Note 10 — Chapter XI · Folklore Philosophy

The shape-shifting is sometimes complicated by taking place on the lines of rebirth: as cases in point may be mentioned Lug, reborn as Cúchulainn10, and the repeated births of Étáin. This was rendered possible in the case of Cúchulainn, for instance, by Lug taking the form of an insect which was unwittingly swallowed by Dechtere, who thereby became Cúchulainn’s mother; and so in the case of Étáin11 and her last recorded mother, the queen of Etar king of Eochraidhe. On Welsh ground we have a combination of transformations and rebirth in the history of Gwion Bach in the story of Taliessin. Gwion was in the service of the witch Ceridwen; but having learned too much of her arts, he became the object of her lasting hatred; and the incident is translated as follows in Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion, iii. 358–9:—‘And she went forth after him, running. And he saw her, and changed himself into a hare and fled. But she changed herself into a greyhound and turned him. And he ran towards a river, and became a fish. And she in the form of an otter-bitch chased him under the water, until he was fain to turn himself into a bird of the air. Then she, as a hawk, followed him and gave him no rest in the sky. And just as she was about to swoop upon him, and he was in fear of death, he espied a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and he dropped amongst the wheat, and turned himself into one of the grains. Then she transformed herself into a high-crested black hen, and went to the wheat and scratched it with her feet, and found him out and swallowed him. And, as the story says, she bore him nine months, and when she was delivered of him, she could not find it in her heart to kill him, by reason of his beauty. So she wrapped him in a leathern bag, and cast him into the sea to the mercy of God on the twenty-ninth day of April. And at that time the weir of Gwyđno was on the strand between Dyvi and Aberystwyth, near to his own castle, and the value of an hundred pounds was taken in that weir every May eve.’ The story goes on to relate how Gwyđno’s son, Elphin, found in the weir the leathern bag containing the baby, who grew up to be the bard Taliessin. But the fourteenth century manuscript called after the name of Taliessin teems with such transformations as the above, except that they are by no means confined to the range of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. I heard an amusing suggestion of metempsychosis the other day: it is related of a learned German, who was sitting at table, let us say, in an Oxford hotel, with most of his dinner in front of him. Being, however, a man of immediate foresight, and anxious to accustom himself to fine English, he was not to be restrained by scruples as to any possible discrepancy between words like bekommen and become. So to the astonishment of everybody he gravely called out to the waiter, ‘Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh rabbit.’ This would have done admirably for the author of certain poems in the Book of Taliessin, where the bard’s changes are dwelt upon. From them it appears that the transformation might be into anything that the mind of man could in any way individualize. Thus Taliessin claims to have been, some time or other, not only a stag or a salmon, but also an axe, a sword, and even a book in a priest’s hand, or a word in writing. On the whole, however, his history as a grain of corn has most interest here, as it differs from that which has just been given: the passage12 is sadly obscure, but I understand it to say that the grain was duly sown on a hill, that it was reaped and finally brought on the hearth, where the ears of corn were emptied of their grains by the ancient method of dexterously applying a flame to them13. But while the light was being applied the grain which was Taliessin, falling from the operator’s hand, was quickly received and swallowed by a hostile hen, in whose interior it remained nine nights; but though this seemingly makes Taliessin’s mother a bird, he speaks of himself, without mentioning any intervening transformation, as a gwas or young man. Such an origin was perhaps never meant to be other than incomprehensible. Lastly as to rebirth, I may say that it has often struck me that the Welsh habit, especially common in Carnarvonshire and Anglesey, of one child in a family being named, partially or wholly, after a grandparent, is to be regarded as a trace of the survival from early times of a belief in such atavism as has been suggested above14.