This third volume of Legend Land tells some more of the old stories of those peoples, kindred in origin, the Welsh and the Cornish. They are mostly the old tales that have survived—who shall say how many generations?
If you look into them, with the eyes of imagination, you will see behind them the simplest romances of a very simple people; a people that explained some uncomprehended thing with some comprehensible story, or who would invest the memories of their great men and women with records of wonderful achievement often formerly attributed to some yet earlier hero.
But that is a student’s occupation. Many weighty tomes have been written upon the origins of folk-lore.
For us it is sufficient to be glad that the old legends have survived. Let us enjoy them without speculation as to their beginnings, remembering only that they had a beginning, most of them in an age so long ago that history cannot place it.
These romances are perhaps the most “genuine antiques” that our country can offer, and they come from the corners of our land where romance still lingers and where, to the country folk, rocks and lakes, streams and great hills, are matters of history—not geology.
And we, who travel to these distant parts of Britain, can better enjoy their charms if we go there knowing something of the stories that have clung about them for many centuries, and if we leave our critical business method of mind behind us locked in our office desks.
That is why these old tales are again retold by
LYONESSE.