Welsh Journals

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There are several references in this number of the Journal to the legend of the discovery of America, about three hundred years before Columbus, by Madoc ab Owen Gwynedd. In dubbing the story a legend we are, of course, prejudging the whole affair and assuming an utter lack of historical basis to it. Whatever may have been the case in 1858, when the committee of the Llangollen national eisteddfod offered a prize for the best essay' upon the discovery of America in the twelfth century by Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd and refused the prize to Thomas Stephens because he, in his masterly essay, proved the contrary, no eisteddfod committee at the present day would dream of asking competitors to deal with this discovery' as a matter for historical treatment. Stephens's essay, published in 1893 under the editorship of Llywarch Reynolds, gave the coup de grace to all pretty theories of the existence of Welsh Indians which had been built up on the alleged evidence of travellers and missionaries, and left us as authentic only very scanty allusions in Welsh literature to a Madoc who was fond of roaming the seas where he ultimately met his end. But these allusions, even when critically sifted and reduced to a minimum, are yet sufficient to imply the existence of some sort of tra- dition on which the quasi-historical legend concerning Madoc could be built. And it is the purpose of this note to suggest, but no more than suggest, that this tradition was a folklore survival of a one-time myth, and that the proper study of the Madoc legend should be along the lines of comparative mythology and folklore. If we take the legend out of the historical setting into which it has been foisted, we are left with the tradition of a voyager who sailed out west, and though he may have returned once, the west had claimed him and he sailed away again, never to return. It is at once obvious that here we have, in the merest outline, of course, the motif of a rich series of Irish tales. The immrama or voyages in Irish literature, although increasingly Christianised with the progress of time and culminating finally in the Navigatio S. Brendani, all ultimately go back to the pagan motif of a voyage to the other-world, which in its most original form is exemplified in such tales as the Immram Brain maic Febail and the Echtra Connla (or Condla). Stephens himself comes near this point of view when (pp. 216-26) he asserts that the legend of Madoc is due to the creative imagination of the Welsh people in just the same way as the national legends of other peoples were due to theirs. But he does not get beyond the conception THE LEGEND OF MADOC.