Lecture III.
THE CULTURE HERO.
The great difficulty in studying the religion and mythology of the ancient Celts, is to bridge over the gulf of ages dividing the literature of the Celtic nations of the present day from the narrative of the writers of antiquity and the testimony of the stones. But that a few slender lines of connection can be thrown across, has been shown in the case of Nodens; and I now propose to make a similar attempt in that of a very different figure in the Celtic pantheon. It is but sparingly that the literature of the Goidel speaks of a god or goddess as such, and this applies still more emphatically to that of the Brython. That is, however, but an accident of the medium, so to say, through which our information about Celtic paganism has reached us: the gods have, in the course of the transmission of the legends about them through Christian channels, been reduced to the status of men playing parts, more or less heroic, in a mythic history. So it is only by careful comparison that one is enabled to find that such and such a hero of our stories was, in the pagan period, such and such a god. Let me call your attention to one of the kind, who, in the Mabinogion, bears the name
