Scan 45
Researches into the early history of the violin family, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 35. See the scan on archive.org.
1Thomas Wright, in his "Essays on Archæological Subjects," Vol. ii., p. 159 (London, 1861), says: "The Welsh claim to a series of vernacular poets, under such names as Aneurin, Taliesin, and Merlin, who are asserted to have lived in the sixth century, and others belonging to ages immediately succeeding; and they show us what are asserted to be their genuine compositions, and which present, strangely enough, a system of perfect rhymes and of the different forms of versification exactly like those which, after a long and laborious course of formation, are only first found in French poetry in the twelfth century. This is certainly a very startling circumstance, and one which may well lead us to hesitate in accepting these Welsh poems of which I am speaking as authentic. . . . Among the poetry attributed to the supposed early Welsh bards, there is much, such as the love for riddles and for enigmatical expressions, and for a particular class of didactic poetry, which has its close resemblance in the Anglo-Saxon literature of the tenth and eleventh centuries, and which was, I think, borrowed from it in the same way that much of the rest was borrowed from the Anglo-Norman of a later date. The Welsh had no doubt abundance of traditions and legends as mythic as those of the Anglo-Saxons. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they were just in that political condition when men look back with eagerness to a supposed former glory, and love to exaggerate the supposed exploits of their ancestors, and when they readily mistake their mythical legends for historical ones. . . . Mr. Nash has pointed out frequent allusions in the poems of Taliesin which fix the composition of many of them to a date not older than the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I think that he might have gone further than he has gone, for I feel convinced that we have no Welsh poetry existing of an older date than the twelfth century, when it appears to have begun to be committed to writing."
3However, even if it could be incontestably shown that the earliest allusion to the crwth in Welsh literature dates from the sixth century, it would still be a debatable question whether at that period it was played with a bow. We have
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