easily answered than in the case of Irish divinities subjected to the same romantic and euhemerizing processes. With religious and social changes it was forgotten that the gods were gods, and they became more or less human, for the mediaeval story-teller was "pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret." The composition of the stories of the Mabinogion, like those of the great Irish manuscripts, dates from the tenth and eleventh centuries, yet in both cases materials and personages are of far older date, the supernatural element is strong, and there is a mythical substratum surviving all changes. Further, the Welsh tales belong to a systematized method of treating ancient traditions, and were the literary stock-in-trade of the Mabinog, or aspirant to the position of a qualified bard. This process was still further carried out in Ireland, where myths were recast into a chronological as well as a romantic mould, the file, or man of letters, being estimated according to the number of his stories and his power of harmonizing and synchronizing them. In Welsh literature the euhemerizing, historical process is seen at work less in the legends than in
