Welsh Journals

presentation of the material and the authors' discussion are particularly dense and close-knit and do not make for easy assimilation. The work as a whole suggests the existence of an elaborate philosophy and a highly- ritualistic civilization among the pre-Christian Celts. The fact that the conclusions depend in general on the questionable proposition that the material on which they are based is of immense antiquity must cause one to have reserves about accepting them, but that need not lessen our welcome for a book which, even if it does not convince, may at least stimulate readers to turn to the stories themselves and derive from them immense pleasure just as countless generations of others have already done. University College, Dublin. BRIAN 6 cuiv. TRIOEDD YNYS PRYDEIN: the Welsh Triads, edited with introduction, translation, and commentary by Rachel Bromwich. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1961. Pp. cxliv, 555. 84s. Rachel Bromwich has worked at this edition ever since she was a student, more years ago than it would perhaps be quite gallant to specify, so that it should be good-and it is good. It is made up as follows. First a discussion of the manuscript sources: the main text is Peniarth 16 which represents a markedly different and, she thinks, older recension than that contained in WBR-RBH. More than a dozen other manuscripts were used and are here described, their interrelations being thoroughly analysed. This takes the manuscript tradition, chiefly on the evidence of spelling, back to the early thirteenth century; and the first writing down, on other internal evidence, perhaps to the second quarter of the twelfth century or even into the later eleventh. In oral tradition, however, there may be reason to think the nucleus of the triads as old as the fixing of our present text of the Gododdin. Next, a study of the development of the triads as a genre, which is balanced, informative, original, and acute. The source is regarded as having been of south-Welsh origin and as having constituted an index to oral narrative tradition for the benefit of the tale-tellers, used also later as a directory of allusions for the similes of bards, though the tales referred to gradually became more or less forgotten and the characters mere names. Mrs. Bromwich calls the Peniarth 16 recension a summary canon of the whole national tradition which the bards down to the end of the twelfth century were required to know. She traces the way in which material of all sorts derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Continental literature was gradually introduced, resulting in a marked increase in the prominence of Arthur, though the antecedents of the oldest Arthurian stratum are clearly pre-Geoffrey. An interesting discussion of the relation of the triads to the Four Branches follows; she regards it as more organic than Ifor Williams's scribal glosses. She shows further that Geoffrey had no direct knowledge of the triads; and demonstrates that there is actual internal evidence for the oral transmission prior to the period of the first