P. 354
Ceannach (line 10).—Here ‘bribe, reward.’
Trulainn (line 13).—‘Topsy-turvy.’
A’ mathachadh air (note 1).—‘To make it good upon him’ (i.e. to insist on his believing).
Dh’ fhalbh na guilean geala (note 2).—‘The blindnees has gone.’ Nach ann agam bha na suilean geala—‘Wasn’t I stupid!’
Beannachd an Dàin ’s an Dòmhnaich (note 2).—A common ending for tales in Eigg; a shrewd man’s wish, to have both fate and Heaven, paganism and Christianity on his side.
P. 355
Siùrra feamann (line 2).—The wrack along the water-mark—mistranslated ‘seaweed seekers’ in W. H. Tales.
Bearradh eoin is amadain (line 13).—‘This phrase is explained to mean clipping the hair and beard off one side of the head. The idea is taken from clipping one wing of a bird, and the punishment was probably inflicted at some period, for the phrase occurs several times in Gaelic tales.’—W, H. Tales.
THE CORNISH DRAMA[1]
Henry Jenner
With the exception of a poem of about 2000 lines on the Passion of Christ, written in the fifteenth century, the whole of the real literature of the Cornish language consists of religious dramas. There are, it is true, several songs, epigrams, epitaphs and proverbs, and one story in prose, but these belong to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and most, if not all of them, were composed by men whose real language was English, though in some cases they knew the broken-down Cornish of the period very well. There is also a fragment of 41 lines of verse, which I discovered many years ago on the back of a deed of 1340 in the British Museum. This fragment, which seems by the writing to be of about 1400, may be part of a drama, and I am inclined to think that it is, but there is not enough to be quite certain.
The existing complete dramas are:—
1. The trilogy known as the Ordinalia, consisting of:
a. Origo Mundi, which begins with the Creation of the
- ↑ A lecture delivered before the Celtic Union, Edinbuigh, 31st March 1906.
