sudden death of Bata so soon as the depository of his soul was destroyed is a usual feature in such tales about souls. But it is only in the Indian tale quoted by Mr. Frazer that there is any revival of the dead, and in no case is there any transformation like that of Bata.” Now in our Welsh tale we have an instance of such a transformation, and the main frame of the story agrees more with the Egyptian version than with the Irish: in both versions the wife is made for the hero. (In the Irish version we have nothing of this kind, but the wife is kidnapped by Cúroi, and has therefore good reasons to hate him; her rescuer Cúchulainn is at first beaten.) In both tales the husband is transformed into an animal and takes his revenge personally on the faithless wife. (In the Irish, Cúroi's soul being totally destroyed, there is no possibility of his revival.)
Professor Flinders Petrie calls this tale a "patch-work," and it really seems as if there were two different motives mixed together, i.e. the "Separable Soul" and the "Shapeshifting of the Dead." If, now, in the Welsh story the "Separable Soul" motive had once a more important rôle than we find in the present version, it would be an extraordinary coincidence with the Egyptian tale; if there was no such motive it is the less similar to the Irish tale, and so the theory of the Goidelic origin of this tale proves to be quite improbable. I will not deny the Gaelic influence; but this does not yet imply that most of the Mabinogi stories are of Gaelic origin. The influence of Gaelic on Welsh is surely sometimes overrated, and philological researches prove that the influence of Brythonic on Gaelic was much greater than vice versâ, and we find in Irish a great number of Brythonic loanwords (see Pedersen, Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen, § 24).[1]
- ↑ It is very important for our purpose that Cúchulainn's first name, Setanta, seems to be of Brythonic origin (cf. Brit. Setantioi; old Setantios would give in Ir. *Seθaide, spelt *Sethaite). If this name is of Brythonic origin it must have come to Ireland after the time of lenition and assimilation ut>d.
