Note 73 — Chapter IX · Place-name Stories

Similarly in the confused list of heroes which the story-teller of the Kulhwch (Mabinogion, p. 108) was able to put together, we seem to have Gofannon, Math’s relative, referred to under the designation of Gouynyon Hen, ‘Gofynion the Ancient.’ To these might be added others, such as Gwrbothu Hên, mentioned above, p. 531, and from another source Ỻeu Hen73, ‘Ỻew the Ancient.’ So strange, probably, and so obscure did some of the contents of the stories themselves seem to the story-tellers, that they may be now and then suspected of having effaced some of the features which it would have interested us to find preserved. This state of things brings back to my mind words of Matthew Arnold’s, to which I had the pleasure of listening more years ago than I care to remember. He was lecturing at Oxford on Celtic literature, and observing ‘how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant,’ Matthew Arnold went on to say, ‘building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely—stones “not of this building,” but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the mediæval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh.’ This becomes intelligible only on the theory of the stories having been in Goidelic before they put on a Welsh dress.