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The heroes of the Mabinogion have no fatherland; each fights to show his personal excellence, and satisfy his taste for adventure, but not to defend a national cause. Britain is the universe; no one suspects that beyond the Cymry there may be other nations and other races.
But this motive does not occur in the Welsh story of Enid and Geraint, which Tennyson has otherwise followed with unwonted closeness. The tale occurs in French romances in various forms, but it appears to have returned, by way of France and coloured with French influences, to Wales, where it is one of the later Mabinogion.
"Yes," said the girl, in a low voice. "Won't you eat your toast, uncle?" "Oh, yes, to be sure," said the old man, beginning on the buttered toast which she placed before him. When tea was over, the "Mabinogion" were brought out again and Valmai continued to read till her uncle fell asleep. Then leaving him to Gwen's care, she gladly retired for the night into her own little bedroom.
These objections, I avow, long barred my way, but I no longer find them insoluble. And first of all there is a class of Mabinogion, including those of Owen, Geraint, and Peredur, stories which possess no very precise geographical localisation.
"King Ludd," we are told in The Mabinogion, "ruled prosperously and rebuilt the walls of London, and encompassed it about with numberless towers. And after that he bade the citizens build houses therein, such as no houses in the kingdom could equal. And, moreover, he was a mighty warrior, and generous and liberal in giving meat and drink to all that sought them.
T.W. Rollestone's Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race. The poem appeares in the Hanes Taliesin, in Lady Guest's Mabinogion. Now, what would common sense have to say about things like that? Simply, I think, that they are echoes that came down in Wales through the ages, of a teaching that once was known.
We have followed it down through many forms: Welsh, in the stories of The Mabinogion; Latin, in the stories of Geoffrey of Monmouth; French, in the stories of Wace and Map; Semi-Saxon, in the stories of Layamon; Middle English, in the stories of Malory; and at last English as we now speak it, in the stories of Tennyson.
I know that to readers of the Mabinogion such an opinion will appear surprising at a first glance, All is Welsh in these fables, the places, the genealogies, the customs; in them Armorica is only represented by Hoel, an important personage no doubt, but one who has not achieved the fame of the other heroes of Arthur's court.
He does not appear to have gone deeply into the French and German "literature of the subject." Malory's compilation from French and English sources, with the Mabinogion of Lady Charlotte Guest, sufficed for him as materials. The whole poem, enshrined in the memory of all lovers of verse, is richly studded, as the hilt of Excalibur, with classical memories.
The Mabinogion, or at least the writings which Lady Guest thought she ought to include under this common name, divide themselves into two perfectly distinct classes some connected exclusively with the two peninsulas of Wales and Cornwall, and relating to the heroic personality of Arthur; the others alien to Arthur, having for their scene not only the parts of England that have remained Cymric, but the whole of Great Britain, and leading us back by the persons and traditions mentioned in them to the later years of the Roman occupation.
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