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Its most marked characteristic is its preservation of the pronunciation of U as 'oo' and of QU, while the 'Brythonic' or Welsh variety changed U to a sound pronounced like the French 'u' or the German 'u' and also QU to P. There is a similar line of cleavage in the Italic languages, where Latin corresponds to Goidelic, and Oscan and Umbrian to Brythonic.

and Blackmore has never been reckoned adequate. Vivien was first composed as Merlin and Nimue, and then Geraint and Enid was adapted from the Mabinogion, the Welsh collection of Marchen and legends, things of widely different ages, now rather Celtic, or Brythonic, now amplifications made under the influence of mediaeval French romance.

In the course of the sixth century the Angles made a descent between the Humber and the Forth, and that district became part of the English kingdom of Northumbria. Even here we have, in the evidence of the place-names, some reasons for believing that a proportion of the original Brythonic population may have survived.

Besides the Goidels, or so-called Celts, and the Brythonic Celts or Britons, we find traces in Scotland of an earlier race who are known as "Picts", a few fragments of whose language survive. About the identity of these Picts another controversy has been waged. Some look upon the Pictish tongue as closely allied to Scottish Gaelic; others regard it as Brythonic rather than Goidelic; and Dr.

Be all this as it may, it is important for us to remember that, at the dawn of history, modern Scotland was populated entirely by people now known as "Celts", of whom the Brythonic portion were the later to appear, driving the Goidels into the more mountainous districts.

Its inscription is Goidelic: that is, it does not belong to the ordinary Callevan population, which was presumably Brythonic. It may be best explained as the work of some western Celt who reached Silchester before its British citizens abandoned it in despair. We do not know the date of that event, though we may conjecturally put it before, and perhaps a good many years before, A.D. 500.

In spite of this, there must be something tangible behind so persistent a rumour as this tradition of Arthur. Wherever the Brythonic tribes extended, there we find traces of him. The Gaels know nothing of him. Finn, Oisin, Cuthullin, Cormac such as these were the great Goidhelic heroes. But the British tradition reached from Armorica to the Forth, and carried Arthur with it.

Such, then, was the racial distribution of Scotland. Picts, Goidelic Celts, Brythonic Celts, Scots, and Anglo-Saxons were in possession of the country. In the year 844, Kenneth MacAlpine, King of the Scots of Dalriada, united under his rule the ancient kingdoms of the Picts and Scots, including the whole of Scotland from the Pentland Firth to the Forth.

Rhys surmises that it is really an older form of speech, neither Goidelic nor Brythonic, and probably not allied to either, although, in the form in which its fragments have come down to us, it has been deeply affected by Brythonic forms.

But there may also have been a Brythonic deity, or culture hero, of the same, or of a similar name, and myths about him may have been assigned to a real Arthur. Again, the Arthur of the old Welsh legends was by no means the blameless king even in comparatively late French romances he is not blameless.