Translated by Lady Guest in her _Mabinogion_, under the title of _Peredur, the Son of Evrawc_. Footnote 519: Rhys: _Arthurian Legend_, p. 169. But see whole of chap. VIII—“Galahad and Gwalchaved”. Footnote 520: The German romance _Diu Krône_, by Heinrich von dem Tûrlin. Footnote 521: Rhys: _Arthurian Legend_, p. 71. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXIV THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE GODS If there be love of fame in celestial minds, those gods might count themselves fortunate who shared in the transformation of Arthur. Their divinity had fallen from them, but in their new rôles, as heroes of romance, they entered upon vivid reincarnations. The names of Arthur’s Knights might almost be described as “household words”, while the gods who had no portion in the Table Round are known only to those who busy themselves with antiquarian lore. It is true that a few folk-tales still survive in the remoter parts of Wales, in which the names of such ancient British deities as Gwydion, Gwyn, Arianrod, and Dylan appear, but it is in such a chaos of jumbled and distorted legend that one finds it hard to pick out even the slenderest thread of story. They have none of the definite coherence of the contemporary Gaelic folk-tales quoted in a previous chapter as still preserving the myths about Goibniu, Lugh, Cian, Manannán, Ethniu, and Balor. Indeed, they have reached such a stage of disintegration that they can hardly now survive another generation.[522] There have been, however, other paths by which the fame of a god might descend to a posterity which would no longer credit his divinity. The rolls of early British history were open to welcome any number of mythical personages, provided that their legends were attractive. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s famous _Historia Britonum_ is, under its grave pretence of exact history, as mythological as the Morte Darthur, or even the Mabinogion. The annals of early British saintship were not less accommodating. A god whose tradition was too potent to be ignored or extinguished was canonized, as a matter of course, by clerics who held as an axiom that “the toleration of the cromlech facilitated the reception of the Gospel.[523]” Only the most irreconcilable escaped them—such a one as Gwyn son of Nudd, who, found almost useless by Geoffrey and intractable by the monkish writers, remains the last survivor of the old gods—dwindled to the proportions of a fairy, but unsubdued.