Une des légendes les plus répandues en Bretagne est celle d'une prétendue ville d'ls, qui, à une époque inconnue, aurait été' engloutie par la. mer. On montre, à divers endroits de ]a côte, l'emplacement de cette cité fabuleuse, et les pěcheurs vous en font d'étranges récits. Les jours de tempéte, assurent-ils, on voit, dans les creux des vagues, le sommet des fléches de ses églses; les jours de calme, on entend mointer de I'ablme Ie son de ses cloches, modulant l'hymne du jour.-RENAN.
MORE than once in the last chapter was the subject of submersions and cataclysms brought before the reader, and it may be convenient to enumerate here the most remarkable cases, and to add one or two to their number, as well as to dwell at somewhat greater length on some instances which may be said to have found their way into Welsh literature. He has already been told of the outburst of the Glasfryn Lake and Ffynnon Gywer, of Llyn Llech Owen and the Crymlyn, also of the drowning of Cantre'r Gwaelod; not to mention that one of my informants had something to say of the submergence of Caer Arianrhod, a rock now visible only at low water between Celynmog Fawr and Dinas Dintle, on the coast of Arfon. Rut, to put it briefly, it is an ancient belief in the Principality that its lakes generally have swallowed up habitations of men, as in the case of Llyn Syfacton (p. 73) and the Pool of Corwrion (p. 57). To these I now proceed to add other instances, to wit those of Bala Lake, Kenfig Pool Llynclys, and Helig ab Glannog's territory including Traeth Lafan.
Perhaps it is best to begin with historical events, namely those implied in the encroachment of the sea and the sand on the coast of Glamorganshire, from the Mumbles, in Gower, to the mouth of the Ogmore, below Bridgend. It is believed that formerly the shores of Swansea Bay were from three to five miles further out than the present strand, and the oyster dredgers point to that part of the bay which they call the Green Grounds, while trawlers, hovering over these sunken meadows of the Grove Island, declare that they can sometimes see the foundations of the ancient homesteads overwhelmed by a terrific storm which raged some three centuries ago. The old people sometimes talk of an extensive forest called Coed Arian, 'Silver Wood,' stretching from the foreshore of the Mumbles to Kenfig Burrows, and there is a tradition of a longlost bridle path used by many generations of Mansels, Mowbrays, and Talbots, from Penrice Castle to Margam Abbey. All this is said to be corroborated by the fishing up every now and then in Swansea Bay of stags' antlers, elks' horns, those of the wild ox, and wild boars' tusks, together with the remains of other ancient tenants of the submerged forest. Various references in the registers of Swansea and Aberavon mark successive stages in the advance of the desolation from the latter part of the fifteenth century down. Among others a great sandstorm is mentioned, which overwhelmed the borough of Cynffig or Kenfig, and encroached on the coast generally: the series of catastrophes seems to have culminated in an inundation caused by a terrible tidal wave in the early part of the year 1607 [a]
To return to Kenfig, what remains of that old town is near the sea, and it is on all sides surrounded by hillocks of finely powdered sand and flanked by ridges of the same fringing the coast. The ruins of several old buildings half buried in the sand peep out of the ground, and in the immediate neighbourhood is Kenfig Pool, which is said to have a circumference of nearly two miles. When the pool formed itself I have not been able to discover: from such accounts as have come in my way I should gather that it is older than the growing spread of the sand, but the island now to be seen in it is artificial and of modem make [b]. The story relating to the lake is given as follows in the volume of the Iolo Manuscripts, p. 194, and the original, from which I translate, is crisp, compressed, and, as I fancy, in Iolo's own words:--
'A plebeian was in love with Earl Clare's daughter: she would not have him as he was not wealthy. He took to the highway, and watched the agent of the lord of the dominion coming towards the castle from collecting his lord's money. He killed him, took the money, and produced the coin, and the lady married him. A splendid banquet was held: the best men of the country were invited, and they made as merry as possible. On the second night the marriage was consummated, and when happiest one heard a voice: all ear one listened and caught the words, "Vengeance comes, vengeance comes, vengeance comes," three times. One asked, " When? " " In the ninth generation (jch)," said the voice. " No reason for us to fear," said the married pair; "we shall be under the mould long before." They lived on, however, and a goresgynnydd that is to say, a descendant of the sixth direct generation, was born to them, also to the murdered man a goresgynnydd, who, seeing that the time fixed was come, visited Kenfig. This was a discreet youth of gentle manners, and he looked at the city and its splendour, and noted that nobody owned a furrow or a chamber there except the offspring of the murderer: he and his wife were still living. At cockcrow he heard a cry, " Vengeance is; come, is come, is come." It is asked, " On whom?" and answered, "On him who murdered my father of the ninth âch." He rises in terror: he goes towards the city; but there is nothing to see save a large lake with three chimney tops above the surface emitting smoke that formed a stinking . . . [c] On the face of the waters the gloves of the murdered man float to the young man's feet: he picks them up, and sees on them the murdered man's name and arms; and he hears at dawn of day the sound of praise to God rendered by myriads joining in heavenly music. And so the story ends'
On this coast is another piece of water in point, namely Crymlyn, or 'Crumlin Pool,' now locally called the Bog. It appears also to have been sometimes called Pwll Cynan, after the name of a son of Rhys ab T-ewdwr, who, in his flight after his father's defeat on Hirwaen Wrgan, was drowned in its waters [d]. It lies on Lord Jersey's estate, at a distance of about one mile east of the mouth of the Tawe, and about a quarter of a mile from high-water mark, from which it is separated by a strip of ground known in the neighbourhood as Crymlyn Burrows. The name Crymlyn means Crooked Lake, which, I am told, describes the shape of this piece of water. When the bog becomes a pool it encloses an island consisting of a little rocky hillock showing no trace of piles, or walling, or any other handiwork of man [e]. The storv about this pool also is that it covers a town buried beneath its waters. Mr. Wirt Sikes' reference to it has already been mentioned, and I have it on the evidence of a native of the immediate neighbourhood, that he has often heard his father and grandfather talk about the submerged town. Add to this that Cadrawd, to whom I have had already (pp. 23, 376) to acknowledge my indebtedness, speaks in the columns of the South Wales Daibi News for February 15, 1899, of Crymlyn as follows:--
'It was said by the old people that on the site of this bog once stood the old town of Swansea, and that in clear and calm weather the chimneys and even the church steeple could be seen at the bottom of the lake, and in the loneliness of the night the bells were often heard ringing in the lake. It was also said that should any person happen to stand with his face towards the lake when the wind is blowing across the lake, and if any of the spray of that water should touch his clothes, it would be only with the greatest difficulty he could save himself from being attracted or sucked into the water. The lake was at one time much larger than at present. The efforts made to drain it have drawn a good deal of the water from it, but only to convert it into a bog, which no one can venture to cross except in exceptionally dry seasons or hard frost.'
On this I wish to remark in passing, that, while common sense would lead one to suppose that the wind blowing across the water would help the man facing it to get away whenever he chose, the reasoning here is of another order, one characteristic in fact of the ways and means of sympathetic magic. For specimens in point the reader may be conveniently referred above, where he may compare the words quoted from Mr. Hartland, especially as to the use there mentioned of stones or pellets thrown from one's hands. In the case of Crymlyn, the wind blowing off the face of the water into the onlooker's face and carrying with it some of the water in the form of spray which wets his clothes, howsoever little, was evidently regarded as establishing a link of connexion between him and the body of the water-or shall I say rather, between him and the divinity of the water?-and that this link was believed to be so strong that it required the man's utmost effort to break it and escape being drawn in and drowned like Cynan. The statement, supremely silly as it reads, is no modern invention; for one finds that Nennius-or somebody else-reasoned in precisely the same way, except that for a single onlooker he substitutes a whole army of men and horses, and that he points the antithesis by distinctly stating, that if they kept their backs turned to the fascinating flood they would be out of danger. The conditions which he had in view were, doubtless, that the men should face the water and have their clothing more or less wetted by the spray from it. The passage (§ 69) to which I refer is in the Mirabilia, and Geoffrey of Monmouth is found to repeat it in a somewhat better style of Latin (ix. 7): the following is the Nennian version:--
Aliud miraculum est, idest Oper Linn Liguan. Ostium fluminis illius in Sabrina et quando Sabrina inundatur ad sissam, et mare inundatur similiter in ostio supra dicti fluminis et in stagno ostii recipitr in modum voraginis et mare non vadit sursum et est litus juxta flumen et quamdiu Sabrina inundatur ad sissam, istud litus non tegitur et quando recedit mare et Sabrina, tunc Stagnum Liuan eructat omne quod devoravit de mari et litus istud tegifur et instar montis in una unda eruclat et rumpit. Et si fuerit exercitus totius regionis, in qua est, et direxerit faciem contra undam, et exercitum trahit unda per vim humore repletis vestibus et equi similiter trahuntur. Si autem exercitus terga versusfuerit contra eam-, non nocet ei unda.
'There is another wonder, to wit Aber Llyn Lliwan. The water from the mouth of that river flows into the Severn, and when the Severn is in flood up to its banks, and when the sea is also in flood at the mouth of the above-named river and is sucked in like a whirlpool into the pool of the Aber, the sea does not go on rising: it leaves a margin of beach by the side of the river, and all the time the Severn is in flood up to its bank, that beach is not covered. And when the sea and the Severn ebb, then ILyn ILiwan brings up all it had swallowed from the sea, and that beach is covered while ILyn ILiwan discharges its contents in one mountain-like wave and vomits forth. Now if the army of the whole district in which this wonder is, were to be present with the men facing the wave, the force of it would, once their clothes are drenched by the spray, draw them in, and their horses would likewise be drawn. But if the men should have their backs turned towards the water, the wave would not harm them'.[f]
One story about the formation of Bala Lake, or Llyn Tegid [g as it is called in Welsh, has already been given, here is another which I translate from a version in Hugh Humphreys' Llyfr Gwybodaeth Gyffredinol (Carnarvon), second series, vol. i, no. 2, P. I. I may premise that the contributor, whose name is not given, betrays a sort of literary ambition which has led him to relate the story in a confused fashion; and among other things he uses the word edifeirwch, 'repentance,' throughout, instead of dial, 'vengeance.' With that correction it runs somewhat as follows:--Tradition relates that Bala Lake is but the watery tomb of the palaces of iniquity; and that some old boatmen can on quiet moonlight nights in harvest see towers in ruins at the bottom of its waters, and also hear at times a feeble voice saying, Dial a daw, dial a itaw, 'Vengeance will come'; and another voice inquiring, Pa bryd y daw, 'When will it come?' Then the first voice answers, Yn y drydedd genhedlaeth, 'In the third generation.' Those voices were but a recollection over oblivion, for in one of those palaces lived in days of yore an oppressive aud cruel prince, corresponding to the well-known description of one of whom it is said, 'Whom he would he slew; and whom he would he kept alive.' The oppression and cruelty practised by him on the poor farmers were notorious far and near. This prince, while enjoying the morning breezes of summer in his garden, used frequently to hear a voice saying, 'Vengeance will come.' But he always laughed the threat away with reckless contempt. One night a poor harper from the neighbouring hills was ordered to come to the prince's palace. On his way the harper was told that there was great rejoicing at the palace at the birth of the first child of the prince's son. When he had reached the palace the harper was astonished at the number of the guests, including among them noble lords, princes, and princesses: never before had he seen such splendour at any feast. When he had begun playing the gentlemen and ladies dancing presented a superb appearance. So the mirth and wine abounded, nor did he love playing for them any more than they loved dancing to the music of his harp. But about midnight, when there was an interval in the dancing, and the old harper had been left alone in a comer, he suddenly heard a voice singing in a sort of a whisper in his ear, 'Vengeance, vengeance!' He turned at once, and saw a little bird hovering above him and beckoning him, as it were, to follow him. He followed the bird as fast as he could, but after getting outside the palace he began to hesitate. But the bird continued to invite him on, and to sing in a plaintive and mournful voice the word I Vengeance, vengeance!' The old harper was afraid of refusing to follow, and so they went on over bogs and through thickets, whilst the bird was all the time hovering in front of him and leading him along the easiest and safest paths. But if he stopped for a moment the same mournful note of 'Vengeance, vengeance!' would be sung to him in a more and more plaintive and heartbreaking fashion. They had by this time reached the top of the hill, a considerable distance from the palace. As the old harper felt rather fatigued and weary, he ventured once more to stop and rest, but he heard the bird's warning voice no more. Helistened, but he heard nothing save the murmuring of the little burn hard by. He now began to think how foolish he had been to allow himself to be led away from the feast at the palace: he turned back in order to be there in time for the next dance. As he wandered on the hill he lost his way, and found himself forced to await the break of day. In the morning, as he turned his eyes in the direction of the palace, he could see no trace of it: the whole tract below was one calm, large lake, with his harp floating on the face of the waters.
Next comes the story of Llynclys Pool in the neighbourhood of 0swestry. That piece of water is said to be of extraordinary depth, and its name means the ' swallowed court.' The village of Llynclys is called after it, and the legend concerning the pool is preserved in verses printed among the compositions of the local poet, John F. M. Dovaston, who published his works in 1825. The first stanza runs thus:--
Clerk Willin he sat at king Alaric's board,
And a cunning clerk was he;
For he'd lived in the land of Oxenford
With the sons of Grammarie.
How much exactly of the poem comes from Dovaston's own muse, and how much comes from the legend, I cannot tell. Take for instance the king's name, this I should say is not derived from the story; but as to the name of the clerk, that possibly is, for the poet bases it on Croes-Willin, the Welsh form of which has been given me as Croes-Wylan, that is Wylan's Cross, the name of the base of what is supposed to have been an old cross, a little way out of Oswestry on the north side; and I have been told that there is a farm in the same neighbourhood called Tre' Wylan, 'Wylan's Stead.' To return to the legend, Alaric's queen was endowed with youth and beauty, but the king was not happy; and when he had lived with her nine years he told Clerk Willin how he first met her when he was hunting 'fair Blodwell's rocks among! He married her on the condition that she should be allowed to leave him one night in every seven, and this she did without his once knowing whither she went on the night of her absence. Clerk Willin promised to restore peace to the king if he would resign the queen to him, and a tithe annually of his cattle and of the wine in his cellar to him and the monks of the White Minster. The king consented, and the wily clerk hurried away with his book late at night to the rocks by the Giant's Grave, where there was an ogo' or cave which was supposed to lead down to Faery. While the queen was inside the cave, he began his spells and made it irrevocable that she should be his, and that his fare should be what fed on the king's meadow and what flowed in his cellar. When the clerk's potent spells forced the queen to meet him to consummate his bargain with the king, what should he behold but a grim ogress, who told him that their spells had clashed. She explained to him how she had been the king's wife for thirty years, and how the king began to be tired of her wrinkles and old age. Then, on condition of returning to the Ogo to be an ogress one night in seven, she was given youth and beauty again, with which she attracted the king anew. In fact, she had promised him happiness
Till within his hall the flag-reeds tall
And the long green rushes grow.
The ogress continued in words which made the clerk see how completely he had been caught in his own net:
Then take thy bride to thy cloistered bed,
As by oath and spell decreed,
And nought be thy fare but the pike and the dare,
And the water in which they feed.
The clerk had succeeded in restoring peace at the king's banqueting board, but it was the peace of the dead;
For down went the king, and his palace and all,
And the waters now o'er it flow,
And already in his hall do the flag-reeds tall
And the long green rushes grow
But the visitor will, Dovaston says, find Willin's peace relieved by the stories which the villagers have to tell of that wily clerk, of Croes-Willin, and of 'the cave called the Grim Ogo'; not to mention that when the lake is clear, they will show you the towers of the palace below, the Llynclys, which the Brython of ages gone by believed to be there..
We now come to a different story about this pool, namely, one which has been preserved in Latin by the historian Humfrey Lhuyd, or Humphrey Llwyd, to the following effect:--
'After the description of Gwynedh, let us now come to Powys, the seconde kyngedome of Wales, which in the time of German Altisiodorensis [St. Germanus of Auxerre], which preached sometime there, agaynst Pelagius Heresie: was of power, as is gathered out of his life. The kynge wherof, as is there read, bycause he refused to heare that good man: by the secret and terrible iudgement of God, with his Palace, and all his householde: was swallowed vp into the bowels of the Earth, in that place, whereas, not farre from 0swastry, is now a standyng water, of an vnknowne depth, called Lhunclys, that is to say: the deuouryng of the Palace. And there are many Churches founde in the same Province, dedicated to the name of German [h]'
I have not succeeded in finding the story in any of the lives of St. Germanus, but Nennius, § 32, mentions a certain Benli, whom he describes as rex iniquus atque tyrannus valde, who, after refusing to admit St. Germanus and his following into his city, was destroyed with all his courtiers, not by water, however, but by fire from heaven. But the name Benli, in modem Welsh spelling Benlli [i], points to the Moel Famau range of mountains, one of which is known as Moel FenIti, between Ruthin and Mold, rather than to any place near Oswestry. In any case there is no reason to suppose that this story with its Christian and ethical motive is anything like so old as the substratum of Dovaston's verses.
The only version known to me in the Welsh language of the Llynclys legend is to be found printed in the Brython for 1863, p. 338, and it may be summarized as follows:--The ILynclys family were notorious for their riotous living, and at their feasts a voice used to be heard proclaiming, 'Vengeance is coming, coming,'but nobody took it much to heart. However, one day a reckless maid asked the voice, I When?' The prompt reply was to the effect that it was in the sixth generation: the voice was heard no more. So one night, when the sixth heir in descent from the time of the warning last heard was giving a great drinking feast, and music had been vigorously contributing to the entertainment of host and guest, the harper went outside for a breath of air; but when he turned to come back, lo and behold! the whole court had disappeared. Its place was occupied by a quiet piece of water, on whose waves he saw his harp floating, nothing more.
Here must, lastly, be added one more legend of submergence, namely, that supposed to have taken place some time or other on the north coast of Carnarvonshire. In the Brython for 1863, pp. 393--4, we have what purports to be a quotation from Owen jones' Aberconwy a'i Chyffiniau, 'Conway and its Environs,' a work which Y have not been able to find. Here one reads of a tract of country supposed to have once extended from the Gogarth [j], 'the Great Orrne,' to Bangor, and from Llanfair Fechan to Ynys Seiriol, 'Priestholme or Puffin Island,' and of its belonging to a wicked prince named Helig ab Glannawc or Glannog.[k], from whom it was called Tyno Helig, 'Helig's Hollow.' Tradition, the writer says, fixes the spot where the court stood about halfway between Penmaen Mawr and Pen y Gogarth, 'the Great Orme's Head,' over against Trwyn yr Wylfa; and the story relates that here a calamity had been foretold four generations before it came, namely as the vengeance of Heaven on Helig ab Glannog for his nefarious impiety. As that ancient prince rode through his fertile heritage one day at the approach of night, he heard the voice of an invisible follower warning him that 'Vengeance is coming, coming.' The wicked old prince once asked excitedly,, When?' The answer was, 'In the time of thy grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and their children.' Per-adventure Helig calmed himself with the thought, that, if such a thing came, it would not happen in his lifetime. But on the occasion of a great feast held at the court, and when the family down to the fifth generation were present taking part in the festivities, one of the servants noticed, when visiting the mead cellar to draw more drink, that water was forcing its way in. He had only time to warn the harper of the danger he was in when all the others, in the midst of their intoxication, were overwhelmed by the flood.'
These inundation legends have many points of similarity among themselves: thus in those of ILynclys, Syfaddon, Llyn Tegid, and Tyno Helig, though they have a ring of austerity about them, the harper is a favoured man, who always escapes when the banqueters are all involved in the catastrophe. The story, moreover, usually treats the submerged habitations as having sunk intact, so that the ancient spires and church towers may still at times be seen: nay the chimes of their bells may be heard by those who have ears for such music. In some cases there may have been, underlying the legend, a trace of fact such as has been indicated to me by Mr. Owen M. Edwards, of Lincoln College, in regard to Bala Lake. When the surface of that water, he says, is covered with broken ice, and a south-westerly wind is blowing, the mass of fragments is driven towards the north-eastern end near the town of Bala; and he has observed that the friction produces a somewhat metallic noise which a quick imagination may convert into something like a distant ringing of bells. Perhaps the most remarkable instance remains to be mentioned: I refer to Cantre'r Gwaelod, as the submerged country of Gwyc1no Garanhir is termed, see above. To one portion of his fabled realm the nearest actual centres of population are Aberdovey and Borth on either side of the estuary of the Dovey. As bursar of Jesus College I had business in 1892 in the Golden Valley of Herefordshire, and I stayed a day or two at Dorstone enjoying the hospitality of the rectory, and learning interesting facts from the rector, Mr. Prosser Powell, and from Mrs. Powell in particular, as to the folklore of the parish, which is still in several respects very Welsh. Mrs. Powell, however, did not confine herself to Dorstone or the Dore Valley, for she told me as follows:--'I was at Aberdovey in 1852, and I distinctly remember that my childish imagination was much excited by the legend of the city beneath the sea, and the bells which I was told might be heard at night. I used to lie awake trying, but in vain, to catch the echoes of the chime. I was only seven years old, and cannot remember who told me the story, though I have never forgotten it.' Mrs. Powell added that she has since heard it said, that at a certain stage of the tide at the mouth of the Dovey, the way in which the waves move the pebbles makes them produce a sort of jingling noise which has been fancied to be the echo of distant bells ringing.
These clues appeared too good to be dropped at once, and the result of further inquiries led Mrs. Powell afterwards to refer me to The Monthly Packet for the year 1859, where I found an article headed 'Aberdovey Legends,' and signed M. B., the initials, Mrs. Powell thought, of Miss Bramston of Winchester. The writer gives a sketch of the story of the country overflowed by the neighbouring portion of Cardigan Bay, mentioning, p. 645, that once on a time there were great cities on the banks of the Dovey and the Disynni. 'Cities with marble wharfs,' she says, 'busy factories, and churches whose towers resounded with beautiful peals and chimes of bells.' She goes on to say that 'Mausna is the name of the city on the Dovey; its eastern suburb was at the sand-bank now called Borth, its western stretched far out into the sea.' What the name Mausna may be I have no idea, unless it is the result of some confusion with that of the great turbary behind Borth, namely Mochno, or Cors Fochno, 'Bog of Mochno.' The name Borth stands for Y Borth,,the Harbour,' which, more adequately described, was once Porth Wyddno, 'Gwydno's Harbour.' The writer, however, goes on with the story of the wicked prince, who left open the sluices of the sea-wall protecting his country and its capital: we read on as follows:--' But though the sea will not give back that fair city to light and air, it is keeping it as a trust but for a time, and even now sometimes, though very rarely, eyes gazing down through the green waters can see not only the fluted glistering sand dotted here and there with shells and tufts of waving sea-weed, but the wide streets and costly buildings of that now silent city. Yet not always silent, for now and then will come chimes and peals of bells, sometimes near, sometimes distant, sounding low and sweet like a call to prayer, or as rejoicing for a victory. Even by day these tones arise, but more often they are heard in the long twilight evenings, or by night. English ears have sometimes heard these sounds even before they knew the tale, and fancied that they must come from some church among the hills, or on the other side of the water, but no such church is there to give the call; the sound and its connexion is so pleasant, that one does not care to break the spell by seeking for the origin of the legend, as in the idler tales with which that neighbourhood abounds.'
The dream about the wide streets and costly buildings of that now silent city' seems to have its counterpart on the western coast of Erin-somewhere, let us say, off the cliffs of Moher [l], in County Clare-witness Gerald Griffin's lines, to which a passing allusion has already been made,
A story I heard on the cliffs of the West,
That oft, through the breakers dividing,
A city is seen on the ocean's wild breast,
In turreted majesty riding.
But brief is the glimpse of that phantom so bright:
Soon close the white waters to screen it.
The allusion to the submarine chimes would make it unpardonable to pass by unnoticed the well-known Welsh air called Clychau Aberdyfi, [16] 'The Bells of Aberdovey,' which I have always suspected of taking its name from fairy bells [m].. This popular tune is of unknown origin, and the words to which it is usually sung make the bells say un, dau, tri, bedwar, fump, chwech, 'one, two, three, four, five, six'; and I have heard a charming Welsh vocalist putting on saith, i seven,'in her rendering of the song. This is not to be wondered at, as her instincts must have rebelled against such a commonplace number as six in a song redolent of old-world sentiment. But our fairy bells ought to have stopped at five: this would seem to have been forgotten when the melody and the present words were wedded together. At any rate our stories seem to suggest that fairy counting did not go beyond the fingering of one hand. The only Welsh fairy represented counting is made to do it all by fives: she counts un, dau, tri, joedwar, pumb; un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump, as hard as her tongue can go. For on the number of times she can repeat the five numerals at a single breath depends the number of the live stock of each kind, which are to form her dowry: see p. 8 above, and as to music in fairy tales.
Now that a number of our inundation stories have been passed in review in this and the previous chapter, some room may be given to the question of their original form. They separate themselves, as it will have been seen, into at least two groups: (1) those in which the cause of the catastrophe is ethical, the punishment of the wicked and dissolute; and (2) those in which no very distinct suggestion of the kind is made. It is needless to say that everything points to the comparative lateness of the fully developed ethical motive; and we are not forced to rest content with this theoretical distinction, for in more than one of the instances we have the two kinds of story. In the case of ILyn Tegid, the less known and presumably the older story connects the formation of the lake with the neglect to keep the stone door of the well shut, while the more popular story makes the catastrophe a punishment for wicked and riotous living. So with the older story of Cantre'r Gwaelod, on which we found the later one of the tipsy Seithennin as it were grafted, p. 395. The keeping of the well shut in the former case, as also in that of Ffynnon Gywer, was a precaution, but the neglect of it was not the cause of the ensuing misfortune. Even if we had stories like the Irish ones, which make the sacred well burst forth in pursuit of the intruder who has gazed into its depths, it would by no means be of a piece with the punishment of riotous and lawless living. Our comparison should rather be with the story of the Curse of Pantannas, where a man incurred the wrath of the fairies by ploughing up ground which they wished to retain as a green sward; but the threatened vengeance for that act of culture did not come to pass for a century, till the time of one, in fact, who is not charged with having done anything to deserve it. The ethics of that legend are, it is clear, not easy to discover, and in our inundation stories one may trace stages of development from a similarly low level. The case may be represented thus: a divinity is offended by a man, and for some reason or other the former wreaks his vengeance, not on the offender, but on his descendants. This minimum granted, it is easy to see, that in time the popular conscience would fail to rest satisfied with the cruel idea of a jealous divinity visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. One may accordingly distinguish the following stages:--
1. The legend lays it down as a fact that the father was very wicked.
2. It makes his descendants also wicked like him.
3- It represents the same punishment overtaking father and sons, ancestor and descendants.
4. The simplest way to secure this kind of equal justice was, no doubt, to let the offending ancestors live on to see their descendants of the
generation for whose time the vengeance had been fixed, and to let them be swept away with them in one and the same cataclysm, as in the Welsh versions of the Syfadon and Kenfig legends, possibly also in those of Llyn Tegid and Tyno Helig, which are not explicit on this point.
Let us for a moment examine the indications of the time to which the vengeance is put off. In the case of the landed families of ancient Wales, every member of them had his position and liabilities settled by his pedigree, which had to be exactly recorded down to the eighth generation or eighth lifetime in Gwyned, and to the seventh in Gwent and Dyfed. Those generations were reckoned the limits of recognized family relationship according to the Welsh Laws, and to keep any practical reckoning of the kind, extending always back some two centuries, must have employed a class of professional men [n] In any case the ninth generation, called in Welsh y nawfed dch, which is a term in use all over the Principality at the present day, is treated as lying outside all recognized kinship. Thus if AB wishes to say that he is no relation to CD, he will say that he is not related o fewn y nawfed dch, 'within the ninth degree,' or hyd y nawfed ach, 'up to the ninth degree,' it being understood that in the ninth degree and beyond it no relationship is reckoned. Folklore stories, however, seem to suggest another interpretation of the word dch, and fewer generations in the direct line as indicated in the following table. For the sake of simplicity the founder of the family is here assumed to have at least two sons, A and B, and each succeeding generation to consist of one son only; and lastly the women are omitted altogether:--
Tad I (Father)
I
Brother A
II
B Mab (Son)
2
i Cousin Aa
III
Ba Wyr (Grandson)
3
ii Cousin Ab
IV
Bb Gorwyr (Great Grandson)
4
Cousin Ac
V
Be Esgynnydd (G. G. Grandson)
5
Cousin Ad
VI
Bf Goresgynnydd (G. G. G. Grandson)
In reckoning the relationships between the collateral members of the family, one counts not generations or begettings, not removes or degrees, but ancestry or the number of ancestors, so that the father or founder of the family only counts once. Thus his descendants Ad and Bd in the sixth generation or lifetime, are fourth cousins separated from one another by nine ancestors: that is, they are related in the ninth dch. In other words, Ad has five ancestors and Bd has also five, but as they have one ancestor in common, the father of the family, they are not separated by 5 + 5 ancestors, but by 5 + 5--1, that is by 9. Similarly, one being always subtracted, the third cousins Ac and Bc are related in the seventh dch, and the second cousin in the fifth ach: so with the others in odd numbers downwards, and also with the relatives reckoned upwards to the seventh or eighth generation, which would mean collaterals separated by eleven or thirteen ancestors respectively. This reckoning, which is purely conjectural, is based chiefly on the Kenfig story, which foretold the vengeance to come in the ninth dch and otherwise in the time of the goresgytrnydd, that is to say in the sixth lifetime. This works out all right if only by the ninth ach we understand the generation or lifetime when the collaterals are separated by nine ancestors, for that is no other than the sixth from the founder of the family. The Welsh version of the Llynclys legend fixes on the same generation, as it says yn oes wyrion, gorwyrion, esgynnydd a goresgynnydd, 'in the lifetime of grandsons, great-grandsons, ascensors, and their children,' for these last's time is the sixth generation. In the case of the Syfaddon legend the time of the vengeance is the ninth cenhedlaeth or gener-ation, which must be regarded as probably a careless way of indicating the generation when the collaterals are separated by nine ancestors, that is to say the sixth -from the father of the family. It can hardly have the other meaning, as the sinning ancestors are represented as then still living.
The case of the Tyno Helig legend is different, as we have the time announced to the offending ancestor described as amser dy wyrion, dy orwyrion, a dy esgynyddion, 'the time of thy grandsons, thy great-grandsons, and thy ascensors,' which would be only the fifth generation with collaterals separated only by seven ancestors, and not nine. But the probability is that goresgynyddion has been here accidentally omitted, and that the generation indicated originally was the same as in the others. This, however, will not explain the Bala legend, which fixes the time for the third generation, namely, immediately after the birth of the offending prince's first grandson. If, however, as I am inclined to suppose, the sixth generation with collaterals severed by nine ancestors was the normal term in these stories, it is easy to understand that the story-teller might wish to substitute a generation nearer to the original offender, especially if he was himself to be regarded as surviving to share in the threatened punishment: his living to see the birth of his first grandson postulated no extraordinary longevity.
The question why fairy vengeance is so often represented deferred for a long time can no longer be put off. Here three or four answers suggest themselves:--
1:. The story of the Curse of Pantarmas relates how the offender was not the person punished, but one of his descendants a hundred or more years after his time, while the offender is represented escaping the fairies' vengeance because he entreated them very hard to let him go unpunished. All this seems to me but a sort of protest against the inexorable character of the little people, a protest, moreover, which was probably invented comparatively late.
2. The next answer is the very antithesis of the Pantannas one; for it is, that the fairies delay in order to involve all the more men and women in the vengeance wreaked by them: I confess that I see no reason to entertain so sinister an idea.
3. A better answer, perhaps, is that the fairies were not always in a position to harm him who offended them. This may well have been the belief as regards any one who had at his command the dreaded potency of magic. Take for instance the Irish story of a king of Erin called Eochaid Airem, who, with the aid of his magician or druid Dalan, defied the fairies, and dug into the heart of their underground station, until, in fact, he got possession of his queen, who had been carried thither by a fairy chief named Mider. Eochaid, assisted by his druid and the powerful Ogams which the latter wrote on rods of yew, was too formidable for the fairies, and their wrath was not executed till the time of Eochaid's unoffending grandson, Conaire Mόr, who fell a victim to it, as related in the epic story of Bruden Diderga, so called from the palace where Conaire was slain [o]
4. Lastly, it may be said that the fairies being supposed deathless, there would be no reason why they should hurry; and even in case the delay meant a century or two, that makes no perceptible approach to the extravagant scale of time common enough in our fairy tales, when, for instance, they make a man who has whiled ages away in fairyland, deem it only so many minutes [p]
Whatever the causes may have been which gave our stories their form in regard of the delay in the fairy revenge, it is clear that Welsh folklore could not allow this delay to extend beyond the sixth generation with its cousinship of nine ancestries, if, as I gather, it counted kinship no further. Had one projected it on the seventh or the eighth generation, both of which are contemplated in the Laws, it would not be folklore. It would more likely be the lore of the landed gentry and of the powerful families whose pedigrees and ramifications of kinship were minutely known to the professional men on whom it was incumbent to keep themselves, and those on whom they depended, well informed in such matters.
It remains for me to consider the non-ethical motive of the other stories, such as those which ascribe negligence and the consequent inundation to the woman who has the charge of the door or lid of the threatening well. Her negligence is not the cause of the catastrophe, but it leaves the way open for it. What then can have been regarded the cause? One may gather something to the point from the Irish story where the divinity of the well is offended because a woman has gazed into its depths, and here probably, as already suggested we come across an ancient tabu directed against women, which may have applied only to certain wells of peculiarly sacred character. It serves, however, to suggest that the divinities of the water-world were not disinclined to seize every opportunity of extending their domain on the earth's surface; and I am persuaded that this was once a universal creed of some race or other in possession of these islands.Besides the Irish Legends already mentioned of the formation of Lough Neagh, Lough Ree, and others, witness the legendary annals of early Ireland, which, by the side of battles, the clearing of forests, and the construction of causeways, mention the bursting fort of lakes and rivers; that is to say, the formation or the coming into existence, or else the serious expansion, of certain of the actual waters of the country. For the present purpose the details given by The Four Masters are sufficient and I have hurriedly counted their instances as follows:
Anno Mundi 2532
2 lakes formed
Anno Mundi 2533
1 lake fomed
Anno Mundi 2535
2 lakes formed
Anno Mundi 2545
1 lake fomed
Anno Mundi 2546
1 lake fomed
Anno Mundi 2859
2 lakes formed
Anno Mundi 2860
2 lakes formed
Anno Mundi 3503
21 rivers fomed
Anno Mundi 3506
9 lakes formed
Anno Mundi 3510
5 rivers fomed
Anno Mundi 3520
9 rivers fomed
Anno Mundi 3581
9 lakes formed
Anno Mundi 3656
3 rivers fomed
Anno Mundi 3751
1 lake formed
Anno Mundi 3751
4 rivers fomed
Anno Mundi 3790
9 lakes formed
Anno Mundi 4169
5 rivers fomed
Anno Mundi 4694
1 lake forme
This makes an aggregate of thirty-five lakes and forty-six rivers, that is to say a total of eighty-one eruptions. But I ought, perhaps, to explain that under the heads of lakes I have included not only separate pieces of water, but also six inlets of the sea, such as Strangford Lough and the like. Still more to the point is it to mention that of the lakes two are said to have burst forth at th digging of graves. Thus A.M. 2535, The Four Masters have the following: 'Laighlinne, son of Parthalon, died in this year. When his grave as dug, Loch Laighlinne sprang forth in Ui Mac Uais nd from him it is named1. O'Donovan, the editor and translator of The Four Masters, supposes it to be somewere to the south-west of Tara, in Meath. Similarly A.M. 4694, they say of a certain Melghe Molbthach, 'When his grave was digging, Loch Melghe burst forth over the land in Cairbre, so that they named from him.' This is sad to be now called Lough Mevin, on the confines of the counties of Donegal, Leitrim, and Fermanagh. These two instances are mentioned by The Four Masters; and here is one given by Stokes in the Rennes Dindsenchas: see the Revue Celtique, xv. 428-9. It has to do with Loch Garman, as Wexford Harbour was called in Irish, and it runs thus: 'Loch Garman, whence is it? Easy to say. Garman Glas, son of Dega, was buried there, and when his grave was dug then the lake burst throughout the land. Whence Loch Garman'. It matters not here that there are alternative accounts of the name.
The meaning of all this seems to be that cutting the green sward or disturbing the earth beneath was believed in certain cases to give offence to some underground divinity or other connected with the world of waters. That divinity avenged the annoyance or offence given him by causing water to burst forth and form a lake forthwith. The nearness of such divinities to the surface seems not a little remarkable,
1 It is right to say that another account is given by the Rennes Dindsenchas published by Stokes in the Revue Celtique xvi. 164, namely that Laiglinne with fifty warriors 'came to the well of Dera son of Scera. A wave burst over them and drowned Laiglinne with his fifty warriors, and thereof a lake was made. Hence we say Loch Laiglinni, Laiglinne's Lake,'
and it is shown not only in the folklore which has been preserved for us by The Four Masters, but also by the usual kind of story about a neglected well door. These remarks suggest the question whether it was not one of the notions which determined surface burials, that is, burials in which no cutting of the ground took place, the cists or chambers and the bodies placed in them being covered over by the heaping on of earth or stones brought from a more or less convenient distance. It might perhaps be said that all this only implied individuals of a character to desecrate the ground and call forth the displeasure of the divinities concerned; and for that suggestion folklore parallels, it is true, could be adduced. But it is hardly adequate: the facts seem to indicate a more general objection on the part of the powers in point; and they remind one rather of the clause said to be inserted in mining leases in China with the object, if one may trust the newspapers, of preventing shafts from being sunk below a certain depth, for fear of offending the susceptibilities of the demons or dragons ruling underground.
It is interesting to note the fact, that Celtic folklore connects the underground divinities intimately with water; for one may briefly say that they have access wherever water can take them. With this qualification the belief may be said to have lingered lately in Wales, for instance, in connexion with Llyn Barfog, near Aberdovey. 'It is believed to be very perilous,' Mr. Pughe says,, 'to let the waters out of the lake'; and not long before he wrote, in 1853, an aged inhabitant of the district informed him 'that she recollected this being done during a period of long drought, in order to procure motive power for Llyn Pair Mill, and that long-continued heavy rains followed.' Then we have the story related to Mr. Reynolds as to Llyn y Fan Fach, how there emerged from the water a huge hairy fellow of hideous aspect, who stormed at the disturbers of his peace, and uttered the threat that unless they left him alone in his own place he would drown a whole town. Thus the power of the water spirit is represented as equal to producing excessive wet weather and destructive floods. He is in all probability not to be dissociated from the afaric in the Conwy story which has already been given. Now the local belief is that the reason why the afanc had to be dragged oilt of the river was that he caused floods in the river and made it impossible for people to cross on their way to market at Llanrwst. Some such a local legend has been generalized into a sort of universal flood story in the late Triad, iii. 97, as follows:--'Three masterpieces of the Isle of Prydain: the Ship of Nefydd Naf Neifion, that carried in her male and female of every kind when the Lake of Don burst; and Hu the Mighty's Ychen Bannog dragging the afanc of the lake to land, so that the lake burst no more; and the Stones of Gwydon Ganhebon, on which one read all the arts and sciences of the world.' A story similar to the Conwy one, but no longer to be got so complete, as far as I know, seems to have been current in various parts of the Principality, especially around Llyn Syfaddon and on the banks of the Anglesey pool called Llyn yr Wyth Eidion, 'the Pool of the Eight Oxen,'for so many is Hu represented here as requiring in dealing with the Anglesey afanc. According to Mr. Pughe of Aberdovey, the same feat was performed at lLyn Barfog, not, however, by Hu and his oxen, but by Arthur and his horse. To be more exact the task may be here considered as done by Arthur superseding Hu: see p. 142 above. That, however, is of no consequence here, and I return to the afanc: the Fan Fach legend told to Mr. Reynolds makes the lake ruler huge and hairy, hideous and rough-spoken, but he expresses himself in human speech, in fact in two lines of doggerel: see p. ig above. On the other hand, the Llyn Cwm Llwch story, which puts the same doggerel into the mouth of the threatening figure in red who sits in a chair on the face of that lake, suggests nothing abnormal about his personal appearance. Then as to the Conwy afanc, he is very heavy, it is true, but he also speaks the language of the country. He is lured, be it noticed, out of his home in the lake by the attractions of a young woman, who lets him rest his head in her lap and fall asleep. When he wakes to find himself in chains he takes a cruel revenge on her. But with infinite toil and labour he is dragged beyond the Conwy watershed into one of the highest tarns on Snowdon; for there is here no question of killing him, but only of removing him where he cannot harm the people of the Conwy Valley. It is true that the story of Peredur represents that knight cutting an afanc's head off, but so much the worse for the compiler of that romance, as we have doubtless in the afanc some kind of a deathless being. However, the description which the Peredur story gives [q] of him is interesting: he lives in a cave at the door of which is a stone pillar: he sees everybody that comes without anybody seeing him; and from behind the pillar he kills all comers with a poisoned spear.
Hitherto we have the afanc described mostly from a hostile point of view: let us change our position, which some of the stories already given enable us to do. Take for instance the first of the whole series, where it describes, P- 7, the Fan Fach youth's despair when the lake damsel, whose love he had gained, suddenly dived to fetch her father and her sister.
There emerged, it says, out of the lake two most beautiful ladies, accompanied by a hoaryheaded man of noble mien and extraordinary stature, but having otherwise all the force and strength of youth. This hoary-headed man of noble mien owned herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, a number of which were allowed to come out of the lake to form his daughter's dowry, as the narrative goes on to show. In the story of Llyn Du'r Arclu, p. 32, he has a consort who appears with him to join in giving the parental sanction to the marriage which their daughter was about to make with the Snowdon shepherd. In neither of these stories has this extraordinary figure any name given him, and it appears prima facie probable that the term afanc is rather one of abuse in harmony with the unlovely description of him supplied by the other stories. But neither in them does the term yr afanc suit the monster meant, for there can be no doubt that in the word afanc we have the etymological equivalent of the Irish word abacc, 'a dwarf'; and till further light is shed on these words one may assume that at one time afanc also meant a dwarf or pigmy in Welsh. In modern Welsh it has been regarded as meaning a beaver, but as that was too small an animal to suit the popular stories, the word has been also gravely treated as meaning a crocodile [r]: this is in the teeth of the unanimous treatment of him as anthropomorphic in the legends in point. If one is to abide by the meaning dwarf or pigmy, one is bound to regard afanc as one of the terms originally applied to the fairies in their more unlovely aspects: compare the use of crimbil, p. 263. Here may also be mentioned pegor, 'a dwarf or pigmy,'which occurs in the Book of Taliessin, poem
vii (p. 135):--
Gog6n Py pegor
I know what (sort of) pigmy
yssyd.ydan vor.
There is beneath the sea.
Gogwn eu heissor I
know their kind,
pa6b yny .oscord.
Each in his troop.
Also the following lines in the twelfth-century manuscript of the Black Book of Carmarthen: see Evans' autotype facsimile, fo. 9b:--
Ar gnyuer pegor
And every dwarf
y ssit y dan mor.
There is beneath the sea,
Ar gnyuer edeinauc
And every winged thing
aoruc kyuoethauc.
The Mighty One hath made,
Ac vei. vei. paup.
And were there to each
tri trychant lauamd
Thrice three hundred tongues-
Nyellynt ve traethaud.
They could not relate
kyuoetheu [y] trindaud
The powers of the Trinity.
I should rather suppose, then, that the pigmies in the water-world were believed to consist of many grades or classes, and to be innumerable like the Luchorpdin of Irish legend, which were likewise regarded as diminutive. With the Luchorpdin were also associated [s] Fomori or Fomoraig (modern Irish spelling Fomhoraigh), and Goborchinn, 'Horse-heads.' The etymology of the word Fomori has been indicated aabove, but Irish legendary history has long associated it with muir, ' sea,' genitive mara, Welsh mor, and it has gone so far as to see in them, as there suggested, not submarine but transmarine enemies and invaders of Ireland. So the singular fomor, now written fomhor, is treated in O'Reilly's Irish Dictionary as meaning 'a pirate, a sea robber, a giant,' while in Highland Gaelic, where it is written fomhair or famhair, it is regularly used as the word for giant. The Manx Gaelic corresponding to Irish fomor and its derivative fomorach, is foawr, 'a giant,' and foawragh, 'gigantic,' but also 'a pirate.'
I remember hearing, however, years ago, a mention made of the Fomhoraigh, which, without conveying any definite allusion to their stature, associated them with subterranean places:--An undergraduate from the neighbourhood of Killorglin, in Kerry, happened to relate in my hearing, how, when he was exploring some underground rdths near his home, he was warned by his father's workmen to beware of the Fomhoraikh. But on the borders of the counties of Mayo and Sligo I have found the word used as in the Scottish Highlands, namely, in the sense of giants, while Dr. Douglas Hyde and others inform me that the Giant's Causeway is called in Irish Clochán na bh-Fomhorach.
The Goborchinns or Horse-heads have also an interest, not only in connexion with the Fornori, as when we read of a king of the latter called Eocha Eachcheann [t], or Eochy Horse-head, but also as a link between the Welsh afanc and the Highland water-horse, of whom Campbell has a good deal to say in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands. See more especially iv- 337, where he remarks among other things, that 'the water-horse assumes many shapes; he often appears as a man,' he adds, ' and sometimes as a large bird.' A page or two earlier he gives a story which illustrates the statement, at the same time that it vividly reminds one of that part of the Conwy legend which (p. 13o) represents the afanc resting his head on the lap of the damsel forming one of the dramatis persona,. Here follows Campbell's own story, omitting all about a marvellous bull, however, that was in the end to checkmate the water-horse:--
'A long time after these things a servant girl went with the farmer's herd of cattle to graze them at the side of a loch, and she sat herself down near the bank. There, in a little while, what should she see walking towards her but a man, who asked her to fasg his hair [Welsh lleua]. She said she was willing enough to do him that service, and so he laid his head on her knee, and she began to array his locks, as Neapolitan damsels also do by their swains. But soon she got a great fright, for growing amongst the man's hair, she found a great quantity of liobhagach an locha, a certain slimy green weed [u] that abounds in such lochs, fresh, salt, and brackish. The girl knew that if she screamed there was an end of her, so she kept her terror to herself, and worked away till the man fell asleep as he was with his head on her knee. Then she untied her apron strings, and slid the apron quietly on to the ground with its burden upon it, and then she took her feet home as fast as it was in her heart [v] . Now when she was getting near the houses, she gave a glance behind her, and there she saw her caraid (friend) coming after her in the likeness of a horse'.
The equine form belongs also more or less constantly to the kelpie of the Lowlands of Scotland and of the Isle of Man, where we have him in the glashtyn, whose amorous propensities are represented as more repulsive than what appears in Welsh or Irish legend: see above, and the Lioar Manninagh for 1897, P. 139. Perhaps in Man and the Highlands the horsy nature of this being has been reinforced by the influence of the Norse Nykr, a Northern Proteus or old Nick, who takes many forms, but with a decided preference for that of 'a gray water-horse': see Vigfusson's Icelandic-English Dictionary. But the idea of associating the equine form with the water divinity is by no means confined to the Irish and the Northern nations: witness the Greek legend of the horse being of Poseidon's own creation, and the beast whose form he sometimes assumed.
It is in this sort of a notion of a water-horse one is probably to look for the key to the riddle of such conceptions as that of March ab Meirchion, the king with horse's ears, and the corresponding Irish figure of Labraid Lorc [w] . In both of these the brute peculiarities are reduced almost to a minimum: both are human in form save their ears alone. The name Labraid Lorc is distinct enough from the Welsh March, but under this latter name one detects traces of him with the horse's ears in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany [x]. We have also probably the same name in the Morc of Irish legend: at any rate Morc, Marc, or Margg, seems to be the same name as the Welsh March, which is no other word than march, 'a steed or charger.' Now the Irish Morc is not stated to have had horse's ears, but he and another called Conaing are represented in the legendary history of early Erin as the naval leaders of the Fornori, a sort of position which would seem to fit the Brythonic March also were he to be treated in earnest as an historical character. But short of that another treatment may be suspected of having been actually dealt out to him, namely, that of resolving the water-horse into a horse and his master. Of this we seem to have two instances in the course of the story of the formation of Lough Neagh in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo- 39-41:--
There was once a good king named Maired reigning over Munster, and he had two sons, Eochaid and Rib. He married a wife named Ebliu (genitive Eblinde), who fell in love with her stepson, Eochaid. The two brothers make up their minds to leave their father and to take Ebliu with them, together with all that was theirs, including in all a thousand men. They proceed northwards, but their druids persuade them that they cannot settle down in the same district, so Rib goes westwards to a plain known as Tir Cluchi Midir acus Maic Oic, 'the Play-ground of Mider and the Mac Oc,' so called after the two great fairy chiefs of Ireland. Mider visits Rib's camp and kills their horses, then he gives them a big horse of his own ready harnessed with a packsaddle. They had to put all their baggage on the big horse's back and go away, but after a while the nag lay down and a well of water formed there, which eventually burst forth, drowning them all: this is Loch Ri, 'Rib's Loch, or Lough Ree,'on the Shannon. Eochaid, the other brother, went with his party to the banks of the Boyne near the Brug, where the fairy chief Mac Oc or Mac ind Oc had his residence: he destroyed Eochaid's horses the first night, and the next day he threatened to destroy the men themselves unless they went away. Thereupon Eochaid said that they could not travel without horses, so the Mac Oc, gave them a big horse, on whose back they placed all they had. The Mac Oc warned them not to unload the nag on the way, and not to let him halt lest he should be their death. However, when they had reached the middle of Ulster, they thoughtlessly took all their property off the horse's back, and nobody bethought him of turning the animal's head back in the direction from which they had come: so he also made a well [y]. Over that well Eochaid had a house built, and a lid put on the well, which he set a woman to guard. In the sequel she neglected it, and the well burst forth and formed Lough Neagh, as already mentioned above. What became of the big horses in these stories one is not told, but most likely they were originally represented as vanishing in a spring of water where each of them stood. Compare the account of Undine at her unfaithful husband's funeral. In the procession she mysteriously appeared as a snow-white figure deeply veiled, but when one rose from kneeling at the grave, where she had knelt nought was to be seen save a little silver spring of limpid water bubbling out of the turf and trickling on to surround the new grave:--Da man sich aber wieder erhob, war die weisse Fremde verschwunden; an der Stelle, wo sie geknieet hatte, quoll ein silberhelles BrfinnIet*n aus dem Rasen; das rieselte und rieselle fort, bis es den Grabhfigel des Rittersfastganz umzogen hatte; dann rann esftirder und ergoss sich in einen Weiher, der zur Seite des Gottesackers lag.
The late and grotesque story of the Gilla Decair may be mentioned next: he was one of the Fornorach, and had a wonderful kind of horse on whose back most of Finn's chief warriors were induced to mount. Then the Gilla Decair and his horse hurried towards Corkaguiny, in Kerry, and took to the sea, for he and his horse travelled equally well on sea and land. Thus Finn's men, unable to dismount, were carried prisoners to an island not named, on which Dermot in quest of them afterwards landed, and from which, after great perils, he made his way to Tir fo Thuinn, 'Terra sub Unda,'and brought his friends back to Erin [z]. Now the number of Finn's men taken away by force by the Gilla Decair was fifteen, fourteen on the back of his horse and one clutching to the animal's tail, and the Welsh Triads, i. 93 = ii. II, seem to re-echo some similar story, but they give the number of persons not as fifteen but just one half, and describe the horse as Du (y) Moroedd, 'the Black of (the) Seas,' steed of Elidyr Mwynfawr, that carried seven human beings and a half from Pen Llech Elidyr in the North to Pen Llech Elidyr in Mon, 'Anglesey.' It is explained that Du carried seven on his back, and that one who swam with his hands on that horse's crupper was reckoned the half man in this case. Du Moroedd is in the story of Kulhwch and Olwen called Du March Moro, 'Black the Steed of Moro,' the horse ridden in the hunt of Twrch Trwyth by Gwyn ab Nud, king of the other world; and he appears as a knight with his name unmistakably rendered into Brun de Morois in the romance of Durmart le Galois, who carries away Arthur's queen on his horse to his castle in Morois [aa]. Lastly, here also might be mentioned the incident in the story of Peredur or Perceval, which relates how to that knight, when he was in the middle of a forest much distressed for the want of a horse, a lady brought a fine steed as black as a blackberry. He mounted and he found his beast marvellously swift, but on his making straight for a vast river the knight made the sign of the cross, whereupon he was left on the ground, and his horse plunged into the water, which his touch seemed to set ablaze. The horse is interpreted to have been the devil [ab], and this is a fair specimen of the way in which Celtic paganism is treated by th Grail writers when they feel in the humour to assume an edifying attitude.
If one is right in setting Mόn, 'Anglesey,' over against the anonymous isle to which the Gilla Decair hurries Finn's men away, Anglesey would have to be treated as having once been considered one of the Islands of the Dead and the home of Other-world inhabitants. We have a trace of this in a couplet in a poem by the medieval poet, Dafyd ab Gwilym, who makes Blodeuwed the Owl give a bit of her history as follows:--
Merrh i arglwyd, ail Meirrhion,
Daughter to a lord, son of Meirchion,
Wyf i, myn Dewi! o Foxc [ac].
Am I, by St. David! from Mona.
This, it will be seen, connects March ab Meirchion, as it were 'Steed son of Steeding,'with the Isle of Anglesey. Add to this that the Irish for Anglesey or was Mόin Conaing, ' Conaing's Swamp,' so called apparently after Conaing associated with Morc, a name which is practically March in Welsh. Both were leaders of the Fornori in Irish tales: see my Arthurian Legend, p. 356.
On the great place given to islands in Celtic legend and myth it is needless here to expatiate: witness Brittia, to which Procopius describes the souls of the departed being shipped from the shores of the Continent, the Isle of Avallon in the Romances, that of Gwales in the Mabinogion, Ynys Enllii or Bardsey, in which Merlin and his retinue enter the Glass House [ad], and the island of which we read in the pages of Plutarch, that it contains Cronus held in the bonds of perennial sleep [ae]
Let us return to the more anthropomorphic figure of the afanc, and take as his more favoured representative the virile personage described emerging from the Fan Fach Lake to give his sanction to the marriage of his daughter with the Mydfai shepherd. It is probable that a divinity of the same order belonged to every other lake of any considerable dimensions in the country. But it will be remembered that in the case of the story of Llyn Du'r Arddu two parents appeared with the lake maiden-her father and her mother-and we may suppose that they were divinities of the waterworld. The same thing also may be inferred from the late Triad, iii. 13, which speaks of the bursting of the lake of Llion, causing all the lands to be inundated so that all the human race was drowned except Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who escaped in a mastless ship: it was from them that the island of Prydain was repeopled. A similar Triad, iii 97, but evidently of a different origin, has already been mentioned as speaking of the Ship of Nefycl Naf Neifion, that carried in it a male and female of every kind when the lake of Uon burst. This later Triad evidently supplies what had been forgotten in the previous one, namely, a pair of each kind of animal life, and not of mankind alone. But from the names Dwyfan and Dwyfach I infer that the writer of Triad iii. 13 has developed his universal deluge on the basis of the scriptural account of it, for those names belonged in all probability to wells and rivers: in other terms, they were the names of water divinities. At any rate there seems to be some evidence that two springs, whose waters flow into Bala Lake, were at one time called Dwyfan and Dwyfach, these names being borne both by the springs themselves and the rivers flowing from them. The Dwyfan and the Dwyfach were regarded as uniting in the lake, while the water on its issuing from the lake is called Dyfrdwy. Now Dyfrdwy stands for an older Dyfr-dwyf, which in Old Welsh was Dubr duiu, 'the water of the divinity.' One of the names of that divinity was Donwy, standing for an early form Danuvios or Danuvia, according as it was masculine or feminine. In either case it was practically the same name as that of the Danube or Danuvios, derived from a word which is represented in Irish by the adjective dána, 'audax, fortis, intrepidus.' The Dee has in Welsh poetry still another name, Aerfen, which seems to mean a martial goddess or the spirit of the battlefield, which is corroborated and explained by Giraldus [af], who represents the river as the accredited arbiter of the fort unes of the wars in its country between the Welsh and the English. The name Dyfrdonwy occurs in a poem by ILywarch Brydyd y Moch, a poet who flourished towards the end of the twelfth century,
as follows [ag]:--
Nid kywiw [ah] a llwfyr dwfyr dyfyr-
With a coward Dyfrdonwy water ill
donwy agrees:
Krereist oth ubyd gwryd garwy.
From thy boyhood hast thou loved
Garwy's valour.
The prince praised was Llywelyn ab lorwerth, whom the poet seems to identify here with the Dee, and it looks as if the water of the Dee formed some sort of a test which no coward could face: compare the case of the discreet cauldron that would not boil meat for a coward [ai]
The dwy, dwyf, duiu, of the river's Welsh name represent an early form deva or deiva, whence the Romans called their station on its banks Deva, possibly as a shortening of ad Devam; but that Deva should have simply and directly meant the river is rendered probable by the fact that Ptolemy elsewhere gives it as the name of the northern Dee, which enters the sea near Aberdeen. From the same stem were formed the names Dwyf-an and Dwyf-ach, which are treated in the Triads as masculine and feminine respectively. In its course the Welsh Dee receives a river Ceirw not far above Corwen, and that river flows through farms called Ar-ddwyfan and H endre' Ar-ddwyfan, and adjoining Arddwyfan is another farm called Foty Arddwyfan, 'Shielings of Arddwyfan,' while Hendre' Arddwyfan means the old stead or winter abode of Arddwyfan. Arddwyfan itself would seem to mean 'On Dwyfan,' and Hendre' Arddwyfan, which may be supposed the original homestead, stands near a burn which flows into the Ceirw. That burn I should suppose to have been the Dwyfan, and perhaps the name extended to the Ceirw itself; but Dwyfan is not now known as the name of any stream in the neighbourhood. Elsewhere we have two rivers called Dwyfor or Dwyfawr and Dwyfach, which unite a little below the village of Llan Ystumdwy; and from there to the sea, the stream is called Dwyfor, the mouth of which is between Criccieth and Afon Wen in Carnarvonshire. Ystumdwy, commonly corrupted into Stindwy, seems to mean Ystum-dwy,'the bend of the Dwy'; so that here also we have Dwyfach and Dwy, as in the case of the Dee. Possibly Dwyfor was previously called simply Dwy or even Dwyfan; but it is now explained as Dwy-fawr, 'great Dwy,' which was most likely suggested by Dwyfach, as this latter explains itself to the country people as Dwy-fach, 'little Dwy! However, it is but right to say that in Llywelyn ab Gruffydds [17] grant of lands to the monks of Aber Conwy they seem to be called Dwyuech and Dwyuaur [aj]
All these waters have in common the reputation of being liable to sudden and dangerous floods, especially the Dwyfor, which drains Cwm Straltyn and its lake lying behind the great rocky barrier on the left as one goes from Tremadoc towards Aber Glaslyn Bridge. Still more so is this the case with the Dee and Bala Lake, which is wont to rise at times from seven to nine feet above its ordinary level. The inundation which then invades the valley from Bala down presents a sight more magnificent than comfortable to contemplate. In fact nothing could have been more natural than for the story elaborated by the writer of certain of the late Triads to have connected the most remarkable inundations with the largest piece of water in the Principality, and one liable to such sudden changes of level: in other words, that one should treat Llyn Llion as merely one of the names--of Bala Lake, now called in Welsh ILyn Tegid, and formerly sometimes ILyn Aerfen.
While touching at p. 286 on Gwaen Llifon with its Llyn Pencraig as one of those claiming to be the Llyn lifon of the Triads, it was hinted that Llion was but a thinner form of Lllifon. Here one might mention perhaps another Llifon, for which, however, no case could be made. I allude to the name of the residence of the Wynns descended from GLlmin Troedddu, namely, Glyn Llifon, which means the river Llifon's Glen; but one could not feel surprised if the neighbouring LLyfni, draining the lakes of Nant1te, should prove to have once been also known as a Llifon, with the Nanttte waters conforming by being called Llyn Llifon. But however that may be, one may say as to the flood caused by the bursting of any such lake, that the notion of the universality of the catastrophe was probably contributed by the author of Triad iii. 13, from a non-Welsh source. He may have, however, not invented the vessel in which he places Dwyfan and Dwyfach: at all events, one version of the story of the Fan Fach represents the Lake Lady arriving in a boat. As to the writer of the other Triad, iii-97, he says nothing about Dwyfan and his wife, but borrows NefyddT Naf Neifion's ship to save all that were to be saved; and here one may probably venture to identify Nefydd with Nemed [ak] genitive Nemid, a name borne in Irish legend by a rover who is represented as one of the early colonizers of Erin. As to the rest, the name Neifion by itself is used in Welsh for Neptune and the sea, as in the following couplet of D. ab Gwilym's poem Iv:--
Nofiad a wmaeth hen Neifon
It is old Neptune that has swam
O Droia: fawr draw i Fon.
From great Troy afar to Mona.
In the same way Mor Neifion, 'Sea of Neifion,' seems to have signified the ocean, the high seas.
To return to the Triad about Dwyfan and Dwyfach, not only does it make them from being water divinities into a man and woman, but there is no certainty even that both were not feminine. In modern Welsh all rivers are treated as feminine, and even Dyfrdwyf has usually to submit, though the modern bard Tegid, analysing the word into Dwfr Dwyf, 'Water of the Divinity or Divine Water,' where dwfr, 'water,,' could only be masculine, addressed LLyn Tegid thus, p. 78:
Drwyot, er dydiau'r Drywon,
Through thee, from the days of the Druids,
Y rhwyf y Dyfrdwyf ei don.
The Dwfr Dwyf impels his wave.
This question, however, of the gender of river names, or rather the sex which personification ascribed them, is a most difficult one. If we glance at Ptolemy's Geography written in the second century, we find in his account of the British Isles that he names moire than fifty of our river mouths and estuaries, and that he divides their names almost equally into masculine and feminine. The modern Welsh usage has, it is seen, departed far from this, but not so far the folklore: the afanc is a male, and we have a figure of the same sex appearing as the father of the lake maiden in the Fan Fach story, and in that of Llyn Du'r Arddu; the same, too, was the sex of the chief dweller of Llyn Cwm Llwch; the same remark is applicable also to the greatest divinity of these islands--the greatest, at any rate, so far as the scanty traces of his cult enable one to become acquainted with him. As his name comes dovvn into legend it belongs here, as well as to the deities of antiquity, just as much, in a sense, as the Dee. I refer to Nudons or Nodons, the remains [al] of whose sanctuary were many years ago brought to light on a pleasant hill in Lydney Park, on the western banks of the Severn. In the mosaic floor of the god's temple there is a coloured inscription showing the expense of that part of the work to have been defrayed by the contributions (ex stipibus) of the faithful, and that it was carried out by two men, of whom one appears to have been an officer in command of a naval force guarding the coasts of the Severn Sea. In the midst of the mosaic inscription is a round opening in the floor of nine inches in diameter and surrounded by a broad band of red enclosed in two of blue. This has given rise to various speculations, and among others that it was intended for libations. The mosaics and the lettering of the inscriptions seem to point to the third century as the time when the sanctuary of Nudons was buLlt under Roman auspices, though the place was doubtless sacred to the god long before. In any case it fell in exactly with the policy of the more astute of Roman statesmen to encourage such a native cult as we find traces of in Lydney Park.
One of the inscriptions began with D. M. Nodonti, 'to the great god Nudons,' and a little bronze crescent intended for the diadem of the god or of one of his priests gives a representation of him as a crowned, beardless personage driving a chariot with four horses; and on either side of him is a naked figure supposed to represent the winds, and beyond them on each of the two sides is a triton with the fore feet of a horse. The god holds the reins in his left hand, and his right uplifted grasps what may be a sceptre or possibly a whip, while the whole equipment of the god recalls in some measure the Chariot of the Sun. Another piece of the bronze ornament shows another triton with an anchor in one of his hands, and opposite him a fisherman in the act of hooking a fine salmon. Other things, such as oars and shell trumpets, together with mosaic representations of marine animals in the floor of the temple, compel us to assimilate Nudons more closely with Neptune than any other god of classical mythology.
The name of the god, as given in the inscriptions, varies between Nudons and Nodens, the cases actually occurring being the dative Nodonti, Nodenti, and Nudente, and the genitive Nodentis, so I should regard o or u as optional in the first syllable, and o as preferable, perhaps, to e in the second, for there is no room for reasonably doubting that we have here to do with the same name as Irish Nuadu, genitive Nuadat, conspicuous in the legendary history of Ireland. Now the Nuadu who naturally occurs to one first, was Nuadu Argetlám or Nuadu of the Silver Hand, from argat, 'silver, argentum,' and lám, 'hand.' Irish literature explains how he came to have a hand made of silver, and we can identify with him on Welsh ground a Lludd Llawereint; for put back as it were into earlier Brythonic, this would be Ludo(ns) Llam'-argenitios: that is to say, a reversal takes place in the order of the elements forming the epithet out of ereint (for older ergeint, 'silvern, argenteus,' and llaw, for earlier lama, 'hand.' Then comes the alliterative instinct into play, forcing Nudo(ns) Lamargentio(s) to become Ludo(ms) Lamargentio(s), whence the later form, Lludd Llawereint, derives regularly [am] Thus we have in Welsh the name Llud, fashioned into that form under the influence of the epithet, whereas elsewhere it is Nud, which occurs as a man's name in the pedigrees, whLle an intermediate form was probably Nudos or Nudo, of which a genitive NVDI occurs in a post-Roman inscription found near Yarrow Kirk in Selkirkshire. It is worthy of note that the modification of Nudo into Ludo must have taken place comparatively early--not improbably while the language was still Goidelic--as we seem to have a survival of the name in that of Lydney itself.
It is very possible that we have Ludo, Llud, also in Porthludd, which Geoffrey of Monmouth gives, iii. 20, as the Welsh for Ludesgata or Ludgate, in London, which gate, according to him, was called after an ancient king of Britain named Lud. He seems to have been using an ancient tradition, and there would be nothing improbable in the conjecture that Geoffrey's Lud was our Lludd, and that the great water divinity of that name had another sanctuary on the hill by the Thames, somewhere near the present site of St. Paul's Cathedral, and occupying a post as it were prophetic of Britain's rule of the water-ways in later times.
Perhaps as one seems to find traces of Nudons from the estuary of the Thames to that of the Severn and thence to Ireland, one may conclude that the god was one of the divinities worshipped by the Goidels. With regard to the Brythonic Celts, there is nothing to suggest that he belonged also to them except in the sense of his having been probably adopted by them from the Goidels. It might be further suggested that the Goidels themselves had in the first instance adopted him from the pre-Celtic natives, but in that case a goddess would have been rather more probable [an]. In fact in the case of the Severn we seem to have a trace of such a goddess in the Sabrina, Old Welsh Habren, now Hafren, so called after a princess whom Geoffrey, ii. 5, represents drowned in the river: she may have been the pre-Celtic goddess of the Severn, and the name corresponding to Welsh Hafren occurs in Ireland in the form of Sabrann, an old name of the river Lee that flows through Cork. Similarly one now reads sometimes of Father Thames after the fashion of classic phraseology, and in the Celtic period Nudons may have been closely identified with that river, but the ancient name Tamesa or Tamesis [ao] was decidedly feminine, and it was, most likely, that of the river divinity from times when the pre-Celtic natives held exclusive possession of these islands. On the whole it appears safer to regard Nudons as belonging to a race that had developed on a larger scale the idea of a patriarchal or kingly ruler holding sway over a comparatively wide area. So Nudons may here be treated as ruled out of the discussion as to the origin of the fairies, to which a few paragraphs are now to be devoted.
Speaking of the rank and file of the fairies in rather a promiscuous fashion, one may say that we have found manifold proof of their close connexion with the waterworld. Not only have we found them supposed to haunt places bordering on rivers, to live beneath the lakes, or to inhabit certain green isles capable of playing hide-and-seek with the ancient mariner, and perhaps not so very ancient either; but other considerations have been suggested as also pointing unmistakably to the same conclusion. Take for instance the indirect evidence afforded by the method of proceeding to recover an infant stolen by the fairies. One account runs thus: The mother who had lost her baby was to go with a wizard and carry with her to a river the child left her in exchange. The wizard would say, Crap ar y wrach, 'Grip the hag,' and the woman would reply, Rhy hwyr, gyfraglach, 'Too late, you urchin [ap] [18] Before she uttered those words she had dropped the urchin into the river, and she would then return to her house. By that time the kidnapped child would be found to have come back home [aq] . The words here used have not been quite forgotten in Carnarvonshire, but no distinct meaning seems to be attached to them now; at any rate I have failed to find anybody who could explain them. I should however guess that the wizard addressed his words to the fairy urchin with the intention, presumably, that the fairies in the river should at the same time hear and note what was about to be done. Another, and a somewhat more intelligible version, is given in the Gwyliedyd for 1837, p. 185, by a contributor who publishes it from a manuscript which Lewis Morris began to write in 1724 and finished apparently in 1729. Hewasanative of Anglesey, and it is probably to that county the story belongs, which he gives to Lllustrate one of the phonological aspects of certain kinds of Welsh. That account differs from the one just cited in that it introduces no wizard, but postulates two fairy urchins between whom the dialogue occurs, which is not unusual in our changeling stories.. After this explanation I translate Morriswords thus:--
'But to return to the question of the words approaching to the nature of the thing intended, there is an old story current among us concerning a woman whose children had been exchanged by the Tylwyth Teg. Whether it is truth or falsehood does not much matter, rt it shows what the men of that age thought concerning the sound of words, and how they fancied that the language of those sprites was of a ghastly and lumpy kind. The story is as follows:--The woman whose two
children had been exchanged, chanced to overhear the two fair heirs, whom she got instead of them, reasoning with one another beyond what became their age and persons. So she picked up the two sham children, one under each arm, in order to go and throw them from a bridge into a river, that they might be drowned as she fancied. But hardly had the one in his fall reached the bottom when he cried out to his comrade in the following words:--
Grippiach greppsach
Grippiach Greppiach,
Dal d'afel yn y wrach,
Keep thy hold on the hag.
Hi aeth yn rhowyr 'faglach
It got too late, thou urchin
Mi eis i ir mwthlach [ar]
I fell into the . . .
In spite of the obscurity of these words, it is quite clear that it was thought the most natural thing in the world to return the fairies to the river, and no sooner were they dropped there than the right infants were found to have been sent home.
The same thing may be learned also from the story of the Curse of Pantannas, above; for when the time of the fairies' revenge is approaching, the merry party gathered together at Pantannas are frightened by a piercing voice rising from a black and cauldron-like pool in the river; and after a while they hear it a second time rising above the noise of the river as it cascades over the shoulder of a neighbouring rock. Shortly afterwards an ugly, diminutive woman appears on the table near the window, and had it not been for the rudeness of one of those present she would have disclosed the future to them, but, as it was, she said very little in a vague way and went away offended; but as long as she was there the voice from the river was silent. Here we have the Welsh counterpart of the ben side, pronounced banshee in Anglo-Irish, and meaning a fairy woman who is supposed to appear to certain Irish famLlies before deaths or other misfortunes about to befall them. It is doubtless to some such fairy persons the voices belong, which threaten vengeance on the heir of Pantannas and on the wicked prince and his descendants previous to the cataclysm which brings a lake into the place of a doomed city: witness such cases as those of Llynclys, Syfaclon, and Kenfig.
The last mentioned deserves some further scrutiny; and I direct his attention to the fact that the voice so closely identifies itself with the wronged famLly that it speaks in the first person, as it cries, 'Vengeance is come on him who murdered my father of the ninth generation!' Now it is worthy of remark that the same personifying is also characteristic of the Cyhiraeth [as]
This spectral female used to be oftener heard than seen; but her blood-freezing shriek was as a rule to be heard when she came to a cross-road or to water, in which she splashed with her hands. At the same time she would make the most doleful noise and exclaim, in case the frightened hearer happened to be a wife, Fy ngwr, fy ngwr! 'my husband, my husband!' If it was the man the exclamation would be, Fy ngwraig, fy ngwraig! 'my wife, my wife!' Or in either case it might be, Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach! 'my child, my child, my little child!' These cries meant the approaching death of the hearer's husband, wife, or chLld, as the case might be; but if the scream was inarticulate it was reckoned probable that the hearer himself was the person foremourned. Sometimes she was supposed to come, like the Irish banshee, in a dark mist to the window of a person who has been long aLling, and to flap her wings against the glass, while repeating aloud his or her name, which was believed to mean that the patient must die [at].. The picture usually given of the Cyhiraeth is of the most repellent kind: tangled hair, long black teeth, wretched, skinny, shrivelled arms of unwonted length out of all proportion to the body. Nevertheless it is, in my opinion, but another aspect of the banshee-like female who intervenes in the story of the Curse of Pantannas. One might perhaps treat both as survivals of a belief in a sort of personification of, or divinity identified with, a family or tribe, but for the fact that such language is emptied of most of its meaning by the abstractions which it would connect with a primitive state of society. So it is preferable, as coming probably near the truth, to say that what we have here is a trace of an ancestress. Such an idea of an ancestress as against that of an ancestor is abundantly countenanced by dim figures like that of the Don of the Mabinogion, and of her counterpart, after whom the Tribes of the goddess Donu or Danu [au[ are known as Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish literature. But the one who most provokes comparison is the Old Woman of Beare, already mentioned,she figures largely in Irish folklore as a hag surviving to see her descendants reckoned by tribes and peoples. It may be only an accident that a poetically wrought legend pictures her not so much interested in the fortunes of her progeny as engaged in bewailing the unattractive appearance of her thin arms and shrivelled hands, together with the general wreck of the beauty which had been hers some time or other centuries before.
However, the evidence of folklore is not of a kind to warrant our buLlding any heavy superstructure of theory on the supposition, that the foundations are firmly held together by a powerful sense of consistency or homogeneity. So I should hesitate to do anything so rash as to pronounce the fairies to be all of one and the same origin: they may well be of several. For instance, there may be those that have grown out of traditions about an aboriginal pre-Celtic race, and some may be the representatives of the ghosts of departed men and women, regarded as one's ancestors; but there can hardly be any doubt that others, and those possibly not the least interesting, have originated in the demons and divinities-not all of ancestral origin-with which the weird fancy of our remote forefathers peopled lakes and streams, bays and creeks and estuaries. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the reader is convinced that in the course of this chapter some interesting specimens have, so to say, been caught in their native element, or else in the enjoyment of an amphibious life of mirth and frolic, largely spent hard by sequestered lakes, near placid rivers or babbling brooks.
[a] For most of my information on this subject I have to thank Mr. David Davies, editor of the South Wales Daily Post, published at Swansea.
[b] I am indebted for this information to Mr. J. Herbert James of Vaynor, who visited Kenfig lately and has called my attention to an article headed I The Borough of Kenfig,' in the Archæologia Cambrensis for 1898: see more especially the maps at pp. 138-42.
[c] Here the Welsh has a word edafwr, the exact meaning of which escapes me, and I gather from the remarks of local etymologers that no such word is no-w in use in Glamorgan.
[d] See the Book of Aberpergwm, printed as Brut y Tywysogion, in the Myvyrian Archaiology, ii, 524a, also Morgan's Antiquarian Survey of East Gower, p. 66, where the incident is given from I Brut y Tywysogion, A. D. 1088.' It is, however, not in what usually passes by the name of Brut y Tywysogion, but comes, as the author kindly informs me, from a volume entitled 'Brut y Tywysogion', the Gwentian Chronicle of Caradoc of Llancarvan, with a translation by the late Aneurin Owen, and printed for the Cambrian Archaeological Association, 1863': see PP- 70-1.
[e] For this also I have to thank Mr. Herbert James, who recently inspected the spot with Mr. Glascodine of Swansea.
[f] I do not know whether anybody has identified the spot which the writer had in view, or whether the coast of the Severn stW offers any feature which corresponds in any way to the description.
[g] Supposed to be so called after a certain Tegid Foel, or 'Tegid the Bald,' of Penllyn: the name Tegid is the phonetic spelling of what might be expected in writing as Tegyd--it is the Latin Tacitus borrowed, and comes with other Latin names in Pedigree 1. of the Cuneda dynasty; see the Cymmrodor, xi. 170. In Point of spelling one may compare Idtis for what might be expected written ldrys, of the same pronunciation, for an earlier Iudrys or Iudris.
[h] The translation was made by Thomas Twyne, and published in 1573 under the title of The Breuiary of Briayne, where the passage here given occurs, on fol. 69b The original was entitled Commentarioli Britannica Descriptionis Fragmentum, published at Cologne in 1572. The original of our Passage, fol- 57a, has Guynedhia and Llunclis. The stem llwnc of llyncaf 'I swallow,'answers, according to Welsh idiom, to the use of what would be in English or Latin a participle. Similarly, when a compound is not used, the verbal noun (in the genitive) is used: thus 'a feigned illness,' in Welsh 'a made illness,' is saldra gwyneyd, literally 'an indisposition or illness of making.' So 'the deuouryng of the Palace' is incorrect, and based on Lwyd's vorago Palatij instead of Palatium voratum.
[i] For other occurrences of the name, see the Black Book, fol. 35a, 52a, and Morris' Celtic Remains, where, s. v. Benlli, the Welsh name of Bardsey,
to wit, Yns Elli.ys EA is treated by somebody, doubtless rightly, as of Ynys Fenlli.
[j] The meaning of this name is not certain, but it seems to equate with the Irish Fochard, anglicized Faughard, in County Louth: see O'Donovan's Four Masters, A. D. 1595; also the Book of the Dun Cow, where it is Fockerd, genitive Focherda, dative Focheird, fo. 70b, 73b, 75a, 75b, 76a 77a.
[k] This is sometimes given as Glannach, which looks like the Goidelic form of the name: witness Giraldus' Enislannach in Itin..Kambriae, ii. 7 (p. 131).
[l] See Choke Notes, p. 92, and Gerald Griffin's Poetical and Dramatic Works, p. 106.
[m] Failing to see this, various writers have tried to claim the honour of owning the bells for Aberteifi, 'Cardigan,' or for Abertawe, 'Swansea'; but no arguments worthy of consideration have been urged on behalf of either place: see Cyfaill yr Aelwyd for 1892, p. 184.
[n] For some of the data as to the reckoning of the pedigrees and branching of a family, see the first volume of Aneurin Owen's Ancient Laws--Gwyned, Ill. i. 12-5 (pp. 222-7); Dyfed, II. i. 17-29 (pp. 408-11); Gwent, II. viii. 1-7 (pp. 700-3); also The Welsh People pp. 230-1.
[o] See the Book of the Dun Cow, fol. 99 a & seq.
[p] he may also consult Howells' Cambrian Superstitions, pp. 123-8, 141-2, 146. In one case, p. 123, he gives an instance of the contrary kind of imagination: the shepherd who joined a fairy party on Frenni Fach was convinced, when his senses and his memory returned, that, I'although he thought he had been absent so many years, he had been only so many minutes'. The story has the ordinary setting; but can it be of popular origin? The Frenni Fach is a part of the mountain known as the Frenni Fawr, in the north-east of Pembrokeshire; the names mean respectively the Little Brerni, and the Great Breni. The obsolete word breni meant, in Old Welsh, the prow of a ship; local habit tends, however, to the solecism of Brenin Fawr, with brenin, 'king,' qualified by an adjective mutated feminine; but people at a distance who call it Frenni Fawr, pronounce the former vocable with nn. Lastly, Y Vrrvi Va6r occurs in Maxen's Dream in the Red Book (Oxford Nab. p. 89); but in the White Book (in the Peniarth collection), col. x87, the proper name is written Freni: for this information I have to thank Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans.
[q] The Oxford Mabinogion, p. 224, and Guest's, i. 343.
[r] See Afanc in the Geiriadur of Silvan Evans, who cites instances in point.
[s] See the Revue Celtique, i. 257, and my Hibbert Letures pp. 92-3.
[t] The Four Masters A. M- 3520.
[u] In another version Campbell had found it to be sand and nothing else.
[v] As to this incident of a girl and a supernatural, Campbell says that lie had heard it in the Isle of Man also, and elsewhere.
[w] See the Revue Celtique, ii. 197. He was also called Labraid Longsech, and Labraid Longsech Lore. The explanation of Labraid Lorcis possibly that it was originally Labraid Morc, and that the fondness for alliteration brought it into line as Labraid Lorc: compare Llud Llaweraint in Welsh for Nud Llaweraint. This is not disproved by the fact that Labraid Lorc's grandfather is said to have been called Loegaire Lore: Loegaire Lorc and Labraid Lorc are rather to be regarded perhaps as duplicates of the same original.
[x] See my Arthurian Legend, p. 70; also Hibbert Lectures, p.. 590
[y] The original has in these passages respectively siblais afual corbo thipra, 'minxit urinam suam so that it was a spring'; ar na siblad aflial ar na bad fochond bais doib, 'ne mingat urinam suam lest it should be the cause of death to them'; and silis, 'minxit,' fo. 39b. For a translation of the whole story see Dr. O'Grady's Silva Gadelica, pp. 265-9; also Joyce's Old Celtic Romances, PP. 97-105.
[z] See the story in Dr. O'Grady's Silva Gadelica, pp. 292-311
[aa] See Stengel's edition of li Romans de Durmart le Galois (Tabingen,
1873), lines 4185-340, and my Arthurian Legend, pp. 68-9.
[ab] See Williams' Seint Greal, pp. 60-1, 474-5; Nutt's Holy Grail, P. 44 and my Arthurian Legend; pp. 69-70.
[ac] Bardoniaeth D. ab Gwilym, poem 183. A similar descent of Blodeuwedds appears implied in the following englyn--one of two-by Anthony Powel, who died in 1618: it is given by Taliesin ab lolo in his essay on the Neath
Valley, entitled Traelhawd ar Gywrneindd, Hynafiaeth, a hen Bendefigion Glynn Nedd (Aberdare, 1886), p. 15:--
Crug ael, carn gadarn a godwyd yn fryn,
Yn hen fraenwaith bochlwyd;
Main a'i llud man y lladdwyd,
Merrh hoewen loer Meirchson lwyd.
It refers, with six other englynion by other authors, to a remarkable rock called Craig y Dinas, with which Taliesin associated a cave where Arthur
or Owen Lawgoch and his men are supposed, according to him, to enjoy a secular sleep, and it implies that Blodeuwedd whose end in the Mabinegi of Math was to be converted into an owl, was, according to another account,
overwhelmed by Craig y -Dinas. It maybe Englished somewhat as follows:
Heaped on a brow, a mighty cairn built like a hill,
Like ancient work rough with age, grey-cheeked
Stones that confine her where she was slain
Grey Meirchion's daughter quick and bright as the moon
[ad] This comes from the late series of Triads, iii. 10, where Merlin's nine companions are called naw beirdd cylfeird: cylfeird should be the plural of cylfardd, which must be the same word as the Irish culbard, name of one of the bardic grades in Ireland.
[ae] For some more remarks on this subject generally, see my Arthurian Legend, chapter xv, on the I Isles of the Dead.'
[af] See his Itinerarium Kambria, ii. II (p. 139); also my CeItic Britain, p. 68, and Arthurian Legend, p. 364.
[ag] From the Myvrian Archaiology of Wales, i. 302.
[ah] I regard nid kywiw as a corruption of ni chywiw from cyf-ywl an instance of the verb corresponding to cymod ( = cymbod), 'peace, conciliation.' The preterite has, in the Oxford Bruts, A.D. 1217 (p. 358), been printed kymni for what one may read kymu: the words would then be y kymu reinald y bre6ys ar brenhin, ' that Reginald de Breos was reconciled with the king, or settled matters with him!
[ai] Seethe Book of Taliessin, poem xxx, in Skene's Four Ancient Books, ii. 18 r also Guest's Mabinogion, ii 354, and the Brython for 1860, p. 372b, where more than one article of similar capacity of distinguishing brave men from cowards is mentioned.
[aj] See Dugdale's Monasticon, v. 672, where they are printed Dwynech and Dwynaur respectively
[ak] See my Hibbert Lectues, pp. 649-50.
[al] A full account of them will be found in a volume devoted to them, and entitled Roman Antquities at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, being a posthumous work of the Rev. W. Hiley Bathurst, with Notes by C. W. King, London, 1879. See also an article entitled 'Das Heilligtum des Nodon,' by Dr. Hubner in the Jahrbucher des Vervins von Afterthumsfreundin int Rheinlande lxvii. pp. 29-46, where several things in Mr. King's book are criticized.
[am] See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 122, 125.
[an] On this subject, see The Welsh People, especially pp. 54-61.
[ao] Why our dictionary makers have taken into their heads to treat it as Tamesis I know not. The Welsh is Tafwys with a diphthong regularly representing an earlier long e or ei in the second syllable. There is, as far as I know, no reason to suppose Tafwys an invention, rather than a genuine vocable of the same origin as the name of the Glamorganshire river Taff, in Welsh Taf, which is also the name of the river emptying itself at Laugbarne, in Carmarthenshire. Tafwyys, however, does not appear to occur in any old Welsh document; but no such weakness attaches to the testimony of the French Tamise, which could hardly come from Tamesis: compare also the place-name Tamise near the Scheidt in East Flanders; this, however, may be of a wholly different origin.
[ap] A more difficult version has been sent me by Dewi Glan Ffrydlas, of Bethesda: Caffed y wrack, 'Let him seize the hag'; Methu'r cryfaglach, 'You have failed, urchin.' But he has not been able to get any explanation of the words at the Penrhyn Quarries. Cryfaglach is also the form in Mur Y Cryfaglach, 'the Urchin's Wall,' in Jenkins' Bedd Gelert p.. 249. Heinformis me that this is the name of an old ruin on an elevated spot some twenty or thirty yards from a swift brook, and not far in a south -south-easterly direction from Sir Edward Watkin's chalet.
[aq] For this I am indebted to Mr. Wm. Davies who tells me that he copied the original from Chwedlau a Thraddodiadau Gwynedd, 'Gwyned Tales and Traditions,' published in a periodical, which I have not been able to consult, called Y Gordofigion, for the year 1873.
[ar] The meaning of the word mwthlach is doubtful, as it is now current in Gwyned only in the sense of a soft, doughy, or puffy person who is all of a heap, so to say. Pughe gives mwythlan and mwythlen with similar significations. But mwthlach would seem to have had some such a meaning in the doggerel as that of rough ground or a place covered with a scrubby, tangled growth. It is possibly the same word as the Irish mothlach, 'rough, bushy, ragged, shaggy'; see the Vision of Laisrin, edited by Professor K. Meyer, in the Otia Nerseiana, pp. 114, 117.
[as] The account here given of the Cyhiraeth is taken partly from Choice Notes, pp. 31-2, and partly from Howells, pp. 31-4, 56-7, who appears to have got uncertain in his narrative as to the sex of the Cyhiraeth; but there is no reason whatsoever for regarding it as either male or female-the latter alone is warranted, as be might have gathered from her being called y Cyhiraeth, 'the Cyhiraeth,' never y Cyhiraeth as far as I know. In North Cardiganshire the spectre intended is known only by another name, that of Gwrach y Rhibyn, but y Gyhiraeth or yr hen Gyhiraeth is a common term of abuse applied to a lanky, cadaverous person, both there and in Gwyned; in books, however, it is found sometimes meaning a phantom funeral. The word cyhiraeth would seem to have originally meant a skeleton with cyhyrau, 'sinews; but no flesh. However, cyhyrau, singular cyhyr, would be more correctly written with an i; for the words are pronounced-even in Gwyned, cyhir, cyhirau. The spelling cyhyraeth corresponds to no pronunciation I have ever heard of the word; but there is a third spelling, cyhearaeth, which corresponds to an actual cyhoereth or cyhoyreth, the colloquial pronunciation to be heard in parts of South Wales: I cannot account for this variant. Gwrach y Rhibyn means the Hag of the Rhibyn, and rhibyn usually means a row, streak, a line -- ma' nhw'n mynd yn un rhibym, 'they are going in a line.' But what exactly Gwrach y Rhibyn should connote I am unable to say. I may mention, however, on the authority of Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans, that in Mid-Cardiganshire the term Gwrach y Rhibyn means a long roll or bustle Qf fern tied with ropes of straw and placed along the middle of the top of a hayrick. This is to form a ridge over which and on which the thatch is worked and supported: gwrach unqualified is, I am told used in this sense in Glamorganshire. Something about the Gwvrach sprite will be found in the Brython for 1860, p. 236, while a different account is given in Jenkins' Bed Gelert, pp. 80-1 .
[at] This statement I give from Choice Notes, p. 32; but I must confess that I am sceptical as to the I wings of a leathery and bat-like substance,' or of any other substance whatsoever.
[au] For more about her and similar ancestral personages, see The Welsh People, pp. 54-61.