Welsh Journals

Sir Mortimer's context might give the erroneous impression that these changes had taken place in the period before the withdrawal of Roman power. The suggestion that Latin was a language which had to be taught care- fully, generation after generation, because it was not the first language of the native Britons, is sound, in all probability. But no reference is made, even in the briefest terms, to the most important contribution which has yet been made to our understanding of this problem. In a detailed analysis of the Latin loan-words in Brythonic, Professor K. H. Jackson has shown that the sound-system of the Latin spoken in Britain during the Roman occupation was on the whole conservative and archaic when compared with contemporary continental standards. The forms in which these Latin loan-words sub- sequently developed prove the continuance in Roman Britain of pronun- ciations which had elsewhere vanished from colloquial use, in some instances as early as the first century. From this evidence Professor Jackson concluded that these loan-words had been taken from a rather stilted and artificial Latin, which had been acquired as a second language at school, a language in which the refined and somewhat archaising pronunciations tended, on the whole, to conform not with those current in ordinary Vulgar Latin, but with the more literary or classical standards advocated by the grammarians and schoolmasters. This is an important contribution to a most difficult prob- lem. Professor Jackson, it will be observed, has presented a clear and persuasive argument from an examination of some of the few scraps of tangible evidence on which we can rely; his conclusions support what, to Sir Mortimer, is merely an 'assumption' Sir Mortimer seems also to be totally unaware of one of the important legendary fusions for which Geoffrey of Monmouth was responsible. It is stated that at the rockly hill fortification of Dinas Emrys, near Beddgelert, in Caernarvonshire, "Ambrosius (Aurelianus) is associated with Merlin. This, and subsequent statements in the same paragraph, seem to indicate that Sir Mortimer is of the opinion that Ambrosius Aurelianus and Merlin were associated in romantic tradition from a very early period. But it has been shown by H. M. and N. K. Chadwick in a detailed discussion in The Growth of Literature, I, 123-132, that it was Geoffrey of Monmouth who really created Merlinus Ambrosius (or Myrddin Emrys) in his extraordinarily popular Historia Regum Britanniae (1136), by conjecturally identifying the earlier Myrddin Wyllt with the wonder-child Ambrosius of the Historia Brittonum (Nennius). One is also at a loss to understand what exactly is meant by the statement that at the little fortification near Dinas Powys there probably lived a king or princeling of Early Christian Wales "in something like feudal state." The application of the term' feudal' to this period is vague and misleading. Nor is it readily apparent why Sir Mortimer, in his pregnant references to The Dream of Macsen Wledig, should take his quotations from Lady Charlotte Guest' translation of the Mabinogion. This translation, it must be allowed, had many excellences, and it fully deserved to become a classic. But it has now been superseded by the splendid translation of the Mabinogion by Professors Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones which, based upon a careful collation of all the relevant manuscript material, is a more faithful rendering of the original. CERI W. LEWIS. SHORTER NOTICES. A second edition of Mr. Thomas Evans's very useful Story of Abercynon (Robert Davies and Co., Tonypandy), which first appeared in 1944, has now