Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race - Knowledge Rush

296 Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race[345]Welsh material is nothing like as full as the Gaelic, nor soearly. The tales of the “Mabinogion” are mainly drawn fromthe fourteenth-century manuscript entitled “The Red Book ofHergest.” One of them, the romance of Taliesin, came fromanother source, a manuscript of the seventeenth century. Thefour oldest tales in the “Mabinogion” are supposed by scholarsto have taken their present shape in the tenth or eleventh century,while several Irish tales, like the story of Etain and Midir orthe Death of Conary, go back to the seventh or eighth. It willbe remembered that the story of the invasion of Partholan wasknown to Nennius, who wrote about the year 800. As onemight therefore expect, the mythological elements in the Welshromances are usually much more confused and harder to decipherthan in the earlier of the Irish tales. The mythic interest has grownless, the story interest greater; the object of the bard is less to handdown a sacred text than to entertain a prince's court. We mustremember also that the influence of the Continental romances ofchivalry is clearly perceptible in the Welsh tales; and, in fact,comes eventually to govern them completely.Gaelic and Continental RomanceIn many respects the Irish Celt anticipated the ideas of theseromances. The lofty courtesy shown to each other by enemies, 213the fantastic pride which forbade a warrior to take advantage ofa wounded adversary, 214 the extreme punctilio with which theduties or observances proper to each man's caste or station wereobserved 215 —all this tone of thought and feeling which wouldseem so strange to us if we met an instance of it in classicalliterature would seem quite familiar and natural in Continentalromances of the twelfth and later centuries. Centuries earlierthan that it was a marked feature in Gaelic literature. Yet inthe Irish romances, whether Ultonian or Ossianic, the element213 See, e.g., pp. 243 and 218, note.214 See p. 233, and a similar case in the author's “High Deeds of Finn,” p. 82.215 See p. 232, and the tale of the recovery of the “Tain,” p. 234.