Professor John Rhys, Principal of Jesus College, Oxford

Description

John Rhys was was born on the 21st June, 1840, at Aberaeron, near Ponterwyd Cardiganshire, and was educated at the village schools, near his home. He served an apprenticeship as pupil teacher at Penllwyn British School, near Aberystwyth, from August, 1855, to the end of 1859, and later, at Bangor Normal College, in 1860, he to be a public elementary schoolmaster. Until the end of 1865 he had charge of a school in Anglesey.

From 1868 to 1870 he attended lectures at the Sorbonne, the College de France, and the University of Heidelberg. In 1870 he matriculated at Leipzig, and read under Professors Curtius, Ritschl, Leskien, and Brockenhaus. In 1871 he matriculated at Gottingen and in the same year was appointed inspector of school for the counties of Flint and Denbigh.

He served on Lord Aberdare's Commission, appointed in August 1880, to inquire into the condition on intermediate and higher education in Wales. Is October, 1881, he was elected to a fellowship at Jesus College. He is the author of several deeply interesting philological works, including one on Celtic Britain (published in 1882), and another all the Arthurian Legend (published in 1891).

The second Hibbert Lecture was delivered on the 5th inst., at St. George's Hall, Langham Place. The lecturer, Professor Rhys. of Oxford, said that on the previous occasion he had tried to give some account of one or two of the Gaulish gods according to classic authors and the testimony of the stone witnesses. It was then attempted to study the subject from the remotest point down towards modern times. He wished already, in this, his second lecture, to reverse the process and try to study the subject backwards from the literature of the Celtic nations of the present day towards the time of Caesar and the monuments.

The great and all but insuperable task was to bridge over the gulf of intervening time, but as he went on the audience would perceive, he hoped, that a few threads of connection could just be made out through the mists which enveloped the early history of the Welsh and the Irish, in other words, the old Brythons and Goidels. It was only sparingly, he said, that Irish literature spoke of a Pagan god or goddess of the ancient inhabitants of the island, and Welsh literature hardly ever. But that was an accident attaching to the medium through which all accounts of Celtic heathendom had reached us; the gods of the Celts had, in the course of their transmission through a Christian channel, been reduced to the status of men, more or less heroic, playing their parts in a mythical history, and it was only by careful comparison that we were enabled to say that such and such a hero of our stories was, in the Pagan period, such and such a god of the Celtic (and even of the Aryan) pantheon.

A lecture of considerable interest was given am Wednesday evening by the Oxford Professor of Celtic before the Cymmrodorion Society of London, am Taliesin. Mr. Alfred Nutt, the author of the forthcoming work on the Holy Grail, presided.

The source of the mythic detail connected with this personage, said the professor, was the story of Taliesin contained in Lady Charlotte Guest's “Mabinogion." There they learned that a certain character of Welsh romance called “Gwion the Little,” having fallen under the ban of Ceridwen was pursued by her through several metamorphosed forms, and eventually wrapped in a hide and cast into the sea.

The hide was picked up by Elphin, son of Gwyddno, who on beholding child's forehead at once christened him "Tal Iessin." (noble forehead). Presently he sang a poem called “Consolation of Elphin," and followed it up by other compositions on his previous existence and preternatural knowledge.

He became a bird and prophet, and to him had been ascribed a number of poems of mythological import. These poems represented a school of Welsh bardism, but they knew in reality nothing about their authorship.

 

Photo credit: Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales Sir John Rhys (1840–1915) ; Christopher Williams (1873–1934)

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