Note 74 — Chapter IX · Place-name Stories

When saying that the Mabinogion and some of the stories contained in the Kulhwch, such as the Hunting of Twrch Trwyth, were Goidelic before they became Brythonic, I wish to be understood to use the word Goidelic in a qualified sense. For till the Brythons came, the Goidels were, I take it, the ruling race in most of the southern half of Britain, with the natives as their subjects, except in so far as that statement has to be limited by the fact, that we do not know how far they and the natives had been amalgamating together. In any case, the hostile advent of another race, the Brythons, would probably tend to hasten the process of amalgamation. That being so, the stories which I have loosely called Goidelic may have been largely aboriginal in point of origin, and by that I mean native, pre-Celtic and non-Aryan. It comes to this, then: we cannot say for certain whose creation Brân, for instance, should be considered to have been—that of Goidels or of non-Aryan natives. He sat, as the Mabinogi of Branwen describes him, on the rock of Harlech, a figure too colossal for any house to contain or any ship to carry. This would seem to challenge comparison with Cernunnos, the squatting god of ancient Gaul, around whom the other gods appear as mere striplings, as proved by the monumental representations in point. In these74 he sometimes appears antlered like a stag; sometimes he is provided either with three normal heads or with one head furnished with three faces; and sometimes he is reduced to a head provided with no body, which reminds one of Brân, who, when he had been rid of his body in consequence of a poisoned wound inflicted on him in his foot in the slaughter of the Meal-bag Pavilion, was reduced to the Urđawl Ben, ‘Venerable or Dignified Head,’ mentioned in the Mabinogi of Branwen75. The Mabinogi goes on to relate how Brân’s companions began to enjoy, subject to certain conditions, his ‘Venerable Head’s’ society, which involved banquets of a fabulous duration and of a nature not readily to be surpassed by those around the Holy Grail. In fact here we have beyond all doubt one of the heathen originals of which the Grail is a Christian version. But the multiplicity of faces or heads of the Gaulish divinity find their analogues in a direction hitherto unnoticed as far as I know, namely, among the Letto-Slavic peoples of the Baltic sea-board. Thus the image of Svatovit in the island of Rügen is said to have had four faces76; and the life of Otto of Bamberg relates77 how that high-handed evangelist proceeded to convert the ancient Prussians to Christianity. Among other things we are told how he found at Stettin an idol called Triglaus, a word referring to the three heads for which the god was remarkable. The saint took possession of the image and hewed away the body, reserving for himself the three heads, which are represented adhering together, forming one piece. This he sent as a trophy to Rome, and in Rome it may be still. Were it perchance to be found, it might be expected to show a close resemblance to the tricephal of the Gaulish altar found at Beaune in Burgundy.