The method of philological mythology is thus discredited by the disputes of its adherents. The system may be called orthodox, but it is an orthodoxy which alters with every new scholar who enters the sacred enclosure.--ANDREW LANG.
IT has been well said, that while it is not science to know the contents of myths, it is science to know why the human race has produced them. It is not my intention to trace minutely the history of that science, but I may hazard the remark, that she could not be said to have reached years of discretion till she began to compare one thing with another; and even when mythology had become comparative mythology, her horizon remained till within recent years comparatively narrow. In other words, the comparisons were wont to be very circumscribed: You might, one was told, compare the myths of Greeks and Teutons and Hindus, because those nations were considered to be of the same stock; but even within that range comparisons were scarcely contemplated, except in the case of myths enshrined in the most classical literatures of those nations. This kind of mythology was eclectic rather than comparative, and it was apt to regard myths as a mere disease of language. By-and-by, however, the student showed a preference for a larger field and a wider range; and in so doing he was, whether consciously or unconsciously, beginning to keep step with a larger movement extending to the march of all the kindred sciences, and especially that of language.
At one time the student of language was satisfied with mummified speech, wrapped up, as it were, in the musty coils of the records of the past: in fact, he often became a mere researcher of the dead letter of language, instead of a careful observer of the breath of life animating her frame. So long as that remained the case, glottology deserved the whole irony of Voltaire's well-known account of etymology as being in fact, 'une science oii les voyelles ne font rien, et les consonnes fort peu de chose.' In the course, however, of recent years a great change has come over the scene: not only have the laws of the Aryan consonants gained greatly in precision, but those of the Aryan vowels have at last been discovered to a considerable extent. The result for me and others who learrit that the Aryan peasant of idyllic habits harped eternally on the three notes of a, i, u, is that we have to unlearn this and a great deal more: in fact, the vowels prove to be far more troublesome than the consonants. But difficult as these lessons are, the glottologist must learn them, unless he is content to remain with the stragglers who happen to be unable to move on. Now the change to which I allude, in connexion with the study of language, has been inseparably accompanied with the paying of increased attention to actual speech, with a more careful scrutiny of dialects, even obscure dialects such as the literary man is wont to regard with scorn.
Similarly the student of mythology now seeks the wherewithal of his comparisons from the mouth of the traveller and the missionary, wherever they may roam; not from the Rig-Veda or the Iliad alone, but from the rude stories of the peasant, and the wild fancies of the savage from Tierra del Fuego to Greenland's icy mountains. The parallel may be drawn still closer. just as the glottologist, fearing lest the written letter may have slurred over or hidden away important peculiarities of ancient speech, resorts for a corrective to the actuality of modern Aryan, so the mythologist, apt to suspect the testimony of the highly respectable bards of the Rig-Veda, may on occasion give ear to the fresh evidence of a savage, however inconsequent it may sound. The movements to which I allude in glottology and mythology began so recently that their history has not yet been written. Suffice it to say that in glottology, or the science of language, the names most intimately connected with the new departure are those of Ascoli, J. Schmidt, and Fick, those of Leskien, Brugmann, Osthoff, and De Saussure; while of the names of the teachers of the anthropological method of studying myths, several are by this time household words in this country. But, so far as I know, the first to give a systematic exposition of the subject was Professor Tylor, in his work on Primitive Culture, published first in 1871.
Such has been the intimate connexion between mythology and glottology that I may be pardoned for going back again to the latter. It is applicable in its method to all languages, but, as a matter of fact, it came into being in the domain of Aryan philology, so that it has been all along principally the science of comparing the Aryan languages with one another. It began with Sir William Jones' discovery of the kinship of Sanskrit with Greek and Latin, and for a long time it took the lead of the more closely related sciences: this proved partly beneficial and partly the reverse. In the case of ethnology, for instance, the influence of glottology has probably done more harm than good, since it has opened up a wide field for confounding race with language. In the case of mythology the same influence has been partly helpful, and it has partly fallen short of being such. Where names could be analysed with certainty, and where they could be equated, leaving little room for doubt, as in the case of that of the Greek Zενς, the NorseTyr and the Sanskrit Dyaus, the science of language rendered a veritable help to mythology; but where the students of language, all pointing in different directions, claimed each to hold in his hand the one safety-lamp, beyond the range of which the mythologist durst not take a single step except at the imminent risk of breaking his neck, the help may be pronounced, to say the least of it, as somewhat doubtful. The anthropological method of studying myths put an end to the unequal relation between the students of the two sciences, and it is now pretty well agreed that the proper relationship between them is that of mutual aid. This will doubtless prove the solution of the whole matter, but it would be premature to say that the period of strained relations is quite over, since the mythologist has so recently made good his escape from the embarrassing attentions of the students of language, that he has not yet quite got out of his ears the bewildering notes of the chorus of discordant cries of 'Dawn,' 'Sun,'and 'Storm-cloud.'
Now that I have touched on the friendly relations which ought to exist between the science of language and the science of myth, I may perhaps be allowed to notice a point or two where it is possible or desirable for the one to render service to the other. The student of language naturally wants the help of the student of myth, ritual, and religion on matters which most immediately concern his own department of study; and I may perhaps be excused for taking my stand on Celtic ground, and calling attention to some of my own difficulties. Here is one of them: when one would say in English 'It rains' or 'It freezes,' I should have to say in my own language, Y mae h'n bwrw glaw and Y mae h'in rhewi, which literally means 'She is casting rain' and 'She is freezing.' Nor is this sort of locution confined to weather topics, for when you would say 'He is badly off' or 'He is hard up,' a Welshman might say, Y mae h'in ddrwg arno or Y mae h'in galed arno, that is literally, 'She is evil on him' or 'She is hard on him.' And the same feminine pronoun fixes itself in other locutions in the language. Now I wish to invoke the student of myth, ritual, and religion to help in the identification of this ubiquitous 'she' of the Welsh. Whenever it is mentioned to Englishmen, it merely calls to their minds the Highland she' of English and Scotch caricature, as for instance when Sir Walter Scott makes Donald appeal in the following strain to Lord Menteith's man, Anderson, who had learnt manners in France: 'What the deil, man, can she no drink after her ain master without washing the cup and spilling the ale, and be tamned to her!' The Highlander denies the charge which our caricature tries to fasten on him; but even granting that it was once to some extent justified, it is easy to explain it by a reference to Gaelic, where the pronouns se and silh, for 'he' and 'you' respectively, approach in pronunciation the sound of the English pronoun 'she.' This may have led to confusion in the mouths of Highlanders who had but very imperfectly mastered English. In any case, it is far too superficial to be quoted as a parallel to the hi, 'she,' in question in Welsh. A cautious Celtist, if such there be, might warn us, before proceeding further with the search, to make sure that the whole phenomenon is not a mere accident of Welsh phonetics, and that it is not a case of two pronouns, one meaning 'she' and the other 'it,' being confounded as the result merely of phonetic decay. The answer to that is, that the language knows nothing of any neuter pronoun which could assume the form of the hi which occupies us; and further, that in locutions where the legitimate representative of the neuter might be expected, the pronoun used is a different one, ef, e, meaning both 'he' and 'it,' as in i-e for i-ef, 'it is he, she, it or they,' nag-e, 'not he, she, it or they,' ef a allai orfe allai, 'perhaps, peradventure, peut-etre, il est possible.' The French sentence suggests the analogous question, what was the original force of denotation of the 'il' in such sentences as 'il fait beau,' ' il pleut,' and 'il neige'? In such cases it now denotes nobody in particular, but has it always been one of his names? French historical grammar may be able, unaided, to dispose of the attenuated fortunes of M. Il, but we have to look for help to the student of myth and allied subjects to enable us to identify the great 'she' persistently eluding our search in the syntax of the Welsh language. Only two feminine names suggest themselves to me as in any way appropriate: one is tynghed, 'fate or fortune,' and the other is Don, mother of some of the most nebulous personages in Celtic literature.
There is, however, no evidence to show that either of them is really the 'she' of whom we are in quest; but I have something to say about both as illustrating the other side of the theme, how the study of language may help mythology. This I have so far only illustrated by a reference to the equation of xxxxx with Dyaus and their congeners. Within the range of Celtic legend the case is similar with Don, who figures on Welsh ground, as I have hinted, as mother of certain heroes of the oldest chapters of the Mabinogion. For it is from her that Gwydion, the bard and arch-magician, and Gofannon the smith his brother, are called sons of Don; and so in the case of Arianrhod, daughter of Don, mother of Llew, and owner of the sea-laved castle of Caer Arianrhod, not far distant from the prehistoric mound of Dinas Diffite, near the western mouth of the Menai Straits, as already mentioned above. In Irish legend, we detect Don under the Irish form of her name, Danu or Donu, genitive Danann or Donann, and she is almost singular there in always being styled a divinity. From her the great mythical personages of Irish legend are called Tuatha Dé Danann, or 'the Goddess Danu's Tribes,'and sometimes Fir Dea, or 'the Men of the Divinity.' The last stage in the Welsh history of Don consists of her translation to the skies, where the constellation of Cassiopeia is supposed to constitute Llys Don or Don's Court, as the Corona Borealis is identified with Caer Arianrhod or 'the Castle of Don's Daughter'; but, as was perhaps fitting, the dimensions of both are reduced to comparative littleness by Caer Gwydion, 'the Magician Gwydion's Battlements,' spread over the radiant expanse of the whole Milky Way [a]. Now the identification of this ancient goddess Danu or Don as that in whom the oldest legends of the Irish Goidels and the Welsh Goidels converge, has been the work not so much of mythology as of the science of language; for it was the latter that showed how to call back a little colouring into the vanishing lineaments of this faded ancestral divinity. [b]
For my next illustration, namely tynghed, 'fate,' I would cite a passage from the opening of one of the most Celtic of Welsh stories, that of Kulhwch and Olwen. Kulhwch's father, after being for some time a widower, marries again, and conceals from his second wife the fact that he has a son. She finds it out and lets her husband know it; so he sends for his son Kulhwch, and the following is the account of the son's interview with his stepmother, as given in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation, ii. 252:--'His stepmother said unto him, "It were well for thee to have a wife, and I have a daughter who is sought of every man of renown in the world." " I am not of an age to wed," answered the youth. Then said she unto him, "I declare to thee, that it is thy destiny not to be suited with a wife until thou obtain 01wen, the daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr." And the youth blushed, and the love of the maiden diffused itself through all his frame, although he had never seen her. And his father inquired of him, "What has come over thee, my son, and what aileth thee? " " My stepmother has declared to me, that I shall never have a wife until I obtain 01wen, the daughter of Yspaddaden Penkawr." " That will be easy for thee," answered his father. "Arthur is thy cousin. Go, therefore, unto Arthur to cut thy hair, and ask this of him as a boon."'
The physical theory of love for an unknown lady at the first mention of her name, and the allusion to the Celtic tonsure, will have doubtless caught the reader's attention, but I only wish to speak of the words which the translator has rendered, 'I declare to thee, that it is thy destiny not to be suited with a wife until thou obtain Olwen.' More closely rendered, the original might be translated thus: 'I swear thee a destiny that thy side touch not a wife till thou obtain Olwen.' The word in the Welsh for destiny is tynghet (for an earlier tuncet), and the corresponding Irish word is attested as tocad. Both these words have a tendency, like 'fate,' to be used mostly in peiorem partem. Formerly, however, they might be freely used in an auspicious sense likewise, as for instance in the woman's name Tunccetace, on an early inscribed stone in Pembrokeshire. If her name had been rendered into Latin she would have probably been called Fortunata, as a
namesake of good fortune. I render the Welsh mi a tynghaf dynghet itt [c] into English, 'I swear thee a destiny'; but, more literally still, one might possibly render it 'I swear thee a swearing,' that is, 'I swear thee an oath,' meaning' I swear for thee an oath which will bind thee.' The stepmother, it is true, is not represented going through the form of words, for what she said appears to have been a regular formula, just like that of putting a person in Medieval Irish story under gessa or bonds of magic; but an oath or form of imprecation was once doubtless a dark reality behind thi formula. In the southern part of my native county of Cardigan, the phrase in question has been in use within the last thirty years, and the practice which it denotes is still so well known as to be the subject of local stories. A friend of mine, who is not yet fifty, vividly remembers listening to an uncle of his relating haw narrowly he once escaped having the oath forced on him. He was in the hilly portion of the parish of Llanwenog, coming home across country in the dead of a midsummer's night, when leaping over a fence he unexpectedly came down close to a man actively engaged in sheep-stealing. The uncle instantly took to his heels, while the thief pursued him with a knife. If the thief had caught him, it is understood that he would have held his knife at his throat and forced on him an oath of secrecy. I have not been able to ascertain the wording of the oath, but all I can learn goes to show that it was dreaded only less than death itself. In fact, there are stories current of men who failed to recover from the effects of the oath, but lingered and died in a comparatively short time. Since I got the foregoing story I have made inquiries of others in South Cardiganshire, and especially of a medical friend of mine, who speaks chiefly as to his native parish of Llangynllo. I found that the idea is perfectly familiar to him and my other informants; but, strange to say, from nobody could I gather that the illness is considered to result necessarily from the violent administration of the ~inghed to the victim, or from the latter's disregarding the secrecy of it by disclosing to his friends the name of the criminal. In fact, I cannot discover that any such secrecy is emphasized so long as the criminal is not publicly brought before a court of justice. Rather is it that the 4ynghed effects blindly the ruin of the sworn man's health, regardless of his conduct. At any rate, that is the interpretation which I am forced to put on what I have been told.
The phrase tyngu tynghed [d][29], intelligible still in Wales, recalls another instance of the importance of the spoken word, to wit, the Latin fatum. Nay, it seems to suggest that the latter might have perhaps originally been part of some such a formula as alicui fatum fari, 'to say one a saying,' in the pregnant sense of applying to him words of power. This is all the more to the point, as it is well known how closely Latin and Celtic are related to one another, and how every advance in the study of those languages goes to add emphasis to their kinship. From the kinship of the languages one may expect, to a certain extent, a similarity of rites and customs, and one has not to go further for this than the very story which I have cited. When Kulhwch's father first married, he is said to have sought a gwreic kynmwyt ac ef [e], which means 'a wife of the same food with him.' Thus the wedded wife was she, probably, who ate with her husband, and we are reminded of the food ceremony which constituted the aristocratic marriage in ancient Rome: it was called confarreatio, and in the course of it an offering of cake, called farreum libum, used to be made to Jupiter. A great French student of antiquity, M. Fustel de Coulanges, describes the ceremony thus [f]:--Les deux 6poux, comme en Grèce, font un sacrifice, versent la libation, prononcent quelques prières, et mangent ensemble un gateau de fleur de farine (panis farreus).' Lastly, my attention has been directed to the place given to bread in the stories of Llyn y Fan Fach and Llyn Elfarch. For on turning back the reader will find too much made of the bread to allow us to suppose that it had no meaning in the courtship. The young farmer having fallen in love at first sight with the lake maiden, it looks as if he wished, by inducing her to share the bread he was eating, to go forthwith through a form of marriage by a kind of confarreation that committed her to a contract to be his wife without any tedious delay.
To return to the Latin fatum, I would point out that the Romans had a plurality of fata; but how far they were suggested by the Greek xxxxxxx is not quite clear: nor is it known that the ancient Welsh had more than one tynghed. In the case, however, of old Norse literature, we come across the Fate there as one bearing a name which is perhaps cognate with the Welsh tynghed. I allude to a female figure, called Pokk, who appears in the touching myth of Balder's death. When Balder had fallen at the hands of Loki and Hodr, his mother Frigg asked who would like to earn her good will by going as her messenger to treat with Hell for the release of Balder. Hermodr the Swift, another of the sons of Woden, undertook to set out on that journey on his father's charger Sleipnir. For nine dreary nights he pursued his perilous course without interruption, through glens dark and deep, till he came to the river called Yell, when he was questioned as to his errand by the maid in charge of the Yell bridge. On and on he rode afterwards till he came to the fence of Hell's abode, which his horse cleared at full speed. Hermodr entered the hall, and there found his brother Balder seated in the place of honour. He abode with him that night, and in the morning he asked Hell to let Balder ride home with him to the Anses. He urged Hell to consider the grief which everybody and everything felt for Balder. She replied that she would put that to the test by letting Balder go if everything animate and inanimate would weep for him; but he would be detained if anybody or anything declined to do so. Herm6ctr made his way back alone to the Anses, and announced to Frigg the answer which Hell had given to her request. Messengers were sent forth without delay to bid all the world beweep Woden's son out of the power of Hell. This was done accordingly by all, by men and animals, by earth and stones, by trees and all metals, 'as you have doubtless seen these things weep,' says the writer of the Prose Edda, 'when they pass from frost to warmth.' When the messengers, however, were on their way home, after discharging their duty, they chanced on a cave where dwelt a giantess called Pokk, whom they ordered to join in the weeping for Balder; but she only answered:--
Pokk will weep dry tears
At Balder's bale-fire.
What is the son of man, quick or dead, to me!
Let Hell keep what she holds [g]
In this ogress Pokk, deaf to the appeals of the tenderer feelings, we seem to have the counterpart of our Celtic tocad and tynghed; and the latter's name as a part of the formula in the Welsh story, while giving us the key of the myth, shows how the early Aryan knew of nothing more binding than the magic force of an oath. On the one hand, this conception of destiny carries with it the marks of its humble origin, and one readily agrees with Cicero's words, De Divinatione, ii. 7, when he says, anile sane et plenum suterstitionis fati nomen ibsum. On the other hand, it rises to the grim dignity of a name for the dark, inexorable power which the whole universe is conceived to obey, a power before which the great and resplendent Zeus of the Aryan race is a mere puppet.
Perhaps I have dwelt only too long on the policy of 'give and take' which ought to obtain between mythology and glottology. Unfortunately, one can add without fear of contradiction, that, even when that policy is carried out to the utmost, both sciences will still have difficulties more than enough. In the case of mythology these difficulties spring chiefly from two distinct sources, from the blending of history with myth, and from the mixing of one race with another. Let us now consider the latter: the difficulties from this source are many and great, but every fresh acquisition of knowledge tending to make our ideas of ethnology more accurate, gives us a better leverage for placing the myths of mixed peoples in their proper places as regards the races composing those peoples. Still, we have far fewer propositions to lay down than questions to ask: thus to go no further afield than the well-known stories attaching to the name of Heracles, how many of them are Aryan, how many Semitic, and how many Aryan and Semitic at one and the same time? That is the sort of question which besets the student of Celtic mythology at every step; for the Celtic nations of the present day are the mixed descendants of Aryan invaders and the native populations which those Aryan invaders found in possession. So the question thrusts itself on the student, to which of these races a particular myth, rite, or custom is to be regarded as originally belonging. Take, for instance, Bran's colossal figure, to which attention has already been called, pp. 552-3 above. Bran was too large to enter a house or go on board a ship: is he to be regarded as the outcome of Celtic imagination, or of that of a people that preceded the Celts in Celtic lands? The comparison with the Gaulish Tricephal would seem to point in the direction of the southetn seaboard of the Baltic: what then?
The same kind of question arises in reference to the Irish hero Cuchulainn: take, for instance, the stock description of Cuchulairin in a rage. Thus when angered he underwent strange distortions: the calves of his legs came round to where his shins should have been; his mouth enlarged itself so that it showed his liver and lungs swinging in his throat; one of his eyes became as small as a needle's, or else it sank back into his head further than a crane could have reached, while the other protruded itself to a corresponding length; every hair on his body became as sharp as a thorn, and held on its point a drop of blood or a spark of fire. It would be dangerous then to stop him from fighting, and even when he had fought enough, he required for his cooling to be plunged into three baths of cold water; the first into which he went would instantly boil over, the second would be too hot for anybody else to bear, and the third only would be of congenial warmth. I do not ask whether that strange picture betrays a touch of the solar brush, but I should be very glad to know whether it can be regarded as an Aryan creation or not.
It is much the same with matters other than mythological: take, for instance, the bedlamite custom of the couvade [h], which is presented to us in Irish literature in the singular form of a cess, 'suffering or indisposition,' simultaneously attacking the braves of ancient Ulster. We are briefly informed in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 60a, that the women and boys of Ulster were free from it. So was any Ultonian, we are told, who happened to be outside the boundaries of his country, and so were Cuchulainn and his father, even when in Ulster. Any one who was rash enough to attack an Ultonian warrior during this his period of helplessness could not, it is further stated, expect to live afterwards either prosperously or long. The question for us, however, is this: was the couvade introduced by the Aryan invaders of Ireland, or are we rather to trace it to an earlier race? I should be, I must confess, inclined to the latter view, especially as the couvade was known among the Iberians of old, and among the ancient Corsicans [i]. It may, of course, have been both Aryan and Iberian, but it will all the same serve as a specimen of the sort of question which one has to try to answer.
Another instance, the race origin of which one would like to ascertain, offers itself in the curious belief, that, when a child is born, it is one of the ancestors of the family come back to live again. Traces of this occur in Irish literature, namely, in one of the stories about Cuchulainn. There we read to the following effect: The Ultonians took counsel on account of Cuchulainn, because their wives and girls loved him greatly; for Cuchulainn had no consort at that time. This was their counsel, namely, that they should seek for Cuchulainn a consort pleasing to him to woo. For it was evident to thern that a man who has the consort of his companionship with him would be so much the less likely to attempt the ruin of their girls and to receive the affection of their wives. Then, moreover, they were anxious and afraid lest the death of Cuchulainn should take place early, so they were desirous for that reason to give him a wife in order that he might leave an heir; for they knew that it was from himself that his rebirth (athgein) would be. That is what one reads in the eleventh-century copy of the ancient manuscript of the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 121b; and this atavistic belief, which was touched upon in connexion with the transformations discussed in the last chapter, I need scarcely say, is well known elsewhere to the anthropologist, as on.e will find on consulting the opening pages of Dr. Tylor's second volume on Primitive Culture. He there! mentions the idea as familiar to American Indians, to various African peoples, to the Maoris and the aborigines of Australia, to Cheremiss Tartars and Lapps. Among such nations the words of Don Diègue to his victorious son, the Cid, could hardly fail to be construed in a sort of literal sense when he exclaims:--
…………… ton illustre audac
Fait bien revivire en toi les héros de ma race.
Let us return to Cuchulainn, and note the statement, that he and his father, Sualdaim, were exempt from the couvade, which marks them out as not of the same race as the Ultonians, that is to say, as the Fir Ulaid, or 'True Ultonians -presumably ancient inhabitants of Ulster. Furthermore, we have an indication whence his family had come, for Cuchulainn's first name was Setanta Beg, 'the Little Setantian,' which points to the coast of what is now Lancashire, as already indicated at P. 385 above. Another thing which marks Cuchulainn as of a different racial origin from the other Ultonians is the belief of the latter, that his rebirth must be from himself. The meaning of this remarkable statement is that there were two social systems face to face in Ulster at the time represented by the Cuchulainn story, and that one of them recognized fatherhood, while the other did not. Thus for Cuchulainn's rebirth to be from himself, he must be the father of a child from whom should descend a man who would be a rebirth or avatar of C(Ichulainn. The other system implied was one which reckoned descent by birth alone [j]; and the Cuchulainn story gives one the impression that it contemplated this system as the predominant one, while the Ciuchulainn family, with its reckoning of fatherhood, comes in as an exception. At all events, that is how I now understand a passage, the full significance of which had till recently escaped me.
Allusion has already been made to the story of Cuchulainn being himself a rebirth, namely, of Lug, and the story deserves still further consideration in its bearing on the question of race, to which the reader's attention has been called. It is needless, however, to say that there are extant fragments of more stories than one as to Cchulainn's origin. Sometimes, as in the Book of Leinster, fo.119a, he is called gein Loga, or Lug's offspring, and in the epic tale of the Tain Bo Cuailnge, Lug as his father comes from the Sid or Faery to take Cuchulainn's place in the field, when the latter was worn out with sleeplessness and toil. Lug sings over him eli Loga, or 'Lug's enchantment,' and Cuchulainn gets the requisite rest and sleep [k]: this we read in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 78a. In another version of the story, Cuchulainn is an incarnation of Lug: the narrative relates how a foster-son was accepted by Dechtere, sister to Conchobar MacNessa, king of Ulster. But her foster-son died youug, to the great grief of Dechtere; and her lamentations for him on the day of his funeral having made her thirsty, she inadvertently swallowed with her drink a diminutive creature which sprang into her mouth. That night she had a dream, in which a man informed her that she was pregnant, that it was he who was in her womb, that he had been her foster-son, and that he was Lug; also that when his birth should take place, the name was to be Setanta. After an incident which I can only regard as a clumsy attempt to combine the more primitive legend with the story which makes him son of Sualdaim, she gives birth to the boy, and he is duly called Setanta [l]: that was Cfthulainn's first name. Now compare this with what Dr. Tylor mentions in
Here let it suffice to say, that the similarity is so close between the Irish and the Lapp idea, and so unlike anything known to have been Aryan, that it is well worth bearing in mind. The belief in rebirth generally seems to fit as a part of the larger belief in the transmigration of souls which is associated with the teachings of the ancient druids, a class of shamans or medicine-men who were probably, as already hinted, not of Celtic or Aryan origin; and probably the beliefs here in question were those of some non-Aryan people of these islands, rather than of any Aryans who settled in them. This view need hardly be regarded as incompatible with the fact, that Lug's name, genitive Loga, would seem to have meant light, and that Lug was a sun-god, very possibly a Celtic sun-god: or more correctly speaking, that there was a series of Lugs, so to say, or sun-gods, called in ancient Spain, Switzerland, and on the banks of the Rhine, Lugoves [n]. For one is sorely tempted to treat this much as a rescue from the wreckage of the solar myth theory, as against those who, having regard mainly to Lug's professional skill and craft as described in Irish story, make of him a kind of Hermes or Mercury. In other words, we have either to regard a Celtic Lug as having become the centre of certain non-Celtic legends, or else to suppose neither Lug nor his name to be of Aryan origin at all. It is hard to say which is the sounder view to take.
The next question which I wish to suggest is as to the ethnology of the fairies; but before coming to that, one has to ask how the fairies have been evolved. The idea of fairies, such as Welshmen have been familiar with from their childhood, clearly involves elements of two distinct origins. Some of those elements come undoubtedly from the workshop of the imagination, as, for example, the stock notion that their food and drink are brought to the fairies by the mere force of wishing, and without the ministration of servants, or the notion, especially prevalent in Arfon, that the fairies dwell in a country beneath the lakes of Snowdon; not to mention the more general connexion of a certain class of fairies with the world of waters, as indicated in chapter vii. Add to this that the dead ancestor has also probably contributed to our bundle of notions about them; but that contains also an element of fact or something which may at any rate be conceived as historical. Under this head I should place the following articles of faith concerning them: the sallowness of their skins and the smallness of their stature, their dwelling underground, their dislike of iron, and the comparative poverty of their homes in the matter of useful articles of furniture, their deep-rooted objection to the green sward being broken up by the plough, the success of the fairy wife in attending to the domestic animals and to the dairy, the limited range generally of the fairies' ability to count; and lastly, one may perhaps mention their using a language of their own (p. 279), which would imply a time when the little people understood no other, and explain why they should be represented doing their marketing without uttering a syllable to anybody.
The attribution of these and similar characteristics to the fairies can scarcely be all mere feats of fancy and imagination: rather do they seem to be the result of our ancestors projecting on an imaginary world a primitive civilization through which tradition represented their own race as having passed, or, more probably, a civilization in which they saw, or thought they saw, another race actually living. Let us recur for examples also to the two lake legends which have just been mentioned (p. 65o): in both of them a distinction is drawn between the lake fairy's notion of bread and that of the men and women of the country. To the fairy the latter's bread appeared crimped or overbaked: possibly the backward civilization, to which she was supposed to belong, was content to support itself on some kind of unleavened bread, if not rather on a fare which included nothing deserving to be called bread at all. Witness Giraldus Cambrensis' story of Eliodorus, in which bread is conspicuous by its absence, the nearest approach to it being something of the consistency of porridge: see P. 27o above. Then. take another order of ideas: the young man in both lake legends lives with his mother (pp. 3, 27): there is no father to advise or protect him: he is in this respect on a level with Undine, who is the protégéé of her tiresome uncle, Kchleborn. Seemingly, he belongs to a primitive society where matriarchal ideas rule, and where paternity is not reckoned [o]. This we are at liberty at all events to suppose to have been the original, before the narrator had painted the mother a widow, and given the picture other touches of his later brush.
To speak, however, of paternity as merely not reckoned is by no means to go far enough; so here we have to return to take another look at the imaginary aspect of the fairies, to which a cursory allusion has just been made. The reader will possibly recall the sturdy smith of Ystrad Meurig, who would not reduce the notions which he had formed of the fairies when he was a child to conformity with those of a later generation around him. In any case, he will remember the smith's statement that the fairies were all women.. The idea was already familiar to me as a Welshman, though I cannot recollect how I got it. But the smith's words brought to my mind at once the story of Condla Ruad or the Red, one of the fairy tales first recorded in Irish literature. There the damsel who takes Condla away in her boat of glass to the realm of the Everliving sings the praises of that delectable country, and uses, among others, the following words, which occur in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 120:--
Ni fil cenel and nammid acht mona ocus ingena [p]
There is no race there but women and maidens alone.
Now what people could have come by the idea of a race of women only? Surely no people who considered that they themselves had fathers: it must have been some community so low in the scale of civilization as never to have had any notion whatsoever of paternity: it is their ignorance that would alone render possible the notion of a race all women. That this was a matter of belief in the past of many nations, is proved by the occurrence of widely known legends about virgin mothers [q]; not to mention that it has been lately established, that there are savages who to this day occupy the low place here indicated in the scale of civilization. Witness the evidence of Spencer and Gillen in their recently published work on The Native Tribes of Central .Australia, and also what Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, says of a passage in point, in the former, as follows:--
'Thus, in the opinion of these savages, every conception is what we are wont to call an immaculate conception, being brought about by the entrance into the mother of a spirit apart from any contact with the other sex. Students of folklore have long been familiar with notions of this sort occurring in the stories of the birth of miraculous personages, but this is the first case on record of a tribe who believe in immaculate conception as the sole cause of the birth of every human being who comes into the world. A people so ignorant of the most elementary of natural processes may well rank at the very bottom of the savage scale [r].'
Nevertheless, it is to some population in that low position, in the remote prehistory of this country, that one is to trace the belief that the fairies were all women. It is to be regarded as a position distinctly lower than that of the Ultonians in the time of Cuchulainn; for the couvade seems to me to argue a notion of paternityperhaps, in their case, as clear a notion of paternity as was possible for a community which was not quite out of the promiscuous stage of society.
The neo-Celtic nations of these islands consist, speaking roughly, of a mixture of the invading Celts with the earlier inhabitants whom the Celts found in possession. These two or more groups of peoples may have been in very different stages of civilization when they first came in contact with one another. They agreed doubtless in many things, and perhaps, among others, in cherishing an inherited reluctance to disclose their names, but the Celts as Aryans were never without the decimal system of counting. Like the French, the Celtic nations of the present day show a tendency, more or less marked, to go further and count by scores instead of by tens. But the Welsh are alone among them in having, in certain instances, gone back from counting by tens to counting by fives, which they do when they count between 10 and 20: for 16, 17, 18, and 19 are in Welsh 1 on 15, 2 on 15, 3 on 15, and 4 on 15 respectively; and similarly with 13 and 14 [s]. We have seen how the lake fairy reckoned by fives all the live stock she was to have as her dowry; and one otherwise notices that the fairies deal invariably in the simplest of numbers. Thus if you wish, for example, to find a person who has been led away by them, ten to one you have to go 'this day next year' to the spot where he disappeared. Except in the case of the alluring light of the full moon, it is out of the question to reckon months or weeks, though it is needless to say that to reckon the year correctly would have been in point of fact far more difficult; but nothing sounds simpler than 'this day next year.' In that simple arithmetic of the fairies, then, we seem to have a trace of a non-Aryan race, that is to say, probably of some early inhabitants of these islands.
Unfortunately, the language of those inhabitants has died out, so that we cannot appeal to its numerals directly; and the next best eourse to adopt is to take as a sort of substitute for their language that of possible kinsmen of a pre-Celtic race in this country. Now the students of ethnology, especially those devoted to the investigation of skulls and skins, tell us that we have among us, notably in Wales and Ireland, living representatives of a dark-haired, long-skulled race of the same description as one of the types which occur, as they allege, among the Basque populations of the Pyrenees. We turn accordingly to Basque, and what do we find? Why, that the first five numerals in that language are bat, bi, iru, lau, bost, all of which appear to be native; but when we come to the sixth numeral we have sei, which looks like an Aryan word borrowed from Latin, Gaulish, or some related tongue. The case is much the same with 'seven,' for that is in Basque zazpi, which is also probably an Aryan loan-word. Basque has native words, zortzi and bederatzi, for eight and nine, but they are longer than the first five, and appear to be of a later formation affecting, in common with sei and zazpi, the termination i. I submit, therefore, that here we have evidence of the former existence of a people in the West of Europe who at one time only counted as far as five. Some of the early peoples of the British Isles may have been on the same level, so that our notions about the fairies have probably been derived, to a greater or less extent, from ideas formed by the Celts concerning those non-Celtic, non-Aryan natives of whose country they took possession.
As regards my appeal to the authority of craniology, I have to confess that it is made with a certairn amount of reservation, since the case is far less simple than it looks at first sight. Thus, in August, 1891, the Cambrian Archaeological Association, including among them Professor Sayce, visited the south-west of Ireland. During our pleasant excursions in Kerry, the question of race was one of our constant topics; and Professor Sayce was reminded by what he saw in Ireland of his visit to North Africa, especially the hilly regions of the country inhabited by the Berbers. Among other things, he used to say that if a number of Berbers from the mountains were to be brought to an Irish village and clad as Irishmen, he felt positive that he should not be able to tell them from the Irishmen themselves, such as we saw on our rambles in Kerry. This struck me as all the more remarkable, since his reference was to fairly tall, blue-eyed men whose hair could not be called black. On the other hand, owing perhaps to ignorance and careless ways of looking at things around me, I am a little sceptical as to the swarthy long-skulls: they did not seem to meet us at every turn in Ireland; and as for Wales, which I know as well as most people do, I cannot in my ignorance of craniology say with any confidence that I have ever noticed vast numbers of that type. I should like, however, to see the heads of some of the singers whom I have noticed at our Eistedfodau at Cardiff, Aberdare, and Swansea, placed under the hands of an experienced skull-man. For I have long suspected that we cannot regard as of Aryan origin the vocal talent so general in Wales, and so conspicuous in our choirs of working people as to astonish all the great musicians who have visited our national festival. Beyond all doubt, race has not a little to do with the artistic feelings: a short-skull may be as unmusical, for example, as I am; but has anybody in this country ever known a narrow long-skuH to be the reverse of unmusical? or has any one ever considered how few clergymen of the tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed type have been converted to the ritualistic and aesthetic movement in the Church of England?
As it seems to me that the bulk of the Welsh people would have to be described as short-skulls, it would be very gratifying to see those who are wont to refer freely to the dark-complexioned long-skulls of Wales catch a respectable number of specimens. I trust there are plenty to be found; and of course I do not care how they are taken, whether it be by an instantaneous process of photography or in the meshes of some anthropometric sportsman, like Dr. Beddoe. Let them be secured anyhow, so that one may rest assured that the type is still numerically safe, and be able to judge with one's own eyes how heads long and swarthy look on the shoulders of living Welshmen. We might then be in a position also to compare with them the prevalent description of fairy changelings; for when the fairies steal nice, blond babies, they usually place in their stead their own aged-looking brats with short legs, sallow skins, and squeaky voices. Unfortunately for me, all the adult changelings of whom I happen to have heard any account had died some years before I began to turn my attention to the population of Faery, with the exception, perhaps, of one whose name I obtained under the seal of secrecy. It was that of the wife of a farmer living near Nefyn, in West Carnarvonshire. It was whispered that she was a changeling, so I am inclined to regard her as no other than one of the representatives of the same aboriginal stock to which one might conjecture some of her neighbours also to belong; she ought to be an extreme specimen of the type. It is to be hoped that the photographer and his anthropometric brother have found her out in time and in good humour; but it is now many years since I heard of her.
To return again to the fairies, some of them are described as more comely and good-looking than the rest but the fairy women are always pictured as fascinating, though their offspring as changelings are as uniformly presented in the light of repulsive urchins; but whole groups of the fairy population are sometimes described as being as ugly of face as they were thievish in disposition-those, for instance, of Llanfabon, in Glamorganshire. There is one district, however, which is an exception to the tenor of fairy physiognomy: it is that of the Pennant neighbourhood, in Carnarvonshire, together with the hills and valleys, roughly speaking, from Cwm Strallyn to Llwytmor and from Drws y Coed to Dolbenmaen. The fairies of that tract are said to have been taller than the others, and characterized by light or even flaxen hair, together with eyes of clear blue. Nor is that all, for we are told that they would not let a person of dark complexion come near them. The other fairies, when kidnapping, it is true, preferred the blond infants of other people to their own swarthy brats, which, perhaps, means that it was a policy of their people to recruit itself with men of the superior physique of the more powerful population around them. The supposed fairy ancestress of the people of the Pennant Valley bears, in the stories in point, such names as Penelope, Bella, Pelisha, and Sibi, while her descendants are still taunted with their descent-a quarrel which, within living memory, used to be fought out with fists at the fairs at Penmorfa and elsewhere. This seems to indicate a comparatively late settlement [t] in the district of a family or group of families from without, and an origin, therefore, somewhat similar to that of the Simychiaid and Cowperiaid of a more eastern portion of the same county, rather than anything deserving to be considered with the rest of the annals of Faery. Passing by this oasis, then, such snap-shot photographs as I have been able to take, so to speak, of fairyland cleared of the glamour resting on its landscape, seem to disclose to the eye a swarthy population of short stumpy men occupying the most inaccessible districts of our country. They appear to have cared more for soap than clothing [u], and they lived on milk taken once a day, when they could get it. They probably fished and hunted, and kept domestic animals, including, perhaps, the pig; but they depended largely on what they could steal at night or in misty weather. Their thieving, however, was not resented, as their visits were believed to bring luck and prosperity. Their communities formed as it were islands, owing to the country round about them having been wrested from them by later corners of a more warlike disposition and provided with better weapons. But the existence of the scattered groups of the fairies was in no danger of coming to a violent end: they were safe in consequence of the superstitious beliefs of their stronger neighbours, who probably regarded them as formidable magicians, powerful, among other things, to cause or to cure disease as they pleased. Such, without venturing to refresh my memory by perusing what has been written about dwarf races in other parts of the world, are the impressions made on my mind in the course of analysing and sifting the folklore materials crowded into this volume. That applies, of course, in so far only as regards the fairies in their character of a real people as distinguished from them as creatures of the imagination. But, as I have no wish to earn the displeasure of my literary friends, let me hasten to say that I acknowledge the latter, the creatures of the imagination, to he the true fairies, the admiration of one's childhood and the despair of one's later years: the other folk--the aborigines whom I have been trying to depict-form only a sort of substratum, a kind of background to the fairy picture, which I should be the last man to wish to mar.
It is needless to say that we have no trace of any fairies approaching the minute dimensions of Shakespeare's Queen Mab; for, after all, our fairies are mostly represented as not extravagantly unlike other people in personal appearance-not so unlike, in fact, that other folk might not be mistaken for them now and then as late as the latter part of the fifteenth century. Witness the following passage from Sir John Wynne's History of the Gwydir Family, p 74.
'Haveing purchased this lease, he removed his dwelling to the castle of Dolwyddelan, which at that time was in part thereof habitable, where one Howell ap Jevan ap Rys Gethim, in the beginning of Edward the Fourth his raigne, captaine of the countrey and an outlaw, had dwelt. Against this man David ap Jenkin rose, and contended with him for the sovreignety of the countrey; and being superiour to him, in the end he drew a draught for him, and took him in his bed at Penanmen with his concubine, performing by craft, what he could not by force, and brought him to Conway Castle. Thus, after many bickerings betweene Howell and David ap Jenkin, he being too weake, was faigne to flie the countrey, and to goe to Ireland, where he was a yeare or thereabouts. In the end he returned in the summer time, haveing himselfe, and all his followers clad in greene, who, being come into the countrey, he dispersed here and there among his friends, lurking by day and walkeing in the night for feare of his adversaries; and such of the countrey as happened to have a sight of him and his followers, said they were the fairies, and soe ran away.'
But what has doubtless helped, above all other things, to perpetuate the belief in the existence of fairies may be said to be the popular association with them of the circles in the grass, commonly known in English as fairy rings. This phenomenon must have answered for ages the purpose for our ancestors, practically speaking, of ocular demonstration, as it still does no doubt in many a rustic neighbourhood.
The most common name for the fairies in Welsh is y Tylwyth Teg, 'the Fair. or Beautiful Family'; but in South Cardiganshire we have found them called Plant Rhys Dwfn, 'the Children of Rhys the Deep', while in Gwent and Morgannwg they are more usually known as Bendith y Mamau, ' the Blessing of the Mothers' . Our fourteenth century poet, D. ab Gwilym, uses the first-mentioned term, Tylwyth Teg, in poem xxxix, and our prose literature has a word corr, cor in the sense of a dwarf, and corres for a she dwarf. The old Cornish had also cor, which in Breton is written korr [v], with a feminine korrez, and among the other derivatives one finds korrik, 'a dwarf, a fairy, a wee little sorcerer,' and korrigez or korrigan, 'a she dwarf, a fairy woman, a diminutive soreeress.' The use of these words in Breton recalls the case of the cor, called RhudIwin or else Eidilig, teaching his magic to Colt, son of Collfrewi. Then we have uncanny dwarfs in the romances, such, for example, as the rude cor in the service of Edern ab Nudd, as described in French in Chrétien's romance of Erec et Enide and in Welsh in that of Gereint vab Erbin, also the cor and corres who figure in the story of Peredur. The latter had belonged to that hero's father and mother till the break-up of the family, when the dwarfs went to Arthur's Court, where they lived a whole year without speaking to anybody. When, however, Peredur made his rustic appearance there, they hailed him loudly as the chief of warriors and the flower of knighthood, which brought on them the wrath of Cai, on whom they were eventually avenged by Peredur. In the case [w] of both Edern and Peredur we find the dwarfs loyally interested in the fortunes of their masters and their masters' friends. With thern also the shape-shifting Menw, though not found placed in the same unfavourable light, is probably to be ranged, as one may gather from his name and his role of wizard scout for Arthur's men. In the like attachment on the part of the fairies, which was at times liable to develop into devotedness of an embarrassing nature, we seem to have one of the germs of the idea of a household fairy or banshee, as illustrated by the case of the ugly wee woman in the Pantannas legend; and it seems natural to regard the interested voices in the Kenfig legend, and other stories of the same kind, as instances of amalgamating the idea of a fairy with that of an ancestral person.
At all events, we have obtained something to put by the side of the instances already noticed of the fairygirl who gives, against her will at first, her services in the dairy of her captor (pp. 45, 87); of the other fairy who acts as a nurse for a family in the Pennant Valley, till she is asked to dress better; and of Bwca'r Trwyn who works willingly and well, both at the house and in the field, till he has tricks played on him. To make this brief survey complete, one has to mention the fairies who used to help Eilian with her spinning, and not to omit those who were found to come to the rescue of a woman in despair and to assist her on the condition of getting her baby. The motive here is probably not to be confounded with that of the fairies who stealthily exchanged babies: the explanation seems in this case to be that the fairies, or some of the fairies, were once regarded as cannibals, which is countenanced by such a story as that of Canrig Bwt, 'Canrig the Stumpy.' At Lanberis the latter is said to have lived beneath the huge stone called y Gromlech, 'the Dolmen,' opposite Cwmglas and near the high-road to the Pass. When the man destined to dispatch her came, she was just finishing her dinner off a baby's flesh. [30] There are traces of a similar story in another district, for a writer who published in the year 1802 uses the following words:--' There was lately near Cerrig y Drudion, in Merionethshire, a subterraneous room composed of large stones, which was called Carchar Cynric Rwth, i. e. "The Prison of Cynric Rwth," which has been taken notice of by travellers.' Cynric Rwth may be rendered ' Cynric the Greedy or Broad-mouthed.' A somewhat similar ogress is located by another story on the high ground at BwIch y Rhiw Felen, on the way from Llangollen to Llandegla, and she is represented by the local tradition as contemporary with Arthur [x]. I am inclined to think the Cwmglas cromlech natural rather than artificial; but I am, however, struck by the fact that the fairies are not unfrequently located on or near ancient sites, such as seem to be Corwrion, the margin of Llyn Irddyn, Bryn y Pibion, Dinllaen, Carn Bodtian, on which there are, I am told, walls and hut foundations similar to those which I have recently seen on Carn Fadrun in the same district, Moedin Camp, and, perhaps, Ynys Gemon Rock and the immediate vicinity of Craig y Nos, neither of which, however, have I ever visited. Local acquaintance with each fairy centre would very possibly enable one to produce a list that would be suggestive.
In passing one may point out that the uncanny dwarf of Celtic story would seem to have served, in one way or another, as a model for other dwarfs in the French romances and the literatures of other nations that came under the influence of those romances, such as that of the English. But the subject is too large to be dealt with here; so I return to the word cor, in order to recall to the reader's mind the allusion made to a certain people called Coranneit or Coranyeit, pronounced in later Welsh Coraniaid, Corannians.' They come in the Adventure of Lliacl and Llevelys, and there they have ascribed to them one of the characteristics of consummate magicians, namely, the power of hearing any word that comes in contact with the wind; so it was, we are told, impossible to harm them. Lludd, however, was advised to circumvent them in the following manner:--he was to bruise certain insects in water and sprinkle the water on the Corannians and his own people indiscriminately, after calling them together under the pretence of making peace between them; for the sprinkling would do no harm to his own subjects, while it would kill the others. This unholy water proved effective, and the Corannians all perished. Now the magic power ascribed to them, and the method of disposing of them, combine to lend them a fabulous aspect, while their name, inseparable as it seems from cor, 'a dwarf,' warrants us in treating them as fairies, and in regarding their strange characteristics as induced on a real people. If we take this view, that Coraniaid was the name of a real people, we are at liberty to regard it as possible, that their name suggested to the Celts the word cor for a dwarf, rather than that cor has suggested the name of the Corannians. In either case, I may mention that Welsh writers have sometimes thought-and they are probably right-that we have a closely related word in the name of Ptalemy's Coritani or Coritavi. He represents the people so called as dwelling, roughly speaking, between the Trent and Norfolk, and possessed of the two towns of Lindum, ' Lincoln,' and Ratae, supposed to have been Leicester. There we should have accordingly to suppose the old race to have survived so long and in such numbers, that the Celtic lords of southern Britain called the people of that area by a name meaning dwarfs. There also they may be conjectured to have had quiet from invaders from the Continent, because of the inaccessible nature of the fens, and the lack of inviting harbours on the coast from the country of the Iceni up to the neighbourhood of the Humber. How far their territory extended inland from the fens and the sea one cannot say, but it possibly took in one-half of what is now Northamptonshire, with the place called Pytchley, from an older Pihtes Lea, meaning the Meadow of the Pict, or else of a man named Pict. In any case it included Croyland in the fens between Peterborough and the Wash. It was there, towards the end of the seventh century, that St. Guthlac built his cell on the side of an ancient mound or tumulus, and it was there he was assailed by demons who spoke Bryttisc or Brythonic, a language which the saint knew, as he had been an exile among Brythons. For this he had probably not to travel far; and it is remarkable that his father's cognomen or surname was Penwall, which we may regard as approximately the Brythonic for 'Wall's End! That is to say, he was 'So-and-so of the Wall's End,' and had got to be known by the latter designation instead of his own nomen, which is not recorded, for the reason, possibly, that it was so Brythonic as not to admit of being readily reduced into an Anglian or Latin form. It is not quite certain that he belonged to the royal race of Mercia, whose genealogy, however, boasts such un-English names as Pybba, Penda, and Peada; but the life [y] states, with no little emphasis, that he was a man whose pedigree included the most noble names of illustrious kings from the ancient stock of Icel: that is, he was one of the Iclingas or Icklings [z]. Here one is tempted to perpetrate a little glottologic alchemy by changing I into n, and to suppose Iclingas the form taken in English by the name of the ancient people of the Iceni. In any case, nothing could be more reasonable to suppose than that some representatives of the royal race of Prasutagus and Boudicca, escaping the sword of the Roman, found refuge among the Coritanians at the time of the final defeat of their own people: it is even possible that they were already the ruling family there. At all events several indications converge to show that communities speaking Brythonicwere not far off, to wit, the p names in the Mercian genealogy, Guthlac's father's surname, Guthlac's exile among Brythons, and the attack on him at Croyland by Brythonic speaking foes. 'Portions of the Coritanian territory were eminently fitted by nature to serve as a refuge for a broken people with a belated language: witness as late as the eleventh century the stand made in the Isle of Ely by Here-ward against the Norman conqueror and his mail-clad knights [aa].
Among the speakers of Goidelic in Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland the fairies take their designation chiefly from a word sid or sith (genitive side or sida), which one may possibly consider as of a common origin with the Latin word sedes, and as originally meaning a seat or settlement, but it sooner or later came to signify simply an abode of the fairies, whence they were called in Medieval Irish aes side, 'fairy folk, 'fer side, a fairy man,' and ben side, 'a fairy woman or banshee.'
By the side of sid, an adjective side, 'of or belonging to the sid,' appears to have been formed, so that they are found also called simply side, as in Fiacc's Hymn, where we are told that before the advent of St. Patrick the pagan tribes of Erin used to worship side or fairies [ab]. Borrowed from this, or suggested by it [ac], we have in Welsh Caer Sidi, 'the Fortress of the Fairies,' which is mentioned twice in the Book of Taliessin [ad]. It first occurs at the end of poem xiv, where we have the following lines, which recall Irish descriptions of Thr nan Og or the Land of the Young:--
Ys kyweir vyg kadeir ygkaer sidi.
Nys pla6d heint a hene6st a uo yndi.
Ys gwyr mana6yt a phryderi.
Teir oryan y am tan agan recdi.
Ac am y banneu ffrydyeu g6eilgi. .
Ar ffynnha6n ffr6ylhla6n yssyd oduchti.
Ys whegach nor g6in g6yn yllyn yndi.
Perfect is my seat in the fort of Sidi,
Nor pest nor age plagues him who dwells therein:
Manawyddan and Pryderi know it.
Three organs play before it about a fire.
Around its corners Ocean's currents flow,
And above it is the fertile fountain,
And sweeter than white wine is the drink therein.
The wine is elsewhere mentioned, but the arrangement of the organs around a fire requires explanation, which I cannot give. The fortress is on an island, and in poem xxx of the Book of Taliessin we read of Arthur and his men sailing thither in his ship Prydwen: the poem is usually called the 'Spoils of Annwn,'and the lines in point run thus:--
Bu kywoir karchar g6eir ygkaer sidi
Tr6y ebostol p6yll aphryderi
Neb kyn noc ef nyt aeth idi.
Yr gad6yn tromlas kywirwas ae ketwi.,
Arac preideu ann6fyn tost yt geni.
Ac yt ura6t paraha6t ynbard wedi.
Tri lloneit prytwen yd aetham ni idi.
Nam seith ny dyrrrith o gaer sidi.
Perfect was the prison of Gwair in Caer Sidi,
Thanks to Pwyll and Pryderi's emissary.
Before him no one entered into it,
To the heavy, dark chain held by a faithful youth
And before the spoils of Annwn sorely he sang,
And thenceforth remains he till doom a bard.
Three freights of Prydwen went we thither,
But only seven returned from Caer Sidi.
The incidents in these lines are mostly unintelligible to me, but the incarceration of Gweir or Gwair, together with other imprisonments, including that of Arthur in Caer Oeth and Anoeth, are mentioned also in the Triads: see i. 50, ii. 7, 49, iii. 61. It is not improbable that the legend about Gwair located his prison on Lundy, as the Welsh name of that island appears to have been Ynys Wair, 'Gwair's Isle.' Pwyll and Pryderi did not belong to Annwn, nor did Pryderi's friend Manawyclan; but the Mabinogi of Pwyll relates how for a whole year Pwylt exchanged crown and kingdom with Arawn king of Annwn, from whom he obtained the first breed of domestic pigs for his own people.
In the lowlands of Scotland, together with the Orkneys and Shetlands, the Picts have to a certain extent taken the place of our fairies, and they are colloquially called Pechts. Now judging from the remains there ascribed to the Pechts, their habitations were either wholly underground or else so covered over with stones and earth and grass as to look like natural hillocks and to avoid attracting the attention of strangers. This was helped by making the entrance very low and as inconspicuous as possible. But one of the most remarkable things about these sids is that the cells within them are frequently so small as to prove beyond doubt, that those who inhabited them were of a remarkably short stature, though it is demonstrated by the weight of the stones used, that the builders were not at all lacking in bodily strength [ae]. Here we have, accordingly, a small people like our own fairies. In Ireland one of the most famous kings of the fairies was called Mider of Bri Léith, where he resided in a sid or mound in the neighbourhood of Ardagh, in the county of Longford; and thither Irish legend represents him carrying away Etain, queen of Eochaid Airem, king of Ireland during a part of Conchobar MacNessa's time. Now Eochaid was for a whole year unable to find where she was, but his druid, Dalan, wrote Ogams and at last found it out. Eochaid then marched to Bri Ldith, and began to demolish Mider's sid, whereupon Mider was eventually so frightened that he sent forth the queen to her husband, who then went his way, leaving the mound folk to digest their wrath. For it is characteristic of them that they did not fight, but chose to bide their time for revenge. In this instance it did not arrive till long after Eochaid's day [af]. I may add that Etain was herself one of the side or fairies; and one of Mider's reasons for taking her away was, that she had been his wife in a previous stage of existence. Now it is true that the fairy Mider is described as resembling the other heroes of Irish story, in having golden yellow hair and bright blue eyes [ag], but he differs completely from them in being no warrior but a great wizard; and though he is not said to have been of small stature, the dwarfs were not far off. For in describing the poet Atherne, who was notorious for his stinginess, the story-teller emphasizes his words by representing him taking from Mider three of his dwarfs and stationing them around his own house, in order that their truculent looks and rude words might drive away anybody who came to seek hospitality or to present an unwelcome request [ah], a role which recalls that of Edern ab Nudds dwarf already mentioned . Here the Irish word used is corr, which is probably to be identified with the Brythonic cor, 'a dwarf' though the better known meaning of corr in Irish is 'crane or heron.' From the former also is hardly to be severed the Irish corrguinigh, 'sorcerers,' and corrguinacht [ai], or the process of cursing to which the corrguinigh resorted, as, for instance, when N6de called forth the fatal blisters on Caier's face. The role would seem exactly to suit the little people, who were consummate magicians.
Let me for a moment leave the little people, in order to call attention to another side of this question of race. It has recently been shown [aj] by Professor J. Morris Jones, of the University College of North Wales, that the non-Aryan traits of the syntax of our insular Celtic point unmistakably to that of old Egyptian and Berber, together with kindred idioms belonging to the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. He has thereby reduced to articulate speech, so to say, the physiognomical convictions of Professor Sayce, to which the reader's attention has been called. To the linguistic argument he appends a statement cited from a French authority and bearing on the question of descent by birth, to the effect, that when among the Berbers the king dies or is deposed, as happens often enough, it is not his son that is called to succeed, but the son of his sister, as in the case of the historical Picts of Scotland down to the twelfth century or thereabouts. Here I would add, that my attention has been called by Professor Sayce to old Egyptian monuments representing the Libyan chiefs with their bodies tattooed, a habit which seems not to be yet extinct among the Touaregs and Kabyles [ak]. Lastly, Mr. Nicholson has recently directed attention to the fact that some princes of ancient Gaul are represented with their faces tattooed on certain coins found in the west of France so far south as the region once occupied by the ancient Pictones. We have a compendious commentary on this in the occurrence of a woord Chortonicum in a High German manuscript written -before the year 814: 1 allude to the Wessobrunn Codex at Munich, in which, among a number of geographical names connected with Gaul and other countries, that vocable is so placed as to allow of our referring it to Poitou or to all Gaul as the country once of the ancient Pictones. The great German philologist Pott, who called attention to it, brought it at once into relation with Cruithne, plural Cruithni, 'the Picts of Britain and Ireland,' a word which has been explained above [al].
Now at last I come to the question, what pre-Celtic race or races make themselves evident in the mass of things touched on in this and the foregoing chapters? The answer must, I think, recognize at least two. First comes the race of the mound folk, consisting of the short swarthy people variously caricatured in our fairy tales. They formed isolated fractions of a widely spread race possessed of no political significance whatsoever; but, with the inconsistency ever clinging to everything connected with the fairies, the weird and uncanny folk emerging from its underground lairs seems to have exercised on other races a sort of permanent spell of mysteriousness amounting to adoration. In fact, Irish literature tells us that the side were worshipped. Owing to his faculty of exaggeration, combined with his inability to comprehend the little people, the Celt was enabled to bequeath to the great literatures of Western Europe a motley train of dwarfs and brownies, a whole world of wizardry and magic. The real race of the little people forms the lowest stratum which we can reach, to wit, at a level no higher, seemingly, than that of the present-day natives of Central Australia. Thus some of the birth stories of Cuchulainn and Lain seem to have passed through their hands, and they bear a striking resemblance to certain notions of the Lapps. In fact, the nature of the habitations of our little people, together with other points which might be mentioned, would seem at first sight to betoken affinity with the Lapps; but I am warned by experts [am] that the other race may be called Picts, which is probably the earliest of the names given it by the Celts; and their affinities appear to be Libyan, possibly Iberian. It was a warlike stock, and stood higher altogether than the mound inhabitants; for it had a notion of paternity, though, on account of its promiscuity, it had to reckon descent by birth. To it probably belonged all the great family groups figuring in the Mabinogion and the corresponding class of literature in Irish: this would include the Danann-D6n group and the Lir-lLyr group, together with the families represented by Pwylt and Rhiannon, who were inseparable from the ILyr group in Welsh, just as the Lir group was inseparable from the Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish leg-end. The Picts made slaves and drudges of the mound-haunting race, but how far any amalgamation may have taken place between them it is impossible to say. Even without any amalgamation, however, the little people, if employed as nurses to their Pictish lords' children, could not help leaving their impress in time on the language of the ruling nationality. But it may be that the treatment of the Picts, by Scottish legend, as a kind of fairies really points to amalgamation, though it is not impossible that archaeology may be able to classify the remains of the dwellings ascribed to the Pechts, that is, to assign a certain class to the warlike Picts of history and another to the dwarf race of the sids. A certain measure of amalgamation may also, be the meaning of the Irish tradition, that when the Milesian Irish came and conquered, the defeated Tuatha D6 Danann gave up their life above ground and retired inside the hills like the fairies. This account of them may be as worthless as the story of the extermination of the Picts of Scotland: both peoples doubtless lived on to amalgamate in time with the conquering race; but it may mean that some of them retreated before the Celts, and concealed themselves after the manner of the little people-in underground dwellings in the less accessible parts of the country. In any case, it may well be that they got their magic and druidism from the dwellers of the sids. In the next place, it has been pointed out how the adjective hen, 'old, ancient,' is applied in Welsh to several of the chief men of the Don group, and by this one may probably understand that they were old not merely to those who told the stories about them in Welsh, but to those who put those stories together in Goidelic ages earlier. The geography of the Mabinogion gives the prehistoric remains of Penmaen Mawr and Tre'r Ceiri to the Don group; but by its name, Tre'r Ceiri should be the 'Town of the Keiri,'a word probably referring to the Picts,: this, so far as it goes, makes the sons of Don belong by race to the Picts. Lastly, it is the widely spread race of the Picts, conquered by the Celts of the Celtican or Goidelic branch and amalgamating with their conquerors in the course of time, that has left its non-Aryan impress on the syntax of the Celtic languages of the British Isles.
These, it is needless to say, are conjectures which I cannot establish; but possibly somebody else may. For the present, however, they cannot fail to suggest a moral, habitually ignored with a light heart by most people-including the writer of these words-that men in his plight, men engaged in studies which, owing to a rapid accumulation of fresh facts or the blossoming of new theories, are in a shifting condition, should abstain from producing books or anything longer than a magazine article now and then. Even such minor productions should be understood to be liable to be cast into a great bonfire lit once a year, say on Halloween. This should help to clear the air of mistaken hypotheses, whether of folklore and myth or of history and language, and also serve to mark Nos Galangaeaf as the commencement of the ancient Celtic year. The business of selecting the papers to be saved from the burning might be delegated to an academy constituted, roughly speaking, on the lines of Plato's aristocracy of intellect. Such academy, once in the enjoyment of its existence, would also find plenty of work in addition to the inquisitional business which I have suggested: it should, for example, be invested with summary jurisdiction over fond parents who venture to show any unreasonable anxiety to save their mental progeny from the annual bonfire. The best of that class of writers should be ordered by the academy to sing songs or indite original verse. As for the rest, some of them might be told off to gesticulate to the gallery, and some to administer the consolations of platitude to stragglers tired of the march of science. There is a mass of other useful work which would naturally devolve on an academy of the kind here suggested. I should be happy, if space permitted, to go through the particulars one by one, but let a single instance suffice: the academy might relieve us of the painful necessity of having seriously to consider any further the proposal that professors found professing after sixty should be shot. This will serve to indicate the kind of work which might advantageously be entrusted to the august body which is here but roughly projected.
There are some branches of learning in the happy position of having no occasion for such a body academical. Thus, if a man will have it that the earth is flat, as flat in fact as some people do their utmost to make it, 'he will most likely,'as the late Mr. Freeman in the Saturday Review once put it, 'make few converts, and will be forgotten after at most a passing laugh from scientific men.' If a man insists that the sum of two and two is five, he will probably find his way to a lunatic asylum, as the economy of society is, in a manner, self-acting. So with regard to him who carries his craze into the more material departments of such a science as chemistry: he may be expected to blow out his own eyes, for the almighty molecule executes its own vengeance. 'But,' to quote again from Mr. Freeman, if that man's 'craze had been historical or philological '-and above all if it had to do with the science of man or of myth-'he might have put forth notions quite as absurd as the notion that the earth is flat, and many people would not have been in the least able to see that they were absurd. If any scholar had tried to confute him we should have heard of "controversies" and "differences of opinion."' In fact, the worst that happens to the false prophet who shines in any such a science is, that he has usually only too many enthusiastic followers. The machinery is, so to say, not automatic, and hence it is that we want the help of an academy. But even supposing such an academy established, no one need feel alarmed lest opportunities enough could no longer be found for cultivating the example of those of the early Christians who had the rare grace to suffer fools gladly.
Personally, however, I should be against doing anything in a hurry; and, considering how little his fellows dare expect from the man who is just waiting to be final and perfect before he commit himself to type, the establishment of an academy invested with the summary powers which have been briefly sketched might, perhaps, after all, conveniently wait a while: my own feeling is that almost any time, say in the latter half of the twentieth century, would do better than this year or the next. In the meantime one must be content to entrust the fortunes of our studies to the combined forces of science and common sense. judging by what they have achieved in recent years, there is no reason to be uneasy with regard to the time to come, for it is as true to-day as when it was first written, that the best of the prophets of the Future is the Past.
Celtic Folklore .. .. ...
[a] See Guest's Mabinogion, iii. 955, where, however, Don is wrongly treated as a male.
[b] One has however, to admit that the same agency may also mar the picture. Since the above was written I have read in Stokes' Festschrift, pp. 7-19, a very interesting article by L. Chr. Stern, in which he discusses some of the difficulties attaching to the term Tuatha Dé Danann. Among other things he suggests that there was a certain amount of confusion between Danann and dána, genitive of dán, & art or profession'--the word meant also 'lot or destiny,' being probably of the same origin as the Latin donum, in Welsh dawn, which means a gift, and especially 'the gift of the gab.' But it would invert the natural sequence to suppose any such a formula as Tuatha Dé Dana to have preceded Tuatha Dé Danann; for why should anybody substitute an obscure vocable Danann for dána of well-known meaning? Dr. Stern has some doubts as to the Welsh Don being a female; but it would have been more satisfactory if he had proved his surmise, or at any rate shown that Ddn has nothing to do with Danann or Donann. I am satisfied with such a passage in the Mabinogi of Math as that where Gwydion, addressing Math, describes Arianrhod, daughter of Don, in the words, dy nith wnh dy ch6aer 'thy niece daughter of thy sister': see the Mabinogion, p. 68, and, for similar references to other children of Don, consult pp. 59 and 65. Axianrhod is in the older Triads, i. 40, ii. 15, called daughter of Beli, whom one can only have regarded as her father. So for the present I continue to accept Stokes' rendering of Tuatha Dé Danann as 'the Folks of the Goddess Danu.'
[c] See the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 102; Guest's trans.,ii. 252. The combination occurs also in the Book of Aneurin: see Stephens' Gododin (London, 1888), Pp. 322.
[d] It will be noticed that there is a discrepancy between the gutturals of these two words; tyngu, 'to swear' (O. Ir. tongu, 'I swear'), has ng--the Kulhwch spelling, tynghaf, should probably be tyngaf--while tynghed and its Irish equivalent imply an nc. I do not know how to explain this, though I cannot doubt the fact of the words being treated as cognate. A somewhat similar difference, however, occurs in Welsh dwyn, 'to bear, carry, steal,' and dwg, 'carries, bears': see the Revue Celtique, vi. 18-9.
[e] See the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 100, and Guest's trans., ii. 249, where it is rendered 'a wife as a helpmate,'which is more commonplace than suggestive.
[f] La Cité antique (Paris, i864), p. 50; see also Joachim Marquardt's Privatleben der Romer (Leipsic, 1886), pp. 49-51, and among the references there given may be mentioned Dionysius of Halicarnassus, ii. 25.
[g] See Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i. 126, 181-3, 197; the Prose Edda in Edda Snorronis Sturlei (Copenhagen, 1848), i. 90-2, 102, 104, 172-86; and Simrock's Edda (Stuttgart, 1855), pp. 292-3, 295-6, 299, 316-20.
[h] Two versions of a story to account for the Ultonian couvade have been published with a translation into German, by Prof. Windisch, in the Berichte der k. sachs. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften (phil.-hist. Classe) for 1884, pp. 338 et seq. Sundry references to the couvade will also be found in my Hibbert Lectures, where certain mythological suggestions made with reference to it require to be reconsidered. But when touching on this point it occurred to me that the wholesale couvade of the Ultonian braves, at one and the same time of the year, implied that the birth of Ultonian children, or at any rate those of them that were to be reared, took place (in some period or other of the history of their race) at a particular season of the year, namely, about the beginning of the winter, that is when food would be most abundant. I have since been confirmed in this view by perusing Westermarck's work on the History of Human Marriage, and by reading especially his second chapter entitled 'A Human Pairing Season in Primitive Times.' For there I find a considerable body of instances in point, together with a summary treatment of the whole question. But in the case of promiscuity, such as originally prevailed doubtless at the Ultonian Court, the question what men were to go into couvade could only be settled by the confinement of them all, wherein we have an alternative if not an additional reason for a simultaneous couvade.
[i] See Strabo, iii. 165, and Diodorus, v. 14.
[j] For some more detailed remarks on the reckoning of descent by birth, see The Welsh People, pp. 36 et seq.
[k] In Welsh eli means 'ointment,' probably so called from spells pronounced over it when used as a remedy. In the Twrch Trwyth story (Oxford Mabinogion, p. 138) one of Arthur's men bears the curious designation of Reid6n mab Eli Atuer, which might be Englished I'R. son of the Restoring Ointment,' unless one should rather say ' of the Restoring Enchantment! the case of the Lapps, namely, that 'the future mother was told in a dream what name to give her child, this message being usually given her by the very spirit of the deceased ancestor, who was about to be incarnate in her [m] If the mother got no such intimation in a dream, the relatives of the child had to have recourse to magic and the aid of the wise man, to discover the name to be given to the child.
[l] See the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 128b, and Windisch's Irische Texte, pp. 138-9. The rebirth of Lug as Cuchulainn has been touched upon in my Hibbert Lectures, p. 431; but since then the whole question of rebirth has been discussed at length in Nutt and Meyer's volumes entitled The Voyage of Bran (London, 1895).
[m] Tylor's Primitive Culture, ii. 4, where he gives a reference to Gustav Klemm's Culturgeschichte, iii. 77, and Klemm's authority proves to be jessen, whose notes are given in a 'tractatus' bound with Knud Leem De Lapponibus Finmarchia (Copenhagen, 1767): Jessen's words in point read as follows, p. 33:--Et baptismum quidem, quent ipsi Laugo, ie. lavacrum appellabant, quod attinet, observandum occurrit, faemirtam Lapponicam, jam partui vicinam, atque in eo slain Sarakka impensius commendatam, do nomine, nascituro infanti imponendo, per insomnia plerumque a jabmekio quodam admonitam fuisse'et simul de jabmekio illo, qui, ut spsi quidem loqui amar-unt, in hoc puero resuscitandus foret, edodam. Hujusmodi per insomnia factas admonitiones niegost nuncuparunt Lappones. Si gravida mulier a Jabmekio hac ratione edocia non fuerit, recens nati infantis vel partnti vel cognatis imubuit, per τό Myran, in tympano, securi ivel balleo susceptum, vel eliam Noaaidum consulendo, explorare, quo potissimum nomine infans appellndus esset. In the body of Leem's work, p. 497, one reads, that if the child sickens or cries after baptism, this is taken to prove that the right ancestor has not been found; but as he must be discovered and his name imposed on the child, resort is had to a fresh baptism to correct the effects of the previous one.
[n] See Holder's All-celtischer Sprackschats, s. v. Lugus; also the index to my Hibbert Lectures, s. v. Leu, Lug, Lugoves.
[o] For more on this subject see the chapter on the Pictish question in The Welsh People pp. 36-74.
[p] It is right to say that the story represents the fairies as living under the rule of a ri, a title usually rendered by king'; but ri (genitive rig) was probably at one time applicable to either sex, just as we find Gaulish names like Biturix and Visurix borne by women. The wonder, however, is that such a line as that just quoted has not: been edited out of the verses long ago, just as one misses any equivalent for it in Joyce's English expansion of the story in his Old Celtic Romances, pp. 106-11. Compare, however, the Land of the Women in the Voyage of Maildun (Joyce pp. 152-4), and in Meyer and Nutt's Voyage of Bran, i. 30-3.
[q] This conclusion has been given in a note at the foot of p. 37 of The Welsh People; but for a variety of instances to illustrate it see Hartland's chapters on Supematural Birth in his Legend of Perseus.
[r] See Frazer's article on I The Origin of Totemism' in the Fortnightly Review for April, 1899, p. 649. The passage to which it refers will be found at p. 265 of Spencer and Gillen's volume, where one reads as follows:'Added to this we have amongst the Arunta, Luritcha, and Ilpirra tribes, and probably also amongst others such as the Warramunga, the idea firmly held that the child is not the direct result of intercourse, that it may come without this, which merely, as it were, prepares the mother for the reception and birth also of an already-formed spirit child who inhabits one of the local totem centres. Time after time we have questioned them oil this point, and always received the reply that the child was not the direct result of intercourse.' It is curious to note how readily the Australian notion here presented would develop into that of the Lapps, as given at p. 638 from Jessen's notes.
[s] This feature of Welsh has camped M. de Charencey, in his instructive letter on 'Numération basque et celtique,' in No. 48 of the Bulletin la Sot. de Linguistique de Paris, pp. cxv-cxix. In passing, 1 may be allowed to mention a numerical curiosity which occurs in Old Irish: it has probably an important historical significance. I refer to the word for 'seven men' occurring sometimes as morfeser which means, as it were, a magnus seviratus or 'big sixer.'
[t] The non-Welsh names of the fairy ancestress ought possibly to lead one to discover the origin of that settlement; and a careful study perhaps of the language of the Belsiaid or Bellisians, if their Welsh has any dialectic Peculiarities, might throw further light on their past.
[u] Our stories frequently delight in giving the fairy women fine dresses and long trains; but I would rely more on the Ystrad Meurig smith's account and the case of the Pennant fairy who team to shreds the gown offered her.
[v] The difference between Mod.Welsh cor and Breton korr is one of spelling, for the reformed orthography of Welsh words only doubles the r where it is dwelt on in the accented syllable! of a longer word: in other terms, when that syllable closes with the consoonant and the next syllable begins with it. Thus cor has, as its derivatives, cor-rach, 'a dwarf,' plural co-rachod, cor-ryn, 'a male dwarf,' plural co-rynnod. Some of these enter into place-names, such as Cwm Corryn near Llanaelhaearn and Cwm Corryn draining into the Vale of Neath; so possibly with Corwen for Cor-waen, in the sense of 'the Fairies' Meadow.' Cor and corryn are also used for the spider, as in gwe'r cor or gwe'r corryn, 'a spider's web,' the spider being so called on account of its spinning, an occupation in which the fairies are represented likewise frequently engaged; not to mention that gossamer (gwawn) is also sometimes regarded as a product of the fairy loom. The derivation of cor is not satisfactorily cleared up: it has been conjectured to be related to a Med. Irish word cert, small, little,' and Latin curtus, 'shortened or mutilated.' To me this means thatt the origin of the word still remains to be discovered. The statement as to Carchar Cynric Rwth comes from William Williams' Observations on the Snowdon Mountains (London, 1802). The BwIch y Rhiw Felen legend was read by me to the British Archaeological Association at its meeting at Llangollen, and it was printed in its journal for December, 1818. It is right to say that the Llangotten story calls the woman a giantess, but I attach no importance to that, as the picture is blurred and treated in part allegorically. Lastly, the use of the word carchar, 'prison,' in the term Carchar Cynric Rwth recalls Carchar Oeth ac Anoeth. or 'the Prison ofOeth and Anoeth,' above: the word would appear to have been selected because in both cases the structure was underground.
[w] For Edern's dwarf see Foerster's Erec, lines 146-274 and passim, the Oxford Mabinogion (248-61, and Guest's trans., ii. 73-92; and for Peredur's the latter books, pp. 197-9 and i. 304-7 respectively.
[x] The story of Canrig (or Cantrig) Bwt is current at Llanberis, but I do
not recollect seeing it in print: I had it years ago from my father-in-law.
[y] See the Acta Sanctorum, April 11, where one finds published the Latin life written by Felix not long after Guthlac's death. See also an AngIo-Saxon version, which has been edited with a translation by Ch. W. Goodwin (London, 1848).
[z] In connexion with them Mr. Bullock Hall reminds me of lcklingham, in West Suffolk; and there seem to be several Ickletons, and an Ickleford, most or all of them, I am told, on the Icknield Way. The name Icel, whose genitive Icles is the form in the original life, has probably been inferred from the longer word Iclingas, and inserted in due course in the Mercian pedigree, where it occupies the sixth place in descent from Woden.
[aa] Since the above was written, Dr. Ripley's important work on the Races of Europe (London, 1900) has reached me, but too late to study. I notice, however, that he speaks of an island of ancient population to the north of London and extending over most of the counties of Hertford, Buckingham, Bedford, Rutland, and Northampton, as far as those of Cambridge and Lincoln. A considerable portion of this area must have been within the boundaries of Coritanian territory, and it is now characterized, according to him, by nigrescence, short stature, and rarity of suicide, such as remind history of Wales and Cornwall: see his maps and pp. 322, 328, 521.
[ab] See Fiacc's Hymn in Stokes' Goidelica, p. 127) l. 41.
[ac] The Welsh passages unfortunately fail to show whether it was pronounced sidi or sidi: should it prove the latter, I should regard it as the Irish word borrowed.
[ad] Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales, ii. 153-5, 181-2;.
[ae] For more about Picts and Pechts see some most instructive papers recently published by Mr. David MacRitchie, such as 'Memories of the Picts' in the Scottish Antiquary, last January, ' Underground Dwellings' in Scottish Notes and Queries, last March, and 'Fairy Mounds' in the Antiquary, last February and March.
[af] See above, where, however, the object of the Ogams written on four twigs of yew has been misconceived. 1 think now that they formed simply so many letters of inquiry addressed by DalAn to other druids in different parts of Ireland. We seem to have here a ray of light on the early history of Ogam writing.
[ag] See the Book of the Dun Cow, fo.130b.
[ah] See the Book of Leinster, fo. 117a.
[ai] Corrguingh occurs in the story of 'The Second Battle of Moytura,' where Stokes has rendered it 'sorcerers' in the Revue Celtique, xii. 77; and corrguinacht heads an article in O'Davoren's Glossary, published in Stokes' Three Irish Glossaries, p. 63, where it is defined as beth for leth cois 7 for leth laimh 7 for leth suil ag denam na glaime dicinn,' to be on one foot and with one hand and one eye doing the glam dicenn.' The glam dicenn was seemingly the special elaboration of the art of making pied de nez, which we have tragically illustrated in the case of Caier.
[aj] In Appendix B to The Welsh People, pp. 617-41.
[am] 'I am chiefly indebted to my friend Professor A. C. Haddon for references to information as to the dwarf races of prehistoric times. I find also that be, among others, has anticipated me in my theory as to the origins of the fairies: witness the following extract from the syllabus of a lecture delivered by him at Cardiff in 1894 on Fairy Tales:--' What are the fairies? -Legendary origin of the fairies. It is evident from fairy literature that there is a mixture of the possible and the impossible, of fact and fancy. Part of fairydom refers to (1) spirits that never were embodied: other fairies are (2) spirits of environment, nature or local spirits, and household or domestic spirits; (3) spirits of the organic world, spirits of plants, and spirits of animals; (4) spirits ofmen or ghosts; and (5) witches and wizards, or men possessed with other spirits. All these and possibly other elements enter into the fanciful aspect of fairyland, but there is a large residuum of real occurrences; these point to a clash of races, and we may regard many of these fairy sagas as stories told by men of the Iron Age of events which happened to men of the Bronze Age in their conflicts with men of the Neolithic Age, and possibly these, too, handed on traditions of the Palaeolithic Age.' there are serious craniological difficulties in the way of any racial comparison with the Lapps, and that one must look rather to the dwarf populations once widely spread over our hemisphere, and still to be found here and there in Europe, as, for example, in Sicily. To come nearer our British Isles, the presence of such dwarfs has been established with regard to Switzerland in Neolithic times [an].
[ak] See Rosellini's Monumenti dell' Egitto (Pisa, 1832), vol. i. Plates civ, cix, and Maspero's Histoire Ancienne (Paris, 1897), ii. 430.
[al] One may now consult Nicholson's paper on 'The Language of the Continental Picts': see Meyer and Stem's Zeifschrift, iii. 326-8, 331-2, and note especially his reference to Herodian, iii. x41 6 8. For Chorionicum see Die altochdeutschen Glossen (edited by Steinmeyer and Sievers), iii. 610; also my paper on 'The Celts and the other Aryans of the P and Q Groups' read before the Philological Society, February 20, 1891, p. 11.
[an] See the Berlin Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie for 1894 vol. xxvi. pp. 189-254, which are devoted to an elaborate paper by Dr. Jul. Kollmann, entitled--Das Schweitzersbild bei Schaffhausen und Pygmaen in Europa.' It closes with a long list of books and articles to be consulted on the subject.