Note 32 — INTRODUCTION (continued 2)

I have sometimes wondered, what if a folklorist, making a little tour in Wales, in a Welsh inn-garden had come on a venerable Welsh harper, playing ancient Welsh airs, and speaking Welsh more fluently than English? He would have drawn him, of course, for folk-tales, and lo! a perfect mine of them—long, unpublished stories, all about magic snuff-boxes and magic balls of yarn, the kings of the mice and the frogs and the fowls of the air, griffins of the greenwood, golden apples and golden castles, sleeping princesses, and all the rest of it. ‘Eureka!’ that folklorist would have shouted, and straightway meditated a new Welsh Mabinogion. Welsh—Celtic—not at all necessarily; his old Welsh bard might have been just John Roberts the Gypsy. ↑