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region of the river Eden, flowing from a source near that of the Swale, through Westmoreland and Cumberiand, into the Solway Frith. They came from districts now known by such names as Dumbarton, Wigtown, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr, from Morecambe Bay and all surrounding regions, gathered their force on the hills about the sources of the Eden and the Swale, and thence marched (A.D. 570) down through Swaledale, some five and twenty miles, to Catterick, or Cattraeth. Aneurin, one of the chief of the bards inspired by the great life-struggle, sang the disasters of the battle in a poem called the Gododin, of which ninety-seven stanzas yet remain. Gray found in a translation of it the passage which he thus put into music of his own :

"To Cattraeth's vale in glittering row
Twice two hundred warriors go;
Every warrior's manly neck
Chains of regal honour deck,
Wreathed in many a golden link:
From the golden cup they drink
Nectar that the bees produce,
Or the grape's ecstatic juice.

Flush'd with mirth and hope they burn;
But none from Cattraeth's vale return,
Save Aeron brave and Conan strong
(Bursting through the bloody throng).
And I, the meanest of them all,

That live to weep and sing their fall."

The battle began on a Tuesday, and continued for a week The Cymry fought to the death, and of three hundred and sixtythree chiefs who had led their people to the conflict, only three, says Aneurin, besides himself, survived. "Morien lifted up again his ancient lance, and, roaring, stretching out death towards the warriors, whilst towards the lovely, slender, blood. stained body of Gwen, sighed Gwenabwy, the only son of Gwen.

. . Fain would I sing, 'would that Morien had not died.' I sigh for Gwenabwy the son of Gwen." Thus Aneurin ends his plaint over the crowning triumph of the Teuton. But hearts had beaten high among the Cymry, and from souls astir song had been poured throughout the days of long resistance that had come before. Urien was the great North of England chief who led the battle of the Cymry for their homes and liberties against invading Angles. Llywarch the Old (Llywarch Hen) Prince of Argoed, whom the remains of verse ascribed to him show to have been first in genius among the Cymric bards, was Urien's friend and fellow-combatant at Lindisfarne, between

TO A.D. 579]

TALIESIN. MERLIN

7

the years 572 and 579. There, after the death of Urien, he carried the chief's head in his mantle from the field. "The head," he sang, "that I carry carried me; I shall find it no more; it will come no more to my succour. Woe to my hand, my happiness is lost!" After Urien's death Llywarch joined arms with Cyndyllan, Prince of Powys, at his capital, where Shrewsbury now stands. Cyndyllan tell in a battle at Tarn, near the Wrekin. "The hall of Cyndyllan," then sang his friend Llywarch, "is gloomy this night, without fire, without songs-tears afflict the cheeks! The hall of Cyndyllan is gloomy this night, without fire, without family-my overflowing tears gush out! The hall of Cyndyllan pierces me to see it, roofless, fireless. My chief is dead, and I alive myself." Twelfth century tradition says that this bard was for a time one of King Arthur's counsellors. Llywarch had many sons; he gave to all of them his heart to battle for their country, and lost them all upon the battle-field. "O, Gwenn," he sang of his youngest and last dead, "O, Gwenn, woe to him who is too old, since he has lost you. A man was my son, a hero, a generous warrior, and he was the nephew of Urien. Gwenn has been slain at the ford of Morlas. . . Sweetly sang a bird on a pear tree above the head of Gwenn before they covered him with the turf. That broke the heart of the old Llywarch."

Taliesin (Shining Forehead) was another of those Cymric bards who sang in the hall of Urien. He was bard only, chief bard, and sang Urien's victories over Ida at Argoed, at Gwenn Estrad, and at Menao, between the years 547 and 560. After the death of Urien, he was the bard of Urien's son, Owain, by whom Ida was slain. After the death of all Urien's sons, Taliesin ended a sad life in Wales, and was buried, it is said, under a cairn near Aberystwith.

Myrddhin, or Merlin, was another of these bards, the one who became afterwards one of the chief figures in Arthurian romance. He was born between the years 470 and 480; served first the British chief Ambrosius Aurelianus, from whom he took the name of Ambrose before his own name of Merlin; then served as bard with Arthur, leader of the Southern Britons. That was the King Arthur who fought as Urien fought, and who, though seldom named in our oldest Cymric remains, became afterwards typical hero of the contest, Arthur, the King of that heroic myth which runs through our literature and is made part of the life of England. Merlin, one day, between the years 560 and 574.

in a field of slaughter on the Solway Firth, lost reason at sight of the miseries and horrors that surrounded him, broke his sword, and fled the society of man. Thenceforth he poured lament through all his music, and at last he was found dead by the banks of a river. Of other bards the memories survive, but these were the chief; and if the records of their lives be blended with much fable, they do, nevertheless, retain truths out of the life of that great time of effervescence which preceded in this country a blending of the elements of English strength.

7. Influence of the Celt on English literature proceeds not from example set by one people and followed by another, but in the way of nature, by establishment of blood relationship, and the transmission of modified and blended character to a succeeding generation.

The pure Gael-now represented by the Irish and Scotch Celts-was, at his best, an artist. He had a sense of literature, he had active and bold imagination, joy in bright colour, skill in music, touches of a keen sense of honour in most savage times, and in religion fervent 2nd self-sacrificing zeal. In the Cymry -now represented by the Celts of Wales--there was the same artist nature. By natural difference, and partly, no doubt, because their first known poets learnt in suffering what they taught in song, the oldest Cymric music comes to us, not like the music of the Irish harp, in throbbings of a pleasant tunefulness, but as a wail that beats again, again, and again some iterated burden on the ear.

The blending of the Celt and Teuton had begun in the north even before the days of the great battle at Cattraeth. Some passages in Aneurin's Gododin show that Celts of part of the Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire coast, the men of Deivyr and Bryneich (Deira and Bernicia), had remained there and become incorporated with the new possessors of the soil. There never was repulse of the whole body of the Cymry into Wales. Bede, writing a hundred and fifty years after the battle of Cattraeth, speaks of the Britons of Northumberland as being in his day partly free and partly subject to the Angles. In the hill-country of the north and west, to which the Teuton did not care to follow with his plough, and in the fens, were independent Celts. The drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe is one of Falstaff's similes for melancholy. The familiar presence of the bagpipe indicates a former Celtic occupation of the fens. In the West of England the Celts were so far from having been entirely driven

INFLUENCE OF THE CELT

9

into Wales that in King Alfred's time, three centuries after the struggle ended at Cattraeth, a line from north to south, dividing England into equal parts, had on the west side of it a country in which Celts abounded. They were the chief occupants of the five south-western counties. In Athelstane's time, Celts and Teutons, Britons and Englishmen, divided equal rule in Exeter. Neither in the West nor in the North of England were the Celts enslaved. Wales they had to themselves; and there they cherished British nationality. But where they lived among the English they accepted, when outnumbered, the established power; or, if in equal force, divided rule, and lived in either case as fellow-citizens with their Teutonic neighbours.

In the fusion of the two races, which then slowly began among the hills and valleys of the North and West of England, where the populations came most freely into contact, the gift of genius was the contribution of the Celt. The writer of our latest and best history of Architecture, when preparing the ground for his work by a survey of the characteristics of different races in relation to his art, says that "the true glory of the Celt in Europe is his artistic eminence. It is not, perhaps," adds Mr. Fergusson, "too much to assert that without his intervention we should not have possessed in modern times a church worthy of admiration, or a picture or a statue we could look at without shame."

8. The sense of literature was shown in the earliest times by the support of a distinct literary class among the Celts who then possessed this country. In Erin, the first headquarters of song and story, even in the third century, there was the poet with his staff of office, a square tablet staff, on the four sides of which he cut his verse; and there were degrees in literature. There was the Ollamh, or perfect doctor, who could recite seven fifties of historic tales; and there were others, down to the Driseg, who could tell but twenty. As we travel down from the remotest time of which there can be doubtful record, we find the profession of historian to be a recognised calling, transmitted in one family from generation to generation, and these later professors of history still bore the name of Ollamhs. Of the active and bold fancy that accompanied this Celtic sense of literature as an art, and of the Celt's delight in bright colour, almost any one of the old Gaelic poems will bear witness. The delight in colour is less manifest in the first poems of the Cymry. For them the one colour was that of blood; they are

B*

of the sixth century, and sing of men who died in the vain fight against the spreading power of the Teuton. Of those Gaels who were known as Gauls to Rome, Diodorus, the Sicilian, told, three centuries before the time of Fionn and Oisin, how they wore bracelets and costly finger-rings, gold corselets, and dyed tunics flowered with colours of every kind, trews, striped cloaks fastened with a brooch and divided into many parti-coloured squares, a taste still represented by the Highland plaid. In the old Gaelic tale of the “Tain Bo,” men are described marching: Some are with red cloaks; others with light blue cloaks; others with deep blue cloaks; others with green, or grey, or white, or yellow cloaks, bright and fluttering about them. There is a young, red-freckled lad, with a crimson cloak, in their midst; a golden brooch in that cloak at his breast." Even the ghost of a Celt, if it dropped the substance, retained all the colouring of life. The vivacity of Celtic fancy is shown also by an outpouring of bold metaphor and effective simile :

66

"Both shoulders covered with his painted shield
The hero there, swift as the war-horse, rushed.
Noise in the mount of slaughter, noise and fire;
The darting lances were as gleams of sun.
There the glad raven fed. The foe must fly
While he so swept them as when in his course
An eagle strikes the morning dews aside,
And like a whelming billow struck their front.
Brave men, so say the bards, are dumb to slaves.
Spears wasted men, and ere the swan-white steeds
Trod the still grave that hushed the master voice,
His blood washed all his arms. Such was Buddvan,
Son of Bleedvan the Bold."

Here, in a mere average stanza, containing one of the ninety celebrations of the Cymric chiefs who fell at Cattraeth, we have more similes than in the six thousand and odd lines (English measure) of "Beowulf," the first heroic poem of the Teutonic section of our people. The delight in music-among the olà Irish Celts in the music of the harp and tabor, among the old Welsh Celts in music of the harp, the pipe, and the crowd-is another characteristic. It is noted also that the music of the Gaels was sweet, lively, and rapid; and that the music of the Cymry was slower and more monotonous.

In the old Gaelic story of the first appearance of their people in Erin, we read how the Milesians landed unobserved, marched upon Tara, and called on the three kings of the Tuatha de Danaan, who then held the country, to surrender. The kings

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