"In every house," says the shrewd Gerald de Barri, "strangers who arrived in the morning were entertained till eventide with the talk of maidens and the music of the harp." A romantic literature, which was destined to leaven the fancy of western Europe, had grown up among this wild people and found an admirable means of utterance in its tongue.

The Welsh language was as real a developement of the old Celtic language heard by Caesar as the Romance tongues are developements of Caesar's Latin, but at a far earlier date than any other language of modern Europe it had attained to definite structure and to settled literary form.

No other mediaeval literature shows at its outset the same elaborate and completed organization as that of the Welsh.
But within these settled forms the Celtic fancy played with a startling freedom.

In one of the later poems Gwion the Little transforms himself into a hare, a fish, a bird, a grain of wheat; but he is only the symbol of the strange shapes in which the Celtic fancy embodies itself in the romantic tales which reached their highest perfection in the legends of Arthur.
[Sidenote: The Welsh Poetry] The gay extravagance of these "Mabinogion" flings defiance to all fact, tradition, probability, and revels in the impossible and unreal.

When Arthur sails into the unknown world it is in a ship of glass.