the Cave of Llanciau Eryri, have been kindly placed at my disposal by
Mr. Ellis Pierce (Elis [59] o'r Nant) of Dolwydelan:--In the uppermost
part of the hollow called Cwmllan is Tregalan, and in the middle of
Cwm Tregalan is a green hill, or rather an eminence which hardly forms
a hill, but what is commonly called a boncyn [60] in Carnarvonshire,
and between that green boncyn and the Clogwyn Du, 'Black Precipice,' is
a bog, the depth of which no one has ever succeeded in ascertaining,
and a town--inferred perhaps from tre in Tregalan--is fabled to
have been swallowed up there. Another of my informants speaks of
several hillocks or boncyns as forming one side of this little cwm;
but he has heard from geologists, that these green mounds represent
moraines deposited there in the glacial period. From the bottom of the
Clogwyn Du it is about a mile to Bwlch y Saethau. Then as to the cave
of Llanciau Eryri, which nobody can now find, the slope down to it
begins from the top of the Lliwed, but ordinarily speaking one could
not descend to where it is supposed to have been without the help
of ropes, which seems incompatible with the story of the Cwm Dyli
shepherd following a sheep until he was at the mouth of the cave;
not to mention the difficulty which the descent would have offered
to Arthur's men when they entered it. Then Elis o'r Nant's story
represents it shutting after them, and only opening to the shepherd
in consequence of his having trodden on a particular sod or spot. He
then slid down unintentionally and touched the bell that was hanging
there, so that it rang and instantly woke the sleeping warriors. No
sooner had that happened than those men of Arthur's took up their
guns--never mind the anachronism--and the shepherd made his way out
more dead than alive; and the frightened fellow never recovered from
the shock to the day of his death. When these warriors take up their
guns they fire away, we are told, without mercy from where each man
stands: they are not to advance a single step till Arthur comes to
call them back to the world.

To swell the irrelevancies under which this chapter labours already,
and to avoid severing cognate questions too rudely, I wish to add
that Elis o'r Nant makes the name of the giant buried on the top of
Snowdon into Rhitta or Rhita instead of Ricca. That is also the form
of the name with which Mrs. Rhys was familiar throughout her childhood
on the Llanberis side of the mountain. She often heard of Rhita [61]
Gawr having been buried on the top of Snowdon, and of other warriors
on other parts of Snowdon such as Moel Gynghorion and the Gist on
that moel. But Elis o'r Nant goes further, and adds that from Rhita
the mountain was called Wydfa Rhita, more correctly Gwydfa Rita,
'Rhita's Gwydfa.' Fearing this might be merely an inference, I have
tried to cross-examine him so far as that is possible by letter. He
replies that his father was bred and born in the little glen called
Ewybrnant [62], between Bettws y Coed and Pen Machno, and that his
grandfather also lived there, where he appears to have owned land not
far from the home of the celebrated Bishop Morgan. Now Elis' father
often talked, he says, in his hearing of 'Gwydfa Rhita.' Wishing to
have some more definite evidence, I wrote again, and he informs me
that his father was very fond of talking about his father, Elis o'r
Nant's grandfather, who appears to have been a character and a great
supporter of Sir Robert Williams, especially in a keenly contested
political election in 1796, when the latter was opposed by the then
head of the Penrhyn family. Sometimes the old man from Ewybrnant
would set out in his clocs, 'clogs or wooden shoes,' to visit Sir
Robert Williams, who lived at Plas y Nant, near Bedgelert. On starting
he would say to his family, Mi a'i hyibio troed Gwydfa Rhita ag mi
do'n ol rwbrud cin nos, or sometimes foru. That is, 'I'll go round
the foot of Rhita's Gwydfa and come back some time before night':
sometimes he would say 'to-morrow.' Elis also states that his father
used to relate how Rhita's Gwydfa was built, namely by the simple
process of each of his soldiers taking a stone to place on Rhita's
tomb. However the story as to Rhita Gawr being buried on the top of
Snowdon came into existence, there can be no doubt that it was current
in comparatively recent times, and that the Welsh name of y Wydfa,
derived from it, refers to the mountain as distinguished from the
district in which it is situated. In Welsh this latter is Eryri,
the habitat, as it were, of the eryr, 'eagle,' a bird formerly at
home there as many local names go to prove, such as Carreg yr Eryr
[63], 'the Stone of the Eagle,' mentioned in the boundaries of the
lands on Snowdon granted to the Abbey of Aberconwy in Llewelyn's
charter, where also Snowdon mountain is called Wedua vawr, 'the Great
Gwydfa.' Now, as already suggested, the word gwydfa takes us back to
Rhita's Carned or Cairn, as it signified a monument, a tomb or barrow:
Dr. Davies gives it in his Welsh-Latin Dictionary as Locus Sepulturæ,
Mausoleum. This meaning of the word may be illustrated by a reference
in passing to the mention in Brut y Tywysogion of the burial of Madog
ab Maredyd. For under the year 1159 we are told that he was interred
at Meifod, as it was there his tomb or the vault of his family,
the one intended also for him (y 6ydua [64]), happened to be.

Against the evidence just given, that tradition places Rhita's grave
on the top of Snowdon, a passing mention by Derfel Hughes (p. 52)
is of no avail, though to the effect that it is on the top of the
neighbouring mountain called Carned Lywelyn, 'Llewelyn's Cairn,'
that Rhita's Cairn was raised. He deserves more attention, however,
when he places Carned Drystan, 'Tristan or Tristram's Cairn,' on
a spur of that mountain, to wit, towards the east above Ffynnon y
Llyffaint [65]. For it is worthy of note that the name of Drystan,
associated with Arthur in the later romances, should figure with that
of Arthur in the topography of the same Snowdon district.

Before leaving Snowdon I may mention a cave near a small stream not
far from Llyn Gwynain, about a mile and a half above Dinas Emrys. In
the Llwyd letter (printed in the Cambrian Journal for 1859, pp. 142,
209), on which I have already drawn, it is called Ogo'r Gwr Blew, 'the
Hairy Man's Cave'; and the story relates how the Gwr Blew who lived in
it was fatally wounded by a woman who happened to be at home, alone,
in one of the nearest farm houses when the Gwr Blew came to plunder
it. Its sole interest here is that a later version [66] identifies the
Hairy Man with Owen Lawgoch, after modifying the former's designation
y Gwr Blew, which literally meant 'the Hair Man,' into y Gwr Blewog,
'the Hairy Man.' This doubtful instance of the presence of Owen
Lawgoch in the folklore of North Wales seems to stand alone.

Some of these cave stories, it will have been seen, reveal to us
a hero who is expected to return to interfere again in the affairs
of this world, and it is needless to say that Wales is by no means
alone in the enjoyment of imaginary prospects of this kind. The
same sort of poetic expectation has not been unknown, for instance,
in Ireland. In the summer of 1894, I spent some sunny days in the
neighbourhood of the Boyne, and one morning I resolved to see the
chief burial mounds dotting the banks of that interesting river;
but before leaving the hotel at Drogheda, my attention was attracted
by a book of railway advertisement of the kind which forcibly impels
one to ask two questions: why will not the railway companies leave
those people alone who do not want to travel, and why will they make
it so tedious for those who do? But on turning the leaves of that
booklet over I was inclined to a suaver mood, as I came on a paragraph
devoted to an ancient stronghold called the Grianan of Aileach, or
Greenan-Ely, in the highlands of Donegal. Here I read that a thousand
armed men sit resting there on their swords, and bound by magic sleep
till they are to be called forth to take their part in the struggle
for the restoration of Erin's freedom. At intervals they awake, it
is said, and looking up from their trance they ask in tones which
solemnly resound through the many chambers of the Grianan: 'Is the
time come?' A loud voice, that of the spiritual caretaker, is heard
to reply: 'The time is not yet.' They resume their former posture and
sink into their sleep again. That is the substance of the words I read,
and they called to my mind the legend of such heroes of the past as
Barbarossa, with his sleep interrupted only by his change of posture
once in seven years; of Dom Sebastian, for centuries expected from
Moslem lands to restore the glories of Portugal; of the Cid Rodrigo,
expected back to do likewise with the kingdom of Castile; and last,
but not least, of the O'Donoghue who sleeps beneath the Lakes of
Killarney, ready to emerge to right the wrongs of Erin. With my head
full of these and the like dreams of folklore, I was taken over the
scene of the Battle of the Boyne; and the car-driver, having vainly
tried to interest me in it, gave me up in despair as an uncultured
savage who felt no interest in the history of Ireland. However he
somewhat changed his mind when, on reaching the first ancient burial
mound, he saw me disappear underground, fearless of the Fomhoraigh;
and he began to wonder whether I should ever return to pay him his
fare. This in fact was the sheet anchor of all my hopes; for I thought
that in case I remained fast in a narrow passage, or lost my way in
the chambers of the prehistoric dead, the jarvey must fetch me out
again. So by the time I had visited three of these ancient places,
Dowth, Knowth, and New Grange, I had risen considerably in his
opinion; and he bethought him of stories older than the Battle of
the Boyne. So he told me on the way back several bits of something
less drearily historical. Among other things, he pointed in the
direction of a place called Ardee in the county of Louth, where,
he said, there is Garry Geerlaug's enchanted fort full of warriors
in magic sleep, with Garry Geerlaug himself in their midst. Once on
a time a herdsman is said to have strayed into their hall, he said,
and to have found the sleepers each with his sword and his spear
ready to hand. But as the intruder could not keep his hands off the
metal wealth of the place, the owners of the spears began to rouse
themselves, and the intruder had to flee for his life. But there that
armed host is awaiting the eventful call to arms, when they are to
sally forth to restore prosperity and glory to Ireland. That was his
story, and I became all attention as soon as I heard of Ardee, which
is in Irish Áth Fhir-dheadh, or the Ford of Fer-deadh, so called from
Fer-deadh, who fought a protracted duel with Cúchulainn in that ford,
where at the end, according to a well-known Irish story, he fell by
Cúchulainn's hand. I was still more exercised by the name of Garry
Geerlaug, as I recognized in Garry an Anglo-Irish pronunciation
of the Norse name Godhfreydhr, later Godhroedh, sometimes rendered
Godfrey and sometimes Godred, while in Man and in Scotland it has
become Gorry, which may be heard also in Ireland. I thought, further,
that I recognized the latter part of Garry Geerlaug's designation
as the Norse female name Geirlaug. There was no complete lack of
Garries in that part of Ireland in the tenth and eleventh centuries;
but I have not yet found any historian to identify for me the warrior
named or nicknamed Garry Geerlaug, who is to return blinking to this
world of ours when his nap is over. Leaving Ireland, I was told the
other day of a place called Tom na Hurich, near Inverness, where Finn
and his following are resting, each on his left elbow, enjoying a
broken sleep while waiting for the note to be sounded, which is to
call them forth. What they are then to do I have not been told: it
may be that they will proceed at once to solve the Crofter Question,
for there will doubtless be one.

It appears, to come back to Wales, that King Cadwaladr, who waged an
unsuccessful war with the Angles of Northumbria in the seventh century,
was long after his death expected to return to restore the Brythons
to power. At any rate so one is led in some sort of a hazy fashion to
believe in reading several of the poems in the manuscript known as
the Book of Taliessin. One finds, however, no trace of Cadwaladr in
our cave legends: the heroes of them are Arthur and Owen Lawgoch. Now
concerning Arthur one need at this point hardly speak, except to say
that the Welsh belief in the eventual return of Arthur was at one
time a powerful motive affecting the behaviour of the people of Wales,
as was felt, for instance, by English statesmen in the reign of Henry
II. But by our time the expected return of Arthur--rexque futurus--has
dissipated itself into a commonplace of folklore fitted only to point
an allegory, as when Elvet Lewis, one of the sweetest of living Welsh
poets, sings in a poem entitled Arthur gyda ni, 'Arthur with us':--

    Mae Arthur Fawr yn cysgu,       Great Arthur still is sleeping,
    A'i dewrion syd o'i deutu,      His warriors all around him,
        A'u gafael ar y cled:           With grip upon the steel:
    Pan daw yn dyd yn Nghymru,      When dawns the day on Cambry,
    Daw Arthur Fawr i fynu          Great Arthur forth will sally
        Yn fyw--yn fyw o'i fed!         Alive to work her weal!

Not so with regard to the hopes associated with the name of Owen
Lawgoch; for we have it on Gwynionyd's testimony, p. 464, that our old
baledwyr or ballad men used to sing about him at Welsh fairs: it is not
in the least improbable that they still do so here and there, unless
the horrors of the ghastly murder last reported in the newspapers
have been found to pay better. At any rate Mr. Fisher (p. 379) has
known old people in his native district in the Llychwr Valley who
could repeat stanzas or couplets from the ballads in question. He
traces these scraps to a booklet entitled Merlin's Prophecy [67],
together with a brief history of his life, taken from the Book of
Prognostication. This little book bears no date, but appears to
have been published in the early part of the nineteenth century. It
is partly in prose, dealing briefly with the history of Merlin the
Wild or Silvaticus, and the rest consists of two poems. The first
of these poems is entitled Dechreu Darogan Myrdin, 'the Beginning
of Merlin's Prognostication,' and is made up of forty-nine verses,
several of which speak of Owen as king conquering all his foes and
driving out the Saxons: then in the forty-seventh stanza comes the
couplet which says, that this Owen is Henry the Ninth, who is tarrying
in a foreign land. The other poem is of a more general character,
and is entitled the Second Song of Merlin's Prognostication, and
consists of twenty-six stanzas of four lines each like the previous
one; but the third stanza describes Arthur's bell at Caerlleon,
'Caerleon,' ringing with great vigour to herald the coming of Owen;
and the seventh stanza begins with the following couplet:--

        Ceir gweled Owen Law-goch yn d'od i Frydain Fawr,
        Ceir gweled newyn ceiniog yn nhref Gaerlleon-gawr.

        Owen Lawgoch one shall to Britain coming see,
        And dearth of pennies find at Chester on the Dee.

It closes with the date in verse at the end, to wit, 1668, which
takes us back to very troublous times: 1668 was the year of the
Triple Alliance of England, Sweden, and Holland against Louis XIV;
and it was not long after the Plague had raged, and London had had its
Great Fire. So it is a matter of no great surprise if some people in
Wales had a notion that the power of England was fast nearing its end,
and that the baledwyr thought it opportune to refurbish and adapt some
of Merlin's prophecies as likely to be acceptable to the peasantry of
South Wales. At all events we have no reason to suppose that the two
poems which have here been described from Mr. Fisher's data represented
either the gentry of Wales, whose ordinary speech was probably for
the most part English, or the bardic fraternity, who would have looked
with contempt at the language and style of the Prognostication. For,
apart from careless printing, this kind of literature can lay no claim
to merit in point of diction or of metre. Such productions represent
probably the baledwyr and the simple country people, such as still
listen in rapt attention to them doing at Welsh fairs and markets
what they are pleased to regard as singing. All this fits in well
enough with the folklore of the caves, such as the foregoing stories
represent it. Here I may add that I am informed by Mr. Craigfryn
Hughes of a tradition that Arthur and his men are biding their time
near Caerleon on the Usk, to wit, in a cave resembling generally those
described in the foregoing legends. He also mentions a tradition as
to Owen Glyndwr--so he calls him, though it is unmistakably the Owen
of the baledwyr who have been referred to by Mr. Fisher--that he and
his men are similarly slumbering in a cave in Craig Gwrtheyrn, in
Carmarthenshire. That is a spot in the neighbourhood of Llandyssil,
consisting of an elevated field terminating on one side in a sharp
declivity, with the foot of the rock laved by the stream of the
Teifi. Craig Gwrtheyrn means Vortigern's Rock, and it is one of the
sites with which legend associates the name of that disreputable old
king. I am not aware that it shows any traces of ancient works, but
it looks at a distance an ideal site for an old fortification. An
earlier prophecy about Owen Lawgoch than any of these occurs, as
kindly pointed out to me by Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans, in the Peniarth
MS. 94 (= Hengwrt MS. 412, p. 23), and points back possibly to the
last quarter of the fourteenth century. See also one quoted by him,
from the Mostyn MS. 133, in his Report on MSS. in the Welsh Language,
i. 106. Probably many more such prophecies might be discovered if
anybody undertook to make a systematic search for them.

But who was Owen Lawgoch, if there ever was such a man? Such a man
there was undoubtedly; for we read in one of the documents printed in
the miscellaneous volume commonly known as the Record of Carnarvon,
that at a court held at Conway in the forty-fourth year of Edward III
a certain Gruffyd Says was adjudged to forfeit all the lands which
he held in Anglesey to the Prince of Wales--who was at that time
no other than Edward the Black Prince--for the reason that the said
Gruffyd had been an adherent of Owen: adherens fuisset Owino Lawegogh
(or Lawgogh) inimico et proditori predicti domini Principis et de
consilio predicti Owyni ad mouendam guerram in Wallia contra predictum
dominum Principem [68]. How long previously it had been attempted to
begin a war on behalf of this Owen Lawgoch one cannot say, but it so
happens that at this time there was a captain called Yeuwains, Yewains,
or Yvain de Gales or Galles, 'Owen of Wales,' fighting on the French
side against the English in Edward's Continental wars. Froissart in
his Chronicles has a great deal to say of him, for he distinguished
himself greatly on various critical occasions. From the historian's
narrative one finds that Owen had escaped when a boy to the court
of Philip VI of France, who received him with great favour and had
him educated with his own nephews. Froissart's account of him is,
that the king of England, Edward III, had slain his father and given
his lordship and principality to his own son as Prince of Wales;
and Froissart gives Owen's father's name as Aymon, which should mean
Edmond, unless the name intended may have been rather Einion. However
that may have been, Owen was engaged in the Battle of Poitiers in
1356, and when peace was made he went to serve in Lombardy; but when
war between England and France broke out again in 1369, he returned
to France. He sometimes fought on sea and sometimes on land, but
he was always entrusted by the French king, who was now Charles V,
with important commands [69]. Thus in 1372 he was placed at the head
of a flotilla with 3,000 men, and ordered to operate against the
English: he made a descent on the Isle of Guernsey [70], and while
there besieging the castle of Cornet, he was charged by the king of
France to sail to Spain to invite the king of Castile to send his
fleet again to help in the attack on La Rochelle. Whilst staying
at Santander the earl of Pembroke was brought thither, having been
taken prisoner in the course of the destruction of the English fleet
before La Rochelle. Owen, on seeing the earl of Pembroke, asks him
with bitterness if he is come there to do him homage for his land,
of which he had taken possession in Wales. He threatens to avenge
himself on him as soon as he can, and also on the earl of Hereford
and Edward Spencer, for it was by the fathers of these three men,
he said, his own father had been betrayed to death. Edward III died
in 1377, and the Black Prince had died shortly before. Owen survived
them both, and was actively engaged in the siege of Mortagne sur Mer
in Poitou, when he was assassinated by one Lamb, who had insinuated
himself into his service and confidence, partly by pretending to
bring him news about his native land and telling him that all Wales
was longing to have him back to be the lord of his country--et lui
fist acroire que toute li terre de Gales le desiroient mout à ravoir à
seigneur. So Owen fell in the year 1378, and was buried at the church
of Saint-Léger [71] while Lamb returned to the English to receive
his stipulated pay. When this happened Owen's namesake, Owen Glyndwr,
was nearly thirty years of age. The latter was eventually to assert
with varying fortune on several fields of battle in this country the
claims of his elder kinsman, who, by virtue of his memory in France,
would seem to have rendered it easy for the later Owen to enter into
friendly relations with the French court of his day [72].

Now as to Yvain de Galles, the Rev. Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc)
in his Hanes Cymru, 'History of Wales,' devotes a couple of pages,
735-7, to Froissart's account of him, and he points out that Angharad
Llwyd, in her edition of Sir John Wynne's History of the Gwydir Family
[73], had found Owen Lawgoch to have been Owen ab Thomas ab Rhodri,
brother to Llewelyn, the last native prince of Wales. One of the names,
however, among other things, forms a difficulty: why did Froissart
call Yvain's father Aymon? So it is clear that a more searching study
of Welsh pedigrees and other documents, including those at the Record
Office [74], has to be made before Owen can be satisfactorily placed
in point of succession. For that he was in the right line to succeed
the native princes of Wales is suggested both by the eagerness with
which all Wales was represented as looking to his return to be the lord
of the country, and by the opening words of Froissart in describing
what he had been robbed of by Edward III, as being both lordship and
principality--la signourie et princeté. Be that as it may, there is,
it seems to me, little doubt that Yvain de Galles was no other than
the Owen Lawgoch, whose adherent Gruffyd Says was deprived of his land
and property in the latter part of Edward's reign. In the next place,
there is hardly room for doubt that the Owen Lawgoch here referred
to was the same man whom the baledwyr in their jumble of prophecies
intended to be Henry the Ninth, that is to say the Welsh successor
to the last Tudor king, Henry VIII, and that he was at the same time
the hero of the cave legends of divers parts of the Principality,
especially South Wales, as already indicated.

Now without being able to say why Owen and his analogues should become
the heroes of cave legends contemplating a second advent, it is easy
to point to circumstances which facilitated their doing so. It is
useless to try to discuss the question of Arthur's disappearance;
but take Garry Geerlaug, for instance, a roving Norseman, as we may
suppose from his name, who may have suddenly disappeared with his
followers, never more to be heard of in the east of Ireland. In the
absence of certain news of his death, it was all the easier to imagine
that he was dozing quietly away in an enchanted fortress. Then as
to King Cadwaladr, who was also, perhaps, to have returned to this
world, so little is known concerning his end that historians have
no certainty to this day when or where he died. So much the readier
therefore would the story gain currency that he was somewhere biding
his time to come back to retrieve his lost fortunes. Lastly, there is
Owen Lawgoch, the magic of whose name has only been dissipated in our
own day: he died in France in the course of a protracted war with the
kings of England. It is not likely, then, that the peasantry of Wales
could have heard anything definite about his fate. So here also the
circumstances were favourable to the cave legend and the dream that
he was, whether at home or abroad, only biding his time. Moreover,
in all these cases the hope-inspiring delusion gained currency among a
discontented people, probably, who felt the sore need of a deliverer to
save them from oppression or other grievous hardships of their destiny.

The question can no longer be prevented from presenting itself as to
the origin of this idea of a second advent of a hero of the past;
but in that form it is too large for discussion here, and it would
involve a review, for instance, of one of the cardinal beliefs of the
Latter-day Saints as to the coming of Christ to reign on earth, and
other doctrines supposed to be derived from the New Testament. On the
other hand, there is no logical necessity why the expected deliverer
should have been in the world before: witness the Jews, who are looking
forward not to the return but to the birth and first coming of their
Messiah. So the question here may be confined more or less strictly to
its cave-legend form; and though I cannot answer it, some advance in
the direction whence the answer should come may perhaps be made. In
the first place, one will have noticed that Arthur and Owen Lawgoch
come more or less in one another's way; and the presumption is that
Owen Lawgoch has been to a certain extent ousting Arthur, who may be
regarded as having the prior claim, not to mention that in the case
of the Gwr Blew cave, p. 481, Owen is made by an apparently recent
version of the story to evict from his lair a commonplace robber
of no special interest. In other words, the Owen Lawgoch legend is,
so to say, detected spreading itself [75]. That is very possibly just
what had happened at a remoter period in the case of the Arthur legend
itself. In other words, Arthur has taken the place of some ancient
divinity, such as that dimly brought within our ken by Plutarch in the
words placed at the head of this chapter. He reproduces the report of
a certain Demetrius, sent by the emperor of Rome to reconnoitre and
inspect the coasts of Britain. It was to the effect that around Britain
lay many uninhabited islands, some of which are named after deities
and some after heroes; and of the islands inhabited, he visited the
one nearest to the uninhabited ones. Of this the dwellers were few,
but the people of Britain treated them as sacrosanct and inviolable in
their persons. Among other things, they related to him how terrible
storms, diseases, and portents happened on the occasion of any one
of the mighty leaving this life. He adds:--'Moreover there is, they
said, an island in which Cronus is imprisoned, with Briareus keeping
guard over him as he sleeps; for, as they put it, sleep is the bond
forged for Cronus. They add that around him are many divinities,
his henchmen and attendants [76].'

What divinity, Celtic or pre-Celtic, this may have been who recalled
Cronus or Saturn to the mind of the Roman officer, it is impossible
to say. It is to be noticed that he sleeps and that his henchmen
are with him, but no allusion is made to treasure. No more is there,
however, in Mr. Fisher's version of the story of Ogo'r Dinas, which,
according to him, says that Arthur and his warriors there lie sleeping
with their right hands clasping the hilts of their drawn swords, ready
to encounter any one who may venture to disturb their repose. On the
other hand, legends about cave treasure are probably very ancient, and
in some at least of our stories the safe keeping of such treasure must
be regarded as the original object of the presence of the armed host.

The permission supposed to be allowed an intruder to take away a
reasonable quantity of the cave gold, I should look at in the light
of a sort of protest on the part of the story-teller against the
niggardliness of the cave powers. I cannot help suspecting in the same
way that the presence of a host of armed warriors to guard some piles
of gold and silver for unnumbered ages must have struck the fancy
of the story-tellers as disproportionate, and that this began long
ago to cause a modification in the form of the legends. That is to
say, the treasure sank into a mere accessory of the presence of the
armed men, who are not guarding any such thing so much as waiting for
the destined hour when they are to sally forth to make lost causes
win. Originally the armed warriors were in some instances presumably
the henchmen of a sleeping divinity, as in the story told to Demetrius;
but perhaps oftener they were the guardians of treasure, just as much
as the invisible agencies are, which bring on thunder and lightning
and portents when any one begins to dig at Dinas Emrys or other spots
where ancient treasure lies hidden. There is, it must be admitted,
no objection to regarding the attendants of a divinity as at the
same time the guardians of his treasure. In none, however, of these
cave stories probably may we suppose the principal figure to have
originally been that of the hero expected to return among men: he,
when found in them, is presumably to be regarded as a comparatively
late interloper. But it is, as already hinted, not to be understood
that the notion of a returning hero is itself a late one. Quite the
contrary; and the question then to be answered is, Where was that kind
of hero supposed to pass his time till his return? There is only one
answer to which Welsh folklore points, and that is, In fairyland. This
is also the teaching of the ancient legend about Arthur, who goes away
to the Isle of Avallon to be healed of his wounds by the fairy maiden
Morgen; and, according to an anonymous poet [77], it is in her charms
that one should look for the reason why Arthur tarries so long:--

        Immodice læsus Arthurus tendit ad aulam
        Regis Avallonis, ubi virgo regia, vulnus
        Illius tractans, sanati membra reservat
        Ipsa sibi: vivuntque simul, si credere fas est.

        Avallon's court see suffering Arthur reach:
        His wounds are healed, a royal maid the leech;
        His pains assuaged, he now with her must dwell,
        If we hold true what ancient legends tell.

Here may be cited by way of comparison Walter Mapes' statement as to
the Trinio, concerning whom he was quoted in the first chapter, p. 72
above. He says, that as Trinio was never seen after the losing battle,
in which he and his friends had engaged with a neighbouring chieftain,
it was believed in the district around Llyn Syfadon, that Trinio's
fairy mother had rescued him from the enemy and taken him away with her
to her home in the lake. In the case of Arthur it is, as we have seen,
a fairy also or a lake lady that intervenes; and there cannot be much
room for doubt, that the story representing him going to fairyland
to be healed is far older than any which pictures him sleeping in a
cave with his warriors and his gold all around him. As for the gold,
however, it is abundantly represented as nowhere more common than
in the home of the fairies: so this metal treated as a test cannot
greatly help us in essaying the distinction here suggested. With regard
to Owen Lawgoch, however, one is not forced to suppose that he was
ever believed to have sojourned in Faery: the legendary precedent of
Arthur as a cave sleeper would probably suffice to open the door for
him to enter the recesses of Craig y Dinas, as soon as the country
folk began to grow weary of waiting for his return. In other words,
most of our cave legends have combined together two sets of popular
belief originally distinct, the one referring to a hero gone to the
world of the fairies and expected some day to return, and the other to
a hero or god enjoying an enchanted sleep with his retinue all around
him. In some of our legends, however, such as that of Llanciau Eryri,
the process of combining the two sets of story has been left to this
day incomplete.

CHAPTER IX

PLACE-NAME STORIES

        The Dindsenchas is a collection of stories (senchasa), in
        Middle-Irish prose and verse, about the names of noteworthy
        places (dind) in Ireland--plains, mountains, ridges, cairns,
        lakes, rivers, fords, estuaries, islands, and so forth.... But
        its value to students of Irish folklore, romance (sometimes
        called history), and topography has long been recognized
        by competent authorities, such as Petrie, O'Donovan, and
        Mr. Alfred Nutt.

                                                         Whitley Stokes.

In the previous chapters some folklore has been produced in which
we have swine figuring: see more especially that concerned with the
Hwch Du Gwta, pp. 224-6 above. Now I wish to bring before the reader
certain other groups of swine legends not vouched for by oral tradition
so much as found in manuscripts more or less ancient. The first three
to be mentioned occur in one of the Triads [78]. I give the substance
of it in the three best known versions, premising that the Triad is
entitled that of the Three Stout Swineherds of the Isle of Prydain:--

i. 30a:--Drystan [79] son of Tallwch who guarded the swine of March
son of Meirchion while the swineherd went to bid Essyllt come to meet
him: at the same time Arthur sought to have one sow by fraud or force,
and failed.

ii. 56b:--Drystan son of Tallwch with the swine of March ab Meirchion
while the swineherd went on a message to Essyllt. Arthur and March and
Cai and Bedwyr came all four to him, but obtained from Drystan not even
as much as a single porker, whether by force, by fraud, or by theft.

iii. 101c:--The third was Trystan son of Tallwch, who guarded the
swine of March son of Meirchion while the swineherd had gone on a
message to Essyllt to bid her appoint a meeting with Trystan. Now
Arthur and Marchell and Cai and Bedwyr undertook to go and make an
attempt on him, but they proved unable to get possession of as much
as one porker either as a gift or as a purchase, whether by fraud,
by force, or by theft.

In this story the well-known love of Drystan and Essyllt is taken for
granted; but the whole setting is so peculiar and so unlike that of
the story of Tristan and Iselt or Iseut in the romances, that there
is no reason to suppose it in any way derived from the latter.

The next portion of the Triad runs thus:--

1 30b:--And Pryderi son of Pwyll of Annwvyn who guarded the swine of
Pendaran of Dyfed in the Glen of the Cuch in Emlyn.

ii. 56a:--Pryderi son of Pwyll Head of Annwn with the swine of
Pendaran of Dyfed his foster father. The swine were the seven brought
away by Pwyll Head of Annwn and given by him to Pendaran of Dyfed his
foster father; and the Glen of the Cuch was the place where they were
kept. The reason why Pryderi is called a mighty swineherd is that no
one could prevail over him either by fraud or by force [80].

iii. 101a:--The first was Pryderi son of Pwyll of Pendaran in Dyfed
[81], who guarded his father's swine while he was in Annwn, and it
was in the Glen of the Cuch that he guarded them.

The history of the pigs is given, so to say, in the Mabinogion. Pwyll
had been able to strike up a friendship and even an alliance with
Arawn king of Annwvyn [82] or Annwn, which now means Hades or the other
world; and they kept up their friendship partly by exchanging presents
of horses, greyhounds, falcons, and any other things calculated to give
gratification to the receiver of them. Among other gifts which Pryderi
appears to have received from the king of Annwn were hobeu or moch,
'pigs, swine,' which had never before been heard of in the island
of Prydain. The news about this new race of animals, and that they
formed sweeter food than oxen, was not long before it reached Gwyned;
and we shall presently see that there was another story which flatly
contradicts this part of the Triad, namely to the effect that Gwydion,
nephew of Math king of Gwyned and a great magician, came to Pryderi's
court at Rhudlan, near Dolau Bach or Highmead on the Teifi in what is
now the county of Cardigan, and obtained some of the swine by deceiving
the king. But, to pass by that for the present, I may say that Dyfed
seems to have been famous for rearing swine; and at the present day
one affects to believe in the neighbouring districts that the chief
industry in Dyfed, more especially in South Cardiganshire, consists
in the rearing of parsons, carpenters, and pigs. Perhaps it is also
worth mentioning that the people of the southern portion of Dyfed
are nicknamed by the men of Glamorgan to this day Moch Sir Benfro,
'the Pigs of Pembrokeshire.'

But why so much importance attached to pigs? I cannot well give a
better answer than the reader can himself supply if he will only
consider what rôle the pig plays in the domestic economy of modern
Ireland. But, to judge from old Irish literature, it was even more so
in ancient times, as pigs' meat was so highly appreciated, that under
some one or other of its various names it usually takes its place at
the head of all flesh meats in Irish stories. This seems the case,
for instance, in the medieval story called the Vision of MacConglinne
[83]; and, to go further back, to the Feast of Bricriu for instance,
one finds it decidedly the case with the Champion's Portion [84]
at that stormy banquet. Then one may mention the story of the fatal
feast on Mac-Dáthó's great swine [85], where that beast would have
apparently sufficed for the braves both of Connaught and Ulster had
Conall Cernach carved fair, and not given more than their share to
his own Ultonian friends in order to insult the Connaught men by
leaving them nothing but the fore-legs. It is right, however, to
point out that most of the stories go to show, that the gourmands
of ancient Erin laid great stress on the pig being properly fed,
chiefly on milk and the best kind of meal. It cannot have been very
different in ancient Wales; for we read in the story of Peredur that,
when he sets out from his mother's home full of his mother's counsel,
he comes by-and-by to a pavilion, in front of which he sees food, some
of which he proceeds to take according to his mother's advice, though
the gorgeously dressed lady sitting near it has not the politeness
to anticipate his wish. It consisted, we are told, of two bottles of
wine, two loaves of white bread, and collops of a milk-fed pig's flesh
[86]. The home of the fairies was imagined to be a land of luxury and
happiness with which nothing could compare in this world. In this
certain Welsh and Irish stories agree; and in one of the latter,
where the king of the fairies is trying to persuade the queen of
Ireland to elope with him, we find that among the many inducements
offered her are fresh pig, sweet milk, and ale [87]. Conversely,
as the fairies were considered to be always living and to be a very
old-fashioned and ancient people, it was but natural to suppose that
they had the animals which man found useful, such as horses, cattle,
and sheep, except that they were held to be of superior breeds, as
they are represented, for instance, in our lake legends. Similarly,
it is natural enough that other stories should ascribe to them also
the possession of herds of swine; and all this prior to man's having
any. The next step in the reasoning would be that man had obtained
his from the fairies. It is some tradition of this kind that possibly
suggested the line taken by the Pwyll story in the matter of the
derivation of the pig from Annwn: see the last chapter.

The next story in the Triad is, if possible, wilder still: it runs
as follows:--

i. 30c:--Coll son of Collfrewi [88] who guarded Henwen [89], Dallweir
Dallben's sow, which went burrowing as far as the Headland of Awstin
in Kernyw and then took to the sea. It was at Aber Torogi in Gwent
Is-coed that she came to land, with Coll keeping his grip on her
bristles whatever way she went by sea or by land. Now in Maes Gwenith,
'Wheat Field,' in Gwent she dropped a grain of wheat and a bee, and
thenceforth that has been the best place for wheat. Then she went as
far as Llonwen in Penfro and there dropped a grain of barley and a bee,
and thenceforth Llonwen has been the best place for barley. Then she
proceeded to Rhiw Gyferthwch in Eryri and dropped a wolf-cub and an
eagle-chick. These Coll gave away, the eagle to the Goidel Brynach
from the North, and the wolf to Menwaed of Arllechwed, and they came
to be known as Menwaed's Wolf and Brynach's Eagle. Then the sow went
as far as the Maen Du at Llanfair in Arfon, and there she dropped a
kitten, and that kitten Coll cast into the Menai: that came later to
be known as Cath Paluc, 'Palug's Cat.'

ii. 56c:--The third was Coll son of Kallureuy with the swine of Dallwyr
Dallben in Dallwyr's Glen in Kernyw. Now one of the swine was with
young and Henwen was her name; and it was foretold that the Isle
of Prydain would be the worse for her litter; and Arthur collected
the host of Prydain and went about to destroy it. Then one sow went
burrowing, and at the Headland of Hawstin in Kernyw she took to the
sea with the swineherd following her. And in Maes Gwenith in Gwent
she dropped a grain of wheat and a bee, and ever since Maes Gwenith
is the best place for wheat and bees. And at Llonyon in Penfro
she dropped a grain of barley and another of wheat: therefore the
barley of Llonyon has passed into a proverb. And on Rhiw Gyferthwch
in Arfon she dropped a wolf-cub and an eagle-chick. The wolf was
given to Mergaed and the eagle to Breat a prince from the North,
and they were the worse for having them. And at Llanfair in Arfon,
to wit below the Maen Du, she dropped a kitten, and from the Maen Du
the swineherd cast it into the sea, but the sons of Paluc reared it to
their detriment. It grew to be Cath Paluc, 'Palug's Cat,' and proved
one of the three chief molestations of Mona reared in the island:
the second was Daronwy and the third was Edwin king of England.

iii. 101b:--The second was Coll son of Collfrewi who guarded Dallwaran
Dallben's sow, that came burrowing as far as the Headland of Penwedic
in Kernyw and then took to the sea; and she came to land at Aber
Tarogi in Gwent Is-coed with Coll keeping his hold of her bristles
whithersoever she went on sea or land. At Maes Gwenith in Gwent she
dropped three grains of wheat and three bees, and ever since Gwent
has the best wheat and bees. From Gwent she proceeded to Dyfed and
dropped a grain of barley and a porker, and ever since Dyfed has
the best barley and pigs: it was in Llonnio Llonnwen these were
dropped. Afterwards she proceeded to Arfon (sic) and in Lleyn she
dropped the grain of rye, and ever since Lleyn and Eifionyd have the
best rye. And on the side of Rhiw Gyferthwch she dropped a wolf-cub
and an eagle-chick. Coll gave the eagle to Brynach the Goidel of Dinas
Affaraon, and the wolf to Menwaed lord of Arllechwed, and one often
hears of Brynach's Wolf and Menwaed's Eagle [the writer was careless:
he has made the owners exchange pests]. Then she went as far as the
Maen Du in Arfon, where she dropped a kitten and Coll cast it into
the Menai. That was the Cath Balwg (sic), 'Palug's Cat': it proved
a molestation to the Isle of Mona subsequently.

Such are the versions we have of this story, and a few notes on
the names seem necessary before proceeding further. Coll is called
Coll son of Collurewy in i. 30, and Coll son of Kallureuy in ii. 56:
all that is known of him comes from other Triads, i. 32-3, ii. 20,
and iii. 90. The first two tell us that he was one of the Three chief
Enchanters of the Isle of Prydain, and that he was taught his magic
by Rhudlwm the Giant; while ii. 20 calls the latter a dwarf and adds
that Coll was nephew to him. The matter is differently put in iii. 90,
to the effect that Rhudlwm the Giant learnt his magic from Eid[il]ig
the Dwarf and from Coll son of Collfrewi. Nothing is known of Dallwyr's
Glen in Kernyw, or of the person after whom it was named. Kernyw is the
Welsh for Cornwall, but if Penryn Awstin or Hawstin is to be identified
with Aust Cliff on the Severn Sea in Gloucestershire, the story would
seem to indicate a time when Cornwall extended north-eastwards as far
as that point. The later Triad, iii. 101, avoids Penryn Awstin and
substitutes Penwedic, which recalls some such a name as Pengwaed [90]
or Penwith in Cornwall: elsewhere Penwedic [91] is only given as the
name of the most northern hundred of Keredigion. Gwent Is-coed means
Gwent below the Wood or Forest, and Aber Torogi or Tarogi--omitted,
probably by accident, in ii. 56--is now Caldicot Pill, where the small
river Tarogi, now called Troggy, discharges itself not very far from
Portskewet. Maes Gwenith in the same neighbourhood is still known by
that name. The correct spelling of the name of the place in Penfro
was probably Llonyon, but it is variously given as Llonwen, Llonyon,
and Llonion, not to mention the Llonnio Llonnwen of the later form
of the Triad: should this last prove to be based on any authority
one might suggest Llonyon Henwen, so called after the sow, as the
original. The modern Welsh spelling of Llonyon would be Llonion, and
it is identified by Mr. Egerton Phillimore with Lanion near Pembroke
[92]. Rhiw Gyferthwch is guessed to have been one of the slopes of
Snowdon on the Bedgelert side; but I have failed to discover anybody
who has ever heard the name used in that neighbourhood.

Arllechwed was, roughly speaking, that part of Carnarvonshire which
drains into the sea between Conway and Bangor. Brynach and Menwaed
or Mengwaed [93] seem to be the names underlying the misreadings
in ii. 56; but it is quite possible that Brynach, probably for an
Irish Bronach, has here superseded an earlier Urnach or Eurnach also
a Goidel, to whom I shall have to return in another chapter. Dinas
Affaraon [94] is the place called Dinas Ffaraon Dande in the story
of Llud and Llevelys, where we are told that after Llud had had the
two dragons buried there, which had been dug up at the centre of his
realm, to wit at Oxford, Ffaraon, after whom the place was called, died
of grief. Later it came to be called Dinas Emrys from Myrdin Emrys,
'Merlinus Ambrosius,' who induced Vortigern to go away from there in
quest of another place to build his castle [95]. So the reader will
see that the mention of this Dinas brings us back to a weird spot with
which he has been familiarized in the previous chapter: see pp. 469,
495 above. Llanfair in Arfon is Llanfair Is-gaer near Port Dinorwic
on the Menai Straits, and the Maen Du should be a black rock or black
stone on the southern side of those straits. Daronwy and Cath Paluc
are both personages on whom light is still wanted. Lastly, by Edwin
king of England is to be understood Edwin king of the Angles of Deira
and Bernicia, whom Welsh tradition represents as having found refuge
for a time in Anglesey.

Now this story as a whole looks like a sort of device for stringing
together explanations of the origin of certain place-names and of
certain local characteristics. Leaving entirely out of the reckoning
the whole of Mid-Wales, that is to say, the more Brythonic portion
of the country, it is remarkable as giving to South Wales credit for
certain resources, but to North Wales for pests alone and scourges,
except that the writer of the late version bethought himself of Lleyn
and Eifionyd as having good land for growing rye; but he was very
hazy as to the geography of North Wales--both he and the redactors of
the other Triads equally belonged doubtless to South Wales. Among the
place-names, Maes Gwenith, 'the Wheat Field,' is clear; but hardly less
so is the case of Aber Torogi, 'Mouth of the Troggy,' where torogi
is 'the pregnancy of animals,' from torrog, 'being with young.' So
with Rhiw Gyferthwch, 'the Hillside or Ascent of Cyferthwch,' where
cyferthwch means 'pantings, pangs, labour.' The name Maen Du, 'Black
Rock,' is left to explain itself; and I am not sure that the original
story was not so put as also to explain Llonion, to wit, as a sort of
plural of llawn, 'full,' in reference, let us say, to the full ears of
the barley grown there. But the reference to the place-names seems to
have partly escaped the later tellers of the story or to have failed
to impress them as worth emphasizing. They appear to have thought more
of explaining the origin of Menwaed's Wolf and Brynach's Eagle. Whether
this means in the former case that the district of Arllechwed was more
infested by wolves than any other part of Wales, or that Menwaed,
lord of Arllechwed, had a wolf as his symbol, it is impossible to
say. In another Triad, however, i. 23 = ii. 57, he is reckoned one of
the Three Battle-knights who were favourites at Arthur's court, the
others being Caradog Freichfras and Llyr Llüydog or Llud Llurugog,
while in iii. 29 Menwaed's place is taken by a son of his called
Mael Hir. Similarly with regard to Brynach's Eagle one has nothing
to say, except that common parlance some time or other would seem to
have associated the eagle in some way with Brynach the Goidel. The
former prevalence of the eagle in the Snowdon district seems to be
the explanation of its Welsh name of Eryri--as already suggested,
p. 479 above--and the association of the bird with the Goidelic
chieftain who had his stronghold under the shadow of Snowdon seems
to follow naturally enough. But the details are conspicuous by their
scarcity in Welsh literature, though Brynach's Eagle is probably to be
identified with the Aquila Fabulosa of Eryri, of which Giraldus makes
a curious mention [96]. Perhaps the final disuse of Goidelic speech
in the district is to be, to some extent, regarded as accounting for
our dearth of data. A change of language involved in all probability
the shipwreck of many a familiar mode of thought; and many a homely
expression must have been lost in the transition before an equivalent
acceptable to the Goidel was discovered by him in his adopted idiom.

This question of linguistic change will be found further illustrated
by the story to which I wish now to pass, namely that of the hunting
of Twrch Trwyth. It is one of those incorporated in the larger tale
known as that of Kulhwch and Olwen, the hero and heroine concerned:
see the Oxford Mabinogion, pp. 135-41, and Guest's translation,
iii. 306-16. Twrch Trwyth is pictured as a formidable boar at the head
of his offspring, consisting of seven swine, and the Twrch himself
is represented as carrying between his ears a comb, a razor, and a
pair of shears. The plot of the Kulhwch renders it necessary that
these precious articles should be procured; so Kulhwch prevails on
his cousin Arthur to undertake the hunt. Arthur began by sending one
of his men, to wit, Menw [97] son of Teirgwaed, to see whether the
three precious things mentioned were really where they were said to
be, namely, between Twrch Trwyth's ears. Menw was a great magician who
usually formed one of any party of Arthur's men about to visit a pagan
country; for it was his business to subject the inhabitants to magic
and enchantment, so that they should not see Arthur's men, while the
latter saw them. Menw found Twrch Trwyth and his offspring at a place
in Ireland called Esgeir Oervel [98], and in order to approach them
he alighted in the form of a bird near where they were. He tried to
snatch one of the three precious articles from Twrch Trwyth, but he
only succeeded in securing one of his bristles, whereupon the Twrch
stood up and shook himself so vigorously that a drop of venom from his
bristles fell on Menw, who never enjoyed a day's health afterwards
as long as he lived. Menw now returned and assured Arthur that the
treasures were really about the Twrch's head as it was reported. Arthur
then crossed to Ireland with a host and did not stop until he found
Twrch Trwyth and his swine at Esgeir Oervel. The hunt began and was
continued for several days, but it did not prevent the Twrch from
laying waste a fifth part of Ireland, that is in Medieval Irish cóiced,
a province of the island. Arthur's men, however, succeeded in killing
one of the Twrch's offspring, and they asked Arthur the history [99]
of that swine. Arthur replied that it had been a king before being
transformed by God into a swine on account of his sins. Here I should
remark by the way, that the narrator of the story forgets the death
of this young boar, and continues to reckon the Twrch's herd as seven.

Arthur's next move was to send one of his men, Gwrhyr, interpreter of
tongues [100], to parley with the boars. Gwrhyr, in the form of a bird,
alighted above where Twrch Trwyth and his swine lay, and addressed
them as follows: 'For the sake of Him who fashioned you in this
shape, if you can speak, I ask one of you to come to converse with
Arthur.' Answer was made by one of the boars, called Grugyn Gwrych
Ereint, that is, Grugyn Silver-bristle; for like feathers of silver,
we are told, were his bristles wherever he went, and whether in woods
or on plains, one saw the gleam of his bristles. The following, then,
was Grugyn's answer: 'By Him who fashioned us in this shape, we shall
not do so, and we shall not converse with Arthur. Enough evil has God
done to us when He fashioned us in this shape, without your coming to
fight with us.' Gwrhyr replied: 'I tell you that Arthur will fight for
the comb, the razor, and the shears that are between the ears of Twrch
Trwyth.' 'Until his life has first been taken,' said Grugyn, 'those
trinkets shall not be taken, and to-morrow morning we set out hence
for Arthur's own country, and all the harm we can, shall we do there.'

The boars accordingly set out for Wales, while Arthur with his host,
his horses, and his hounds, on board his ship Prydwen, kept within
sight of them. Twrch Trwyth came to land at Porth Clais, a small
creek south of St. David's, but Arthur went that night to Mynyw,
which seems to have been Menevia or St. David's. The next day Arthur
was told that the boars had gone past, and he overtook them killing
the herds of Kynnwas Cwrvagyl, after they had destroyed all they could
find in Deugledyf, whether man or beast. Then the Twrch went as far as
Presseleu, a name which survives in that of Preselly or Precelly, as
in Preselly Top and Preselly Mountains in North Pembrokeshire. Arthur
and his men began the hunt again, while his warriors were ranged on
both sides of the Nyfer or the river Nevern. The Twrch then left the
Glen of the Nevern and made his way to Cwm Kerwyn, the name of which
survives in that of Moel Cwm Kerwyn, one of the Preselly heights. In
the course of the hunt in that district the Twrch killed Arthur's four
champions and many of the people of the country. He was next overtaken
in a district called Peuliniauc [101] or Peuliniog, which appears to
have occupied a central area between the mountains, Llandewi Velfrey,
Henllan Amgoed, and Laugharne: it probably covered portions of the
parish of Whitland and of that of Llandysilio, the church of which is a
little to the north of the railway station of Clyn Derwen on the Great
Western line. Leaving Peuliniog for the Laugharne Burrows, he crossed,
as it seems, from Ginst Point to Aber Towy or Towy Mouth [102], which
at low water are separated mostly by tracts of sand interrupted only
by one or two channels of no very considerable width; for Aber Towy
would seem to have been a little south-east of St. Ishmael's, on the
eastern bank of the Towy. Thence the Twrch makes his way to Glynn
Ystu, more correctly perhaps Clyn Ystun, now written Clyn Ystyn [103],
the name of a farm between Carmarthen and the junction of the Amman
with the Llychwr, more exactly about six miles from that junction and
about eight and a half from Carmarthen as the crow flies. The hunt is
resumed in the Valley of the Llychwr or Loughor [104], where Grugyn
and another young boar, called Llwydawc Gouynnyat [105], committed
terrible ravages among the huntsmen. This brought Arthur and his host
to the rescue, and Twrch Trwyth, on his part, came to help his boars;
but as a tremendous attack was now made on him he moved away, leaving
the Llychwr, and making eastwards for Mynyd Amanw, or 'the Mountain of
Amman,' for Amanw is plentifully preserved in that neighbourhood in
the shortened form of Aman or Amman [106]. On Mynyd Amanw one of his
boars was killed, but he is not distinguished by any proper name: he is
simply called a banw, 'a young boar.' The Twrch was again hard pressed,
and lost another called Twrch Llawin. Then a third of the swine is
killed, called Gwys, whereupon Twrch Trwyth went to Dyffryn Amanw,
or the Vale of Amman, where he lost a banw and a benwic, a 'boar'
and a 'sow.' All this evidently takes place in the same district,
and Mynyd Amanw was, if not Bryn Amman, probably one of the mountains
to the south or south-east of the river Amman, so that Dyffryn Amanw
may have been what is still called Dyffryn Amman, or the Valley of
the Amman from Bryn Amman to where the river Amman falls into the
Llychwr. From the Amman the Twrch and the two remaining boars of
his herd made their way to Llwch Ewin, 'the lake or pool of Ewin,'
which is now represented by a bog mere above a farm house called
Llwch in the parish of Bettws, which covers the southern slope of the
Amman Valley. I have found this bog called in a map Llwch is Awel,
'Pool below Breeze,' whatever that may mean.

We find them next at Llwch Tawi, the position of which is indicated
by that of Ynys Pen Llwch, 'Pool's End Isle,' some distance lower
down the Tawe than Pont ar Dawe. At this point the boars separate,
and Grugyn goes away to Din Tywi, 'Towy Fort,' an unidentified position
somewhere on the Towy, possibly Grongar Hill near Llandeilo, and thence
to a place in Keredigion where he was killed, namely, Garth Grugyn. I
have not yet been able to identify the spot, though it must have
once had a castle, as we read of a castle called Garthgrugyn being
strengthened by Maelgwn Vychan in the year 1242: the Bruts locate
it in Keredigion [107], but this part of the story is obscured by
careless copying on the part of the scribe [108] of the Red Book. After
Grugyn's death we read of Llwydawc having made his way to Ystrad Yw,
and, after inflicting slaughter on several of his assailants, he is
himself killed there. Now Ystrad Yw, which our mapsters would have
us call Ystrad Wy, as if it had been on the Wye [109], is supposed
to have covered till Henry VIII's time the same area approximately
as the hundred of Crickhowel has since, namely, the parishes of (1)
Crickhowel, (2) Llanbedr Ystrad Yw with Patrishow, (3) Llanfihangel
Cwm Du with Tretower and Penmyarth, (4) Llangattock with Llangenny,
(5) Llanelly with Brynmawr, and (6) Llangynidr. Of these Llanbedr
perpetuates the name of Ystrad Yw, although it is situated near the
junction of the Greater and Lesser Grwynë and not in the Strath of
the Yw, which Ystrad Yw means. So one can only treat Lanbedr Ystrad
Yw as meaning that particular Llanbedr or St. Peter's Church which
belongs to the district comprehensively called Ystrad Yw. Now if
one glances at the Red Book list of cantreds and cymwds, dating in
the latter part of the fourteenth century, one will find Ystrad Yw
and Cruc Howel existing as separate cymwds. So we have to look for
the former in the direction of the parish of Cwm Du; and on going
back to the Taxatio of Pope Nicholas IV dating about 1291, we find
that practically we have to identify with Cwm Du a name Stratden',
p. 273a, which one is probably to treat as Strat d'Eue [110] or some
similar Norman spelling; for most of the other parishes of the district
are mentioned by the names which they still bear. That is not all;
for from Cwm Du a tributary of the Usk called the Rhiangoll comes
down and receives at Tretower the waters of a smaller stream called
the Yw. The land on both sides of that Yw burn forms the ystrad or
strath of which we are in quest. The chief source of this water is
called Llygad Yw, and gives its name to a house of some pretensions
bearing an inscription showing that it was built in its present form
about the middle of the seventeenth century by a member of the Gunter
family well known in the history of the county. Near the house stands
a yew tree on the boundary line of the garden, and close to its trunk,
but at a lower level, is a spring of bubbling water: this is Llygad Yw,
'the Eye of the Yw.' For Llygad Yw is a succinct expression for the
source of the Yw burn [111], and the stream retains the name Yw to its
fall into the Rhiangoll; but besides the spring of Llygad Yw it has
several other similar sources in the fields near the house. There is
nothing, however, in this brook to account for the name of Ystrad Yw
having been extended to an important district; but if one traces its
short course one will at once guess the explanation. For a few fields
below Llygad Yw is the hamlet of the Gaer or fortress, consisting of
four farm houses called the Upper, Middle, and Lower Gaer, and Pen y
Gaer: through this hamlet of the Gaer flows the Yw. These, and more
especially Pen y Gaer, are supposed to have been the site of a Roman
camp of considerable importance, and close by it the Yw is supposed
to have been crossed by the Roman road proceeding towards Brecon
[112]. The camp in the Strath of the Yw was the head quarters of the
ruling power in the district, and hence the application of the name of
Ystrad Yw to a wider area. But for our story one has to regard the name
as confined to the land about the Yw burn, or at most to a somewhat
larger portion of the parish of Cwm Du, to which the Yw and Tretower
belong. The position of the Gaer in Ystrad Yw at the foot of the Bwlch
or the gap in the difficult mountain spur stretching down towards the
Usk is more likely to have been selected by the Romans than by any of
the Celtic inhabitants, whose works are to be found on several of the
neighbouring hills, such as Myarth [113] between the Yw and the Usk.

We next find Twrch Trwyth, now the sole survivor, making his way
towards the Severn: so Arthur summons Cornwall and Devon to meet him
at Aber Hafren or Severn mouth. Then a furious conflict with the Twrch
takes place in the very waters of that river, between Llyn Lliwan
(p. 407) and Aber Gwy or the mouth of the Wye. After much trouble,
Arthur's men succeed in getting possession of two out of the three
treasures of the boar, but he escapes with the third, namely, the
comb, across the Severn [114]. Then as soon as he gets ashore he
makes his way to Cornwall, where the comb is at length snatched from
him. Chased thence, he goes straight into the sea, with the hounds
Anet and Aethlem after him, and nothing has ever been heard of any
of the three from that day to this.

That is the story of Twrch Trwyth, and Dr. Stokes calls my attention
to a somewhat similar hunt briefly described in the Rennes Dindsenchas
in the Revue Celtique, xv. 474-5. Then as to the precious articles
carried by the Twrch about his head and ears, the comb, the razor,
and the shears, two out of the three--the comb and the razor--belong
to the regular stock of a certain group of tales which recount how
the hero elopes with the daughter of a giant who loses his life
in the pursuit [115]. In order to make sure of escaping from the
infuriated giant, the daughter abstracts from her father's keeping a
comb, a razor, and another article. When she and her lover fleeing
on their horse are hard pressed, the latter throws behind him the
comb, which at once becomes a rough impenetrable forest to detain
the giant for a while. When he is again on the point of overtaking
them, the lover throws behind him the razor, which becomes a steep
and sharp mountain ridge through which the pursuing giant has to
waste time tunnelling his way. The third article is usually such as,
when thrown in the giant's way, becomes a lake in which he is drowned
while attempting to swim across. In the Kulhwch story, however, as we
have it, the allusion to these objects is torn away from what might be
expected as its context. The giant is Yspadaden Penkawr, whose death
is effected in another way; but before the giant is finally disposed
of he requires to be shaved and to have his hair dressed. His hair,
moreover, is so rough that the dressing cannot be done without the
comb and shears in the possession of Twrch Trwyth, whence the hunt;
and for the shaving one would have expected the Twrch's razor to
have been requisite; but not so, as the shaving had to be done by
means of another article, namely, the tusk of Yskithyrwynn Pennbeid,
'White-tusk chief of Boars,' for the obtaining of which one is treated
briefly to another boar hunt. The Kulhwch story is in this respect
very mixed and disjointed, owing, it would seem, to the determination
of the narrator to multiply the number of things difficult to procure,
each involving a separate feat to be described.

Let us now consider the hunt somewhat more in detail, with special
reference to the names mentioned; and let us begin with that of Twrch
Trwyth: the word twrch means the male of a beast of the swine kind,
and twrch coed, 'a wood pig,' is a wild boar, while twrch daear,
'an earth pig,' is the word in North Wales for a mole. In the next
place we can practically equate Twrch Trwyth with a name at the head
of one of the articles in Cormac's Irish Glossary. There the exact
form is Orc tréith, and the following is the first part of the article
itself as given in O'Donovan's translation edited by Stokes:--'Orc
Tréith, i. e. nomen for a king's son, triath enim rex vocatur, unde
dixit poeta Oínach n-uirc tréith "fair of a king's son," i. e. food
and precious raiment, down and quilts, ale and flesh-meat, chessmen
and chessboards, horses and chariots, greyhounds and playthings
besides.' In this extract the word orc occurs in the genitive as uirc,
and it means a 'pig' or 'boar'; in fact it is, with the usual Celtic
loss of the consonant p, the exact Goidelic equivalent of the Latin
porcus, genitive porci. From another article in Cormac's Glossary, we
learn that Tréith is the genitive of Triath, which has been explained
to mean a king. Thus, Orc Tréith means Triath's Orc, Triath's Boar,
or the King's Boar; so we take Twrch Trwyth in the same way to mean
'Trwyth's Boar.' But we have here a discrepancy, which the reader will
have noticed, for twrch is not the same word as Irish orc, the nearest
form to be expected in Welsh being Wrch, not Twrch; but such a word as
Wrch does not, so far as I know, exist. Now did the Welsh render orc
by a different word unrelated to the Goidelic one which they heard? I
think not; for it is remarkable that Irish has besides orc a word
torc, meaning a 'boar,' and torc is exactly the Welsh twrch. So there
seems to be no objection to our supposing that what Cormac calls Orc
Tréith was known in the Goidelic of Wales as Torc Tréith, which had the
alliteration to recommend it to popular favour. In that case one could
say that the Goidelic name Torc Tréith appears in Welsh with a minimum
of change as Twrch Trwyth, and also with the stamp of popular favour
more especially in the retention of the Goidelic th, just as in the
name of an ancient camp or fortification on the Withy Bush Estate in
Pembrokeshire: it is called the Rath, or the Rath Ring. Here rath is
identical with the Irish word ráth, 'a fortification or earthworks,'
and we seem to have it also in Cil Râth Fawr, the name of a farm in
the neighbourhood of Narberth. Now the Goidelic word tréith appears
to have come into Welsh as treth-i, the long vowel of which must in
Welsh have become oi or ui by about the end of the sixth century;
and if the th had been treated on etymological principles its proper
equivalent in the Welsh of that time would have been d or t. The
retention of the th is a proof, therefore, of oral transmission;
that is to say, the Goidelic word passed bodily into Brythonic,
to submit afterwards to the phonological rules of that language.

A little scrutiny of the tale will, I think, convince the reader that
one of the objects of the original story-teller was to account for
certain place-names. Thus Grugyn was meant to account for the name
of Garth Grugyn, where Grugyn was killed; Gwys, to account similarly
for that of Gwys, a tributary of the Twrch, which gives its name to
a station on the line of railway between Ystalyfera and Bryn Amman;
and Twrch Llawin to account for the name of the river Twrch, which
receives the Gwys, and falls into the Tawe some distance below Ystrad
Gynlais, between the counties of Brecknock and Glamorgan.

Besides Grugyn and Twrch Llawin, there was a third brother to whom the
story gives a special name, to wit, Llwydawc Gouynnyat, and this was,
I take it, meant also to account for a place-name, which, however,
is not given: it should have been somewhere in Ystrad Yw, in the
county of Brecknock. Still greater interest attaches to the swine
that have not been favoured with names of their own, those referred
to simply as banw, 'a young boar,' and benwic, 'a young sow.' Now
banw has its equivalent in Irish in the word banbh, which O'Reilly
explains as meaning a 'sucking pig,' and that is the meaning also of
the Manx bannoo; but formerly the word may have had a somewhat wider
meaning. The Welsh appellative is introduced twice into the story of
Twrch Trwyth; once to account, as I take it, for the name Mynyd Amanw,
'Amman Mountain,' and once for Dyffryn Amanw, 'Amman Valley.' In
both instances Amanw was meant, as I think, to be accounted for by
the banw killed at each of the places in question. But how, you will
ask, does the word banw account for Amanw, or throw any light on it
at all? Very simply, if you will just suppose the name to have been
Goidelic; for then you have only to provide it with the definite
article and it makes in banbh, 'the pig or the boar,' and that could
not in Welsh yield anything but ymmanw or ammanw [116], which with
the accent shifted backwards, became Ammanw and Amman or Aman.

Having premised these explanations let us, before we proceed further,
see to what our evidence exactly amounts. Here, then, we have a
mention of seven swine, but as two of them, a banw and a benwic,
are killed at one and the same place, our figure is practically
reduced to six [117]. The question then is, in how many of these six
cases the story of the hunt accounts for the names of the places of
the deaths respectively, that is to say, accounts for them in the
ordinary way with which one is familiar in other Welsh stories. They
may be enumerated as follows:--

1. A banw is killed at Mynyd Amanw.

2. A twrch is killed in the same neighbourhood, where there is a
river Twrch.

3. A swine called Gwys is killed in the same neighbourhood still,
where there is a river called Gwys, falling into the Twrch.

4. A banw and a benwic are killed in Dyffryn Amanw.

5. Grugyn is killed at a place called Garth Grugyn.

6. A swine called Llwydawc is killed at a spot, not named, in Ystrad
Yw or not far off [118].

Thus in five cases out of the six, the story accounts for the
place-name, and the question now is, can that be a mere accident? Just
think what the probabilities of the case would be if you put them
into numbers: South Wales, from St. David's to the Vale of the Usk,
would supply hundreds of place-names as deserving of mention, to
say the least, as those in this story; is it likely then that out
of a given six among them no less than five should be accounted for
or alluded to by any mere accident in the course of a story of the
brevity of that of Twrch Trwyth. To my thinking such an accident
is inconceivable, and I am forced, therefore, to suppose that the
narrative was originally so designed as to account for them. I said
'originally so designed,' for the scribe of the Red Book, or let us
say the last redactor of the story as it stands in the Red Book, shows
no signs of having noticed any such design. Had he detected the play
on the names of the places introduced, he would probably have been
more inclined to develop that feature of the story than to efface it.

What I mean may best be illustrated by another swine story, namely,
that which has already been referred to as occurring in the Mabinogi
of Math. There we find Pryderi, king of Dyfed, holding his court at
Rhudlan on the Teifi, but though he had become the proud possessor of a
new race of animals, given him as a present by his friend Arawn, king
of Annwn, he had made a solemn promise to his people, that he should
give none of them away until they had doubled their number in Dyfed:
these animals were the hobeu or pigs to which reference was made at
p. 69 above. Now Gwydion, having heard of them, visited Pryderi's
court, and by magic and enchantment deceived the king. Successful in
his quest, he sets out for Gwyned with his hobeu, and this is how
his journey is described in the Mabinogi: 'And that evening they
journeyed as far as the upper end of Keredigion, to a place which
is still called, for that reason, Mochdref, "Swine-town or Pigs'
stead." On the morrow they went their way, and came across the Elenyd
mountains, and that night they spent between Kerry and Arwystli, in
the stead which is also called for that reason Mochdref. Thence they
proceeded, and came the same evening as far as a commot in Powys,
which is for that reason called Mochnant [119], "Swine-burn." Thence
they journeyed to the cantred of Rhôs, and spent that night within the
town which is still called Mochdref [120].' 'Ah, my men,' said Gwydion,
'let us make for the fastness of Gwyned with these beasts: the country
is being raised in pursuit of us.' So this is what they did: they made
for the highest town of Arllechwed, and there built a creu or sty
for the pigs, and for that reason the town was called Creu-Wyrion,
that is, perhaps, 'Wyrion's Sty.' In this, it is needless to state,
we have the Corwrion of chap. i: see pp. 47, 50-70 above--the name
is variously pronounced also Cyrwrion and C'rwrion.

That is how a portion of the Math story is made to account for a
series of place-names, and had the editor of the Kulhwch understood
the play on the names of places in question in the story of Twrch
Trwyth, it might be expected that he would have given it prominence,
as already suggested. Then comes the question, how it came to pass
that he did not understand it? The first thing to suggest itself as an
answer is, that he may have been a stranger to the geography of the
country concerned. That, however, is a very inadequate explanation;
for his being a stranger, though it might account for his making
blunders as to the localities, would not be likely to deter him from
venturing into geography which he had not mastered.

What was it, then, that hid from him a portion of the original in
this instance? In part, at least, it must have been a difficulty of
language. Let us take an illustration: Gwys has already been mentioned
more than once as a name applied to one of Twrch Trwyth's offspring,
and the words used are very brief, to the following effect:--'And then
another of his swine was killed: Gwys was its name.' As a matter of
fact, the scribe was labouring under a mistake, for he ought to have
said rather, 'And then another of his swine was killed: it was a sow';
since gwys was a word meaning a sow, and not the name of any individual
hog. The word has, doubtless, long been obsolete in Welsh; but it was
known to the poet of the 'Little Pig's Lullaby' in the Black Book of
Carmarthen, where one of the stanzas begins, fo. 29a, with the line:

        Oian aparchellan. aparchell. guin guis.

The late Dr. Pughe translated it thus:

        Listen, little porkling! thou forward little white pig.

I fear I should be obliged to render it less elegantly:

        Lullaby, little porker, white sow porker.

For the last four words Stokes suggests 'O pigling of a white sow';
but perhaps the most natural rendering of the words would be 'O white
porker of a sow!'--which does not recommend itself greatly on the score
of sense, I must admit. The word occurs, also, in Breton as gwiz or
gwéz, 'truie, femelle du porc,' and as gwys or guis in Old Cornish,
while in Irish it was feis. Nevertheless, the editor of the Twrch
Trwyth story did not know it; but it would be in no way surprising that
a Welshman, who knew his language fairly well, should be baffled by
such a word in case it was not in use in his own district in his own
time. This, however, barely touches the fringe of the question. The
range of the hunt, as already given, was mostly within the boundaries,
so to say, of the portion of South Wales where we find Goidelic
inscriptions in the Ogam character of the fifth or sixth century;
and I am persuaded that the Goidelic language must have lived down to
the sixth or seventh century in the south and in the north of Wales
[121], a tract of Mid-Wales being then, probably, the only district
which can be assumed to have been completely Brythonic in point of
speech. In this very story, probably, such a name as Garth Grugyn is
but slightly modified from a Goidelic Gort Grucaind, 'the enclosure
of Grucand [122] or Grugan': compare Cúchulaind or Cúchulainn made in
Welsh into Cocholyn. But the capital instance in the story of Twrch
Trwyth as has already been indicated is that of Amanw, which I detect
also as Ammann (probably to be read Ammanu), in the Book of Llan Dâv
(or Liber Landavensis), p. 199: it is there borne by a lay witness to
a grant of land called Tir Dimuner, which would appear to have been in
what is now Monmouthshire. Interpreted as standing for in Banbh, 'the
Boar,' it would make a man's name of the same class as Ibleid, found
elsewhere in the same manuscript (pp. 178, 184), meaning evidently
i Bleid, now y Blaid, 'the Wolf.' But observe that the latter was
Welsh and the former Goidelic, which makes all the difference for our
story. The Goidel relating the story would say that a boar, banbh,
was killed on the mountain or hill of in Banbh or of 'the Boar';
and his Goidelic hearer could not fail to associate the place-name
with the appellative. But a Brython could hardly understand what the
words in Banbh meant, and certainly not after he had transformed them
into Ammanw, with the nb assimilated into mm, and the accent shifted
to the first syllable. It is needless to say that my remarks have no
meaning unless Goidelic was the original language of the tale.

In the summary I have given of the hunt, I omitted a number of proper
names of the men who fell at the different spots where the Twrch is
represented brought to bay. I wish now to return to them with the
question, why were their names inserted in the story at all? It may be
suspected that they also, or at any rate some of them, were intended to
explain place-names; but I must confess to having had little success
in identifying traces of them in the ordnance maps. Others, however,
may fare better, who have a better acquaintance with the districts
in point, and in that hope I append them in their order in the story:--

1. Arthur sends to the hunt on the banks of the Nevern, in
Pembrokeshire, his men, Eli and Trachmyr, Gwarthegyd son of Caw,
and Bedwyr; also Tri meib Cledyv Divwlch, 'three Sons of the Gapless
Sword.' The dogs are also mentioned: Drudwyn, Greid son of Eri's whelp,
led by Arthur himself; Glythmyr Ledewig's two dogs, led by Gwarthegyd
son of Caw; and Arthur's dog Cavall, led by Bedwyr.

2. Twrch Trwyth makes for Cwm Kerwyn in the Preselly Mountains, and
turns to bay, killing the following men, who are called Arthur's
four rhyswyr [123] or champions--Gwarthegyd son of Caw, Tarawg of
Allt Clwyd, Rheidwn son of Eli Atver, and Iscovan Hael.

3. He turns to bay a second time in Cwm Kerwyn, and kills Gwydre son
of Arthur, Garselid Wydel, Glew son of Yscawt, and Iscawyn son of
Bannon or Panon.

4. Next day he is overtaken in the same neighbourhood, and he kills
Glewlwyd Gavaelvawr's three men, Huandaw, Gogigwr, and Penn Pingon,
many of the men of the country also, and Gwlydyn Saer, one of Arthur's
chief architects.

5. Arthur overtakes the Twrch next in Peuliniauc (p. 512 above);
and the Twrch there kills Madawc son of Teithion, Gwyn son of Tringad
son of Neued, and Eiriawn Penlloran.

6. Twrch Trwyth next turns to bay at Aber Towy, 'Towy Mouth,' and
kills Cynlas son of Cynan, and Gwilenhin, king of France.

7. The next occasion of his killing any men whose names are given,
is when he reaches Llwch Ewin (p. 515), near which he killed Echel
Vordwyd-twll, Arwyli eil Gwydawg Gwyr, and many men and dogs besides.

8. Grugyn, one of the Twrch's offspring, goes to Garth Grugyn in
Keredigion with Eli and Trachmyr pursuing him; but what happened to
them we are not told in consequence of the omission mentioned above
(p. 515) as occurring in the manuscript.

9. Llwydawc at bay in an uncertain locality kills Rudvyw Rys [124]
and many others.

10. Llwydawc goes to Ystrad Yw, where he is met by the Men of Llydaw,
and he kills Hirpeissawc, king of Llydaw, also Llygatrud Emys and
Gwrbothu Hên, maternal uncles to Arthur.

By way of notes on these items, I would begin with the last by asking,
what is one to make of these Men of Llydaw? First of all, one notices
that their names are singular: thus Hirpeissawc, 'Long-coated or
Long-robed,' is a curious name for their king, as it sounds more
like an epithet than a name itself. Then Llygatrud (also Llysgatrud,
which I cannot understand, except as a scribal error) Emys is also
unusual: one would have rather expected Emys Lygatrud, 'Emys the
Red-eyed.' As it stands it looks as if it meant the 'Red-eyed One
of Emys.' Moreover Emys reminds one of the name of Emyr Llydaw, the
ancestor in Welsh hagiology of a number of Welsh saints. It looks as
if the redactor of the Red Book had mistaken an r for an s in copying
from a pre-Norman original. That he had to work on such a manuscript
is proved by the remaining instance, Gwrbothu Hên, 'G. the Ancient,'
in which we have undoubtedly a pre-Norman spelling of Gwrfodw: the
same redactor having failed to recognize the name, left it without
being converted into the spelling of his own school. In the Book
of Llan Dâv it will be found variously written Gurbodu, Guoruodu,
and Guruodu. Then the epithet hên, 'old or ancient,' reminds one of
such instances as Math Hên and Gofynion Hên, to be noticed a little
later in this chapter. Let us now direct the reader's attention for
a moment to the word Llydaw, in order to see whether that may not
suggest something. The etymology of it is contested, so one has to
infer its meaning, as well as one can, from the way in which it is
found used. Now it is the ordinary Welsh word for Brittany or Little
Britain, and in Irish it becomes Letha, which is found applied not
only to Armorica but also to Latium. Conversely one could not be
surprised if a Goidel, writing Latin, rendered his own Letha or the
Welsh Llydaw by Latium, even when no part of Italy was meant. Now it
so happens that Llydaw occurs in Wales itself, to wit in the name of
Llyn Llydaw, a Snowdonian lake already mentioned, p. 475. It is thus
described by Pennant, ii. 339:--'We found, on arriving at the top,
an hollow a mile in length, filled with Llyn Llydaw, a fine lake,
winding beneath the rocks, and vastly indented by rocky projections,
here and there jutting into it. In it was one little island, the
haunt of black-backed gulls, which breed here, and, alarmed by such
unexpected visitants, broke the silence of this sequestered place by
their deep screams.' But since Pennant's time mining operations [125]
have been carried on close to the margin of this lake; and in the
course of them the level of the water is said to have been lowered to
the extent of sixteen feet, when, in the year 1856, an ancient canoe
was discovered there. According to the late Mr. E. L. Barnwell, who
has described it in the Archæologia Cambrensis for 1874, pp. 150-1, it
was in the possession of Dr. Griffith Griffith of Tal y Treudyn, near
Harlech, who exhibited it at the Cambrian Archæological Association's
meeting at Machynlleth in 1866 [126]. 'It measures,' Mr. Barnwell
says, 'nine feet nine inches--a not uncommon length in the Scotch
early canoes,--and has been hollowed out of one piece of wood, as is
universally the case with these early boats.' He goes on to surmise
that 'this canoe may have been used to reach the island, for the sake
of birds or eggs; or what is not impossible, the island may have been
the residence of some one who had reasons for preferring so isolated
an abode. It may, in fact, have been a kind of small natural crannog,
and, in one sense, a veritable lake-dwelling, access to and from
which was easy by means of such a canoe.' Stokes conjectures Llydaw
to have meant coast-land, and Thurneysen connects it with the Sanskrit
prthivi and Old Saxon folda [127], 'earth': and, so far as I can see,
one is at liberty to assume a meaning that would satisfy Llydaw,
'Armorica,' and the Llydaw of Llyn Llydaw, 'the Lake of Llydaw,'
namely that it signified land which one had to reach by boat, so that
it was in fact applicable to a lake settlement of any kind, in other
words, that Llydaw on Snowdon was the name of the lake-dwelling. So I
cannot help suggesting, with great deference, that the place whence
came the Men of Llydaw in the story of the hunting of Twrch Trwyth
was the settlement in Syfadon lake (p. 73), and that the name of
that stronghold, whether it was a crannog or a stockaded islet, was
also Llydaw. For the power of that settlement over the surrounding
country to have extended a few miles around would be but natural to
suppose--the distance between the Yw and Llyn Syfadon is, I am told,
under three miles. Should this guess prove well founded, we should
have to scan with renewed care the allusions in our stories to Llydaw,
and not assume that they always refer us to Brittany.

That the name Llydaw did on occasion refer to the region of Llyn
Syfadon admits of indirect proof as follows:--The church of Llangorse
on its banks is dedicated to a Saint Paulinus, after whom also is
called Capel Peulin, in the upper course of the Towy, adjacent to the
Cardiganshire parish of Llandewi Brefi. Moreover, tradition makes
Paulinus attend a synod in 519 at Llandewi Brefi, where St. David
distinguished himself by his preaching against Pelagianism. Paulinus
was then an old man, and St. David had been one of his pupils at the
Ty Gwyn, 'Whitland,' on the Taf, where Paulinus had established a
religious house [128]; and some five miles up a tributary brook of
the Taf is the church of Llandysilio, where an ancient inscription
mentions a Paulinus. These two places, Whitland and Llandysilio, were
probably in the cymwd of Peuliniog, which is called after a Paulinus,
and through which we have just followed the hunt of Twrch Trwyth
(p. 512). Now the inscription to which I have referred reads [129],
with ligatures:--

                               CLVTORIGI
                              FILI PAVLINI
                              MARINILATIO

This probably means '(the Monument) of Clutorix, son of Paulinus from
Latium in the Marsh'; unless one ought rather to treat Marini as an
epithet to Paulini. In either case Latio has probably to be construed
'of or from Latium': compare a Roman inscription found at Bath
(Hübner's No. 48), which begins with C. Murrius. | C. F. Arniensis
| Foro. Iuli. Modestus [130], and makes in English, according to
Mr. Haverfield, 'Gaius Murrius Modestus, son of Gaius, of the tribe
Arniensis, of the town Forum Iulii.' The easiest way to explain the
last line as a whole is probably to treat it as a compound with the
qualifying word deriving its meaning, not from mare, 'the sea,' but
from the Late Latin mara, 'a marsh or bog.' Thus Marini-Latium would
mean 'Marshy Latium,' to distinguish it from Latium in Italy, and
from Letha or Llydaw in the sense of Brittany, which was analogously
termed in Medieval Irish Armuirc Letha [131], that is the Armorica
of Letha. This is borne out by the name of the church of Paulinus,
which is in Welsh Llan y Gors, anglicized Llangorse, 'the Church of the
Marsh or Bog,' and that is exactly the meaning of the name given it in
the Taxatio of Pope Nicholas, which is that of Ecclesia de Mara. In
other terms, we have in the qualified Latium of the inscription the
Latium or Letha which came to be called in Welsh Llydaw. It is, in
my opinion, from that settlement as their head quarters, that the
Men of Llydaw sallied forth to take part in the hunt in Ystrad Yw,
where the boar Llwydog was killed.

The idea that the story of Twrch Trwyth was more or less topographical
is not a new one. Lady Charlotte Guest, in her Mabinogion, ii. 363-5,
traces the hunt through several places called after Arthur, such
as Buarth Arthur, 'Arthur's Cattle-pen,' and Bwrd Arthur, 'Arthur's
Table,' besides others more miscellaneously named, such as Twyn y Moch,
'the Swine's Hill,' near the source of the Amman, and Llwyn y Moch,
'the Swine's Grove,' near the foot of the same eminence. But one of
the most remarkable statements in her note is the following:--'Another
singular coincidence may be traced between the name of a brook in
this neighbourhood, called Echel, and the Echel Fordwyttwll who
is recorded in the tale as having been slain at this period of the
chase.' I have been unable to discover any clue to a brook called
Echel, but one called Egel occurs in the right place; so I take
it that Lady Charlotte Guest's informants tacitly identified the
name with that of Echel. Substantially they were probably correct,
as the Egel, called Ecel in the dialect of the district, flows into
the upper Clydach, which in its turn falls into the Tawe near Pont
ar Dawe. As the next pool mentioned is Llwch Tawe, I presume it
was some water or other which drained into the Tawe in this same
neighbourhood. The relative positions of Llwch Ewin, the Egel,
and Llwch Tawe as indicated above offer no apparent difficulty. The
Goidelic name underlying that of Echel was probably some such a one
as Eccel or Ecell; and Ecell occurs, for instance, in the Book of the
Dun Cow, fo. 80b, as the name of a noble or prince. In rendering this
name into Welsh as Echel, due regard was had for the etymological
equivalence of Goidelic cc or c to Welsh ch, but the unbroken oral
tradition of a people changing its language by degrees from Goidelic
to Welsh was subject to no such influence, especially in the matter of
local names; so the one here in question passed into Welsh as Eccel,
liable only to be modified into Egel. In any case, one may assume that
the death of the hero Echel was introduced to account for the name
of the brook Egel. Indications of something similar in the linguistic
sense occur in the part of the narrative relating the death of Grugyn,
at Garth Grugyn. This boar is pursued by two huntsmen called Eli and
Trachmyr, the name of the former of whom reminds one of Garth Eli,
in the parish of Llandewi Brefi. Possibly the original story located
at Garth Eli the death of Eli, or some other incident in which Grugyn
was concerned; but the difficulty here is that the exact position of
Garth Grugyn is still uncertain.

Lastly, our information as to the hunting of Twrch Trwyth is not
exclusively derived from the Kulhwch, for besides an extremely
obscure poem about the Twrch in the Book of Aneurin, a manuscript
of the thirteenth century, we have one item given in the Mirabilia
associated with the Historia Brittonum of Nennius, § 73, and this
carries us back to the eighth century. It reads as follows:--

Est aliud mirabile in regione quæ dicitur Buelt. Est ibi cumulus
lapidum, et unus lapis superpositus super congestum, cum vestigio
canis in eo. Quando venatus est porcum Troit, impressit Cabal, qui
erat canis Arthuri militis, vestigium in lapide, et Arthur postea
congregavit congestum lapidum sub lapide in quo erat vestigium canis
sui, et vocatur Carn Cabal. Et veniunt homines et tollunt lapidem in
manibus suis per spacium diei et noctis, et in crastino die invenitur
super congestum suum.

'Another wonder there is in the district called Buallt: there is there
a heap of stones, and one stone is placed on the top of the pile with
the footmark of a dog in it. Cafall, the dog of the warrior Arthur,
when chasing the pig Trwyd printed the mark of his foot on it, and
Arthur afterwards collected a heap of stones underneath the stone
in which was the footmark of his dog, and it is called Cafall's
Cairn. And men come and take the stone away in their hands for the
space of a day and a night, and on the following day the stone is
found on the top of its heap [132].'

Lady Charlotte Guest, in a note to the Kulhwch story in her Mabinogion,
ii. 360, appears to have been astonished to find that Carn Cavall,
as she writes it, was no fabulous mound but an actual 'mountain in
the district of Builth, to the south of Rhayader Gwy, and within
sight of that town.' She went so far as to persuade one of her
friends to visit the summit, and he begins his account of it to her
with the words: 'Carn Cavall, or as it is generally pronounced Corn
Cavall, is a lofty and rugged mountain.' On one of the cairns on the
mountain he discovered what may have been the very stone to which
the Mirabilia story refers; but the sketch with which he accompanied
his communication cannot be said to be convincing, and he must have
been drawing on his imagination when he spoke of this somewhat high
hill as a lofty mountain. Moreover his account of its name only
goes just far enough to be misleading: the name as pronounced in the
neighbourhood of Rhayader is Corn Gafallt by Welsh-speaking people,
and Corn Gavalt by monoglot Englishmen. So it is probable that at
one time the pronunciation was Carn Gavall [133]. But to return to
the incident recorded by Nennius, one has to remark that it does
not occur in the Kulhwch; nor, seeing the position of the hill,
can it have been visited by Arthur or his dog in the course of the
Twrch Trwyth hunt as described by the redactor of the story in its
present form. This suggests the reflection not only that the Twrch
story is very old, but that it was put together by selecting certain
incidents out of an indefinite number, which, taken all together,
would probably have formed a network covering the whole of South Wales
as far north as the boundary of the portion of Mid-Wales occupied by
the Brythons before the Roman occupation. In other words, the Goidels
of this country had stories current among them to explain the names
of the places with which they were familiar; and it is known that was
the case with the Goidels of Ireland. Witness the place-name legends
known in Medieval Irish as Dindsenchas, with which the old literature
of Ireland abounds. On what principle the narrator of the Kulhwch
made his selection from the repertoire I cannot say; but one cannot
help seeing that he takes little interest in the details, and that he
shows still less insight into the etymological motif of the incidents
which he mentions. However, this should be laid mainly to the charge,
perhaps, of the early medieval redactor.

Among the reasons which have been suggested for the latter overlooking
and effacing the play on the place-names, I have hinted that he did
not always understand them, as they sometimes involved a language
which may not have been his. This raises the question of translation:
if the story was originally in Goidelic, what was the process by which
it passed into Brythonic? Two answers suggest themselves, and the first
comes to this: if the story was in writing, we may suppose a literary
man to have sat down to translate it word for word from Goidelic to
Brythonic, or else to adapt it in a looser fashion. In either case,
one should suppose him a master of both languages, and capable of doing
justice to the play on the place-names. But it is readily conceivable
that the fact of his understanding both languages might lead him to
miscalculate what was exactly necessary to enable a monoglot Brython
to grasp his meaning clearly. Moreover, if the translator had ideas
of his own as to style, he might object on principle to anything like
an explanation of words being interpolated in the narrative. In short,
one could see several loopholes through which a little confusion might
force itself in, and prevent the monoglot reader or hearer of the
translation from correctly grasping the story at all points as it was
in the original. The other view, and the more natural one, as I think,
is that we should postulate the interference of no special translator,
but suppose the story, or rather a congeries of stories, to have been
current among the natives of a certain part of South Wales, say the
Loughor Valley, at a time when their language was still Goidelic, and
that, as they gradually gave up Goidelic and adopted Brythonic, they
retained their stories and translated the narrative, while they did not
always translate the place-names occurring in that narrative. Thus,
for instance, would arise the discrepancy between banw and Amanw,
the latter of which to be Welsh should have been rendered y Banw,
'the Boar.' If this is approximately what took place, it is easy to
conceive the possibility of many points of nicety being completely
effaced in the course of such a rough process of transformation. In one
or two small matters it happens that we can contrast the community as
translator with the literary individual at work: I allude to the word
Trwyth. That vocable was not translated, not metaphoned, if I may so
term it, at all at the time: it passed, when it was still Treth-i, from
Goidelic into Brythonic, and continued in use without a break; for the
changes whereby Treth-i has become Trwyth have been such as other words
have undergone in the course of ages, as already stated. On the other
hand, the literary man who knew something of the two languages seems
to have reasoned, that where a Goidelic th occurred between vowels,
the correct etymological equivalent in Brythonic was t, subject to be
mutated to d. So when he took the name over he metaphoned Treth-i into
Tret-i, whence we have the Porcus Troit of Nennius, and Twrch Trwyd
[134] in Welsh poetry: these Troit and Trwyd were the literary forms
as contrasted with the popular Trwyth. Now, if my surmises as to Echel
and Egel are near the truth, their history must be similar; that is to
say, Echel would be the literary form and Ecel, Egel the popular one
respectively of the Goidelic Ecell. A third parallel offers itself
in the case of the personal name Arwyli, borne by one of Echel's
companions: the Arwyl of that name has its etymological equivalent
in the Arwystl- of Arwystli, the name of a district comprising the
eastern slopes of Plinlimmon, and represented now by the Deanery of
Arwystli. So Arwystli challenges comparison with the Irish Airgialla
or Airgéill, anglicized Oriel, which denotes, roughly speaking, the
modern counties of Armagh, Louth, and Monaghan. For here we have the
same prefix ar placed in front of one and the same vocable, which in
Welsh is gwystl, 'a hostage,' and in Irish giall, of the same meaning
and origin. The reader will at once think of the same word in German
as geisel, 'a hostage,' Old High German gisal. But the divergence
of sound between Arwystl-i and Arwyl-i arises out of the difference
of treatment of sl in Welsh and Irish. In the Brythonic district
of Mid-Wales we have Arwystli with sl treated in the Brythonic way,
while in Arwyli we have the combination treated in the Goidelic way,
the result being left standing when the speakers of Goidelic in South
Wales learnt Brythonic [135].

Careful observation may be expected to add to the number of these
instructive instances. It is, however, not to be supposed that all
double forms of the names in these stories are to be explained in
exactly the same way. Thus, for instance, corresponding to Lug,
genitive Loga, we have the two forms Lleu and Llew, of which the
former alone matches the Irish. But it is to be observed that Lleu
remains in some verses [136] in the story of Math, whereas in the
prose he appears to be called Llew. It is not improbable that the
editing which introduced Llew dates comparatively late, and that it
was done by a man who was not familiar with the Venedotian place-names
of which Lleu formed part, namely, Dinlleu and Nantlleu, now Dinlle
and Nantlle. Similarly the two brothers, Gofannon and Amaethon, as
they are called in the Mabinogi of Math and in the Kulhwch story, are
found also called Gofynyon and Amathaon. The former agrees with the
Irish form Goibniu, genitive Goibnenn, whereas Gofannon does not. As
to Amaethon or Amathaon the Irish counterpart has, unfortunately,
not been identified. Gofannon and Amaethon have the appearance of
being etymologically transparent in Welsh, and they have probably been
remodelled by the hand of a literary redactor. There were also two
forms of the name of Manawydan in Welsh; for by the side of that there
was another, namely, Manawydan, liable to be shortened to Manawyd:
both occur in old Welsh poetry [137]. But manawyd or mynawyd is the
Welsh word for an awl, which is significant here, as the Mabinogi
called after Manawydan makes him become a shoemaker on two occasions,
whence the Triads style him one of the Three golden Shoemakers of
the Isle of Prydain: see the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 308.

What has happened in the way of linguistic change in one of our
stories, the Kulhwch, may have happened in others, say in the
four branches of the Mabinogi, namely, Pwyll, prince of Dyved;
Branwen, daughter of Llyr; Math, son of Mathonwy; and Manawydan,
son of Llyr. Some time ago I endeavoured to show that the principal
characters in the Mabinogi of Math, namely, the sons and daughters
of Dôn, are to be identified as a group with the Tuatha Dé Danann,
'Tribes of the Goddess Danu or Donu,' of Irish legend. I called
attention to the identity of our Welsh Dôn with the Irish Donu,
genitive Donann, Gofynion or Gofannon with Goibniu, genitive Goibnenn,
and of Lleu or Llew with Lug. Since then Professor Zimmer has gone
further, and suggested that the Mabinogion are of Irish origin; but
that I cannot quite admit. They are of Goidelic origin, but they do
not come from the Irish or the Goidels of Ireland: they come rather,
as I think, from this country's Goidels, who never migrated to the
sister island, but remained here eventually to adopt Brythonic
speech. There is no objection, however, so far as this argument
is concerned, to their being regarded as this country's Goidels
descended either from native Goidels or from early Goidelic invaders
from Ireland, or else partly from the one origin and partly from the
other. This last is perhaps the safest view to accept as a working
hypothesis. Now Professor Zimmer fixes on that of Mathonwy, among
other names, as probably the Welsh adaptation of some such an Irish
name as the genitive Mathgamnai [138], now anglicized Mahony. This
I am also prepared to accept in the sense that the Welsh form is a
loan from a Goidelic one current some time or other in this country,
and represented in Irish by Mathgamnai. The preservation of Goidelic
th in Mathonwy stamps it as ranking with Trwyth, Egel, and Arwyli,
as contrasted with a form etymologically more correct, of which we
seem to have an echo in the Breton names Madganoe and Madgone [139].

Another name which I am inclined to regard as brought in from Goidelic
is that of Gilvaethwy, son of Dôn: it would seem to involve some
such a word as the Irish gilla, 'a youth, an attendant or servant,'
and some form of the Goidelic name Maughteus or Mochta, so that the
name Gilla-mochtai meant the attendant of Mochta. This last vocable
appears in Irish as the name of several saints, but previously it
was probably that of some pagan god of the Goidels, and its meaning
was most likely the same as that of the Irish participial mochta,
which Stokes explains as 'magnified, glorified': see his Calendar of
Oengus, p. ccxiv, and compare the name Mael-mochta. Adamnan, in his
Vita S. Columbæ, writes the name Maucteus in the following passage,
pref. ii. p. 6:--

Nam quidam proselytus Brito, homo sanctus, sancti Patricii episcopi
discipulus, Maucteus nomine, ita de nostro prophetizavit Patrono,
sicuti nobis ab antiquis traditum expertis compertum habetur.

This saint, who is said to have prophesied of St. Columba and died in
the year 534, is described in his Life (Aug. 19) as ortus ex Britannia
[140], which, coupled with Adamnan's Brito, probably refers him
to Wales; but it is remarkable that nevertheless he bore the very
un-Brythonic name of Mochta or Mauchta [141].

To return to the Mabinogion: I have long been inclined to identify
Llwyd, son of Kilcoed, with the Irish Liath, son of Celtchar, of
Cualu in the present county of Wicklow. Liath, whose name means
'grey,' is described as the comeliest youth of noble rank among
the fairies of Erin; and the only time the Welsh Llwyd, whose name
also means 'grey,' appears in the Mabinogion he is ascribed, not
the comeliest figure, it is true, or the greatest personal beauty,
but the most imposing disguise of a bishop attended by his suite: he
was a great magician. The name of his father, Kil-coet, seems to me
merely an inexact popular rendering of Celtchar, the name of Liath's
father: at any rate one fails here to detect the touch of the skilled
translator or literary redactor. [142] But the Mabinogi of Manawydan,
in which Llwyd figures, is also the one in which Pryderi king of
Dyfed's wife is called Kicua or Cigfa, a name which has no claim to
be regarded as Brythonic. It occurs early, however, in the legendary
history of Ireland: the Four Masters, under the year A.M. 2520,
mention a Ciocbha as wife of a son of Parthalon; and the name seems
to be related to that of a man called Cioccal, A.M. 2530. Lastly,
Manawydan, from whom the Mabinogi takes its name, is called mab Llyr,
'son of Llyr,' in Welsh, and Manannán mac Lir in Irish. Similarly
with his brother Brân, and his sister Branwen, except that she has not
been identified in Irish story. But in Irish literature the genitive
Lir, as in mac Lir, 'son of Ler,' is so common, and the nominative so
rare, that Lir came to be treated in late Irish as the nominative too;
but a genitive of the form Lir suggests a nominative-accusative Ler,
and as a matter of fact it occurs, for instance, in the couplet:--

        Fer co n-ilur gnim dar ler
        Labraid Luath Lam ar Claideb [143].

        A man of many feats beyond sea,
        Labraid swift of Hand on Sword is he.

So it seems probable that the Welsh Llyr [144] is no other word than
the Goidelic genitive Lir, retained in use with its pronunciation
modified according to the habits of the Welsh language; and in that
case [145] it forms comprehensive evidence, that the stories about
the Llyr family in Welsh legend were Goidelic before they put on a
Brythonic garb.

As to the Mabinogion generally, one may say that they are devoted
to the fortunes chiefly of three powerful houses or groups, the
children of Dôn, the children of Llyr, and Pwyll's family. This last is
brought into contact with the Llyr group, which takes practically the
position of superiority. Pwyll's family belonged chiefly to Dyfed;
but the power and influence of the sons of Llyr had a far wider
range: we find them in Anglesey, at Harlech, in Gwales or the Isle
of Grasholm off Pembrokeshire, at Aber Henvelen somewhere south of
the Severn Sea, and in Ireland. But the expedition to Ireland under
Brân, usually called Bendigeituran, 'Brân [146] the Blessed,' proved
so disastrous that the Llyr group, as a whole, disappears, making
way for the children of Dôn. These last came into collision with
Pwyll's son, Pryderi, in whose country Manawydan, son of Llyr, had
ended his days. Pryderi, in consequence of Gwydion's deceit (pp. 69,
501, 525), makes war on Math and the children of Dôn: he falls in it,
and his army gives hostages to Math. Thus after the disappearance of
the sons of Llyr, the children of Dôn are found in power in their
stead in North Wales [147], and that state of things corresponds
closely enough to the relation between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the
Lir family in Irish legend. There Lir and his family are reckoned in
the number of the Tuatha Dé Danann, but within that community Lir
was so powerful that it was considered but natural that he should
resent a rival candidate being elected king in preference to him. So
the Tuatha Dé took pains to conciliate Lir, as did also their king,
who gave his daughter to Lir to wife, and when she died he gave
him another of his daughters [148]; and with the treatment of her
stepchildren by that deceased wife's sister begins one of the three
Sorrowful Tales of Erin, known to English readers as the Fate of the
Children of Lir. But the reader should observe the relative position:
the Tuatha Dé remain in power, while the children of Lir belong to
the past, which is also the sequence in the Mabinogion. Possibly this
is not to be considered as having any significance, but it is to be
borne in mind that the Lir-Llyr group is strikingly elemental in its
patronymic Lir, Llyr. The nominative, as already stated, was ler,
'sea,' and so Cormac renders mac Lir by filius maris. How far we may
venture to consider the sea to have been personified in this context,
and how early, it is impossible to say. In any case it is deserving
of notice that one group of Goidels to this day do not say mac Lir,
'son of Lir,' filium maris, but always 'son of the lir': I allude to
the Gaels of the Isle of Man, in whose language Manannán mac Lir is
always Mannanan mac y Lir, or as they spell it, Lear; that is to say
'Mannanan, son of the ler.' Manxmen have been used to consider Manannan
their eponymous hero, and first king of their island: they call him
more familiarly Mannanan beg mac y Lear, 'Little Mannanan, son of
the ler'. This we may, though no Manxman of the present day attaches
any meaning to the word lir or lear, interpreted as 'Little Mannanan,
son of the Sea.' The wanderings at large of the children of Lir before
being eclipsed by the Danann-Dôn group, remind one of the story of
the labours of Hercules, where it relates that hero's adventures on
his return from robbing Geryon of his cattle. Pomponius Mela, ii. 5
(p. 50), makes Hercules on that journey fight in the neighbourhood
of Aries with two sons of Poseidon or Neptune, whom he calls (in
the accusative) Albiona and Bergyon. To us, with our more adequate
knowledge of geography, the locality and the men cannot appear the most
congruous, but there can hardly be any mistake as to the two personal
names being echoes of those of Albion and Iverion, Britain and Ireland.

The whole cycle of the Mabinogion must have appeared strange to the
story-teller and the poet of medieval Wales, and far removed from the
world in which they lived. We have possibly a trace of this feeling
in the epithet hên, 'old, ancient,' given to Math in a poem in the
Red Book of Hergest, where we meet with the line [149]:--

        Gan uath hen gan gouannon.

        With Math the ancient, with Gofannon.

Similarly in the confused list of heroes which the story-teller of
the Kulhwch (Mabinogion, p. 108) was able to put together, we seem to
have Gofannon, Math's relative, referred to under the designation of
Gouynyon Hen, 'Gofynion the Ancient.' To these might be added others,
such as Gwrbothu Hên, mentioned above, p. 531, and from another
source Lleu Hen [150], 'Llew the Ancient.' So strange, probably, and
so obscure did some of the contents of the stories themselves seem to
the story-tellers, that they may be now and then suspected of having
effaced some of the features which it would have interested us to find
preserved. This state of things brings back to my mind words of Matthew
Arnold's, to which I had the pleasure of listening more years ago than
I care to remember. He was lecturing at Oxford on Celtic literature,
and observing 'how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging
an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is
like a peasant,' Matthew Arnold went on to say, 'building his hut on
the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds
is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by
a glimmering tradition merely--stones "not of this building," but of
an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the
mediæval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as
in those of the Welsh.' This becomes intelligible only on the theory of
the stories having been in Goidelic before they put on a Welsh dress.

When saying that the Mabinogion and some of the stories contained
in the Kulhwch, such as the Hunting of Twrch Trwyth, were Goidelic
before they became Brythonic, I wish to be understood to use the
word Goidelic in a qualified sense. For till the Brythons came, the
Goidels were, I take it, the ruling race in most of the southern
half of Britain, with the natives as their subjects, except in so
far as that statement has to be limited by the fact, that we do not
know how far they and the natives had been amalgamating together. In
any case, the hostile advent of another race, the Brythons, would
probably tend to hasten the process of amalgamation. That being
so, the stories which I have loosely called Goidelic may have been
largely aboriginal in point of origin, and by that I mean native,
pre-Celtic and non-Aryan. It comes to this, then: we cannot say for
certain whose creation Brân, for instance, should be considered to
have been--that of Goidels or of non-Aryan natives. He sat, as the
Mabinogi of Branwen describes him, on the rock of Harlech, a figure
too colossal for any house to contain or any ship to carry. This would
seem to challenge comparison with Cernunnos, the squatting god of
ancient Gaul, around whom the other gods appear as mere striplings,
as proved by the monumental representations in point. In these [151]
he sometimes appears antlered like a stag; sometimes he is provided
either with three normal heads or with one head furnished with three
faces; and sometimes he is reduced to a head provided with no body,
which reminds one of Brân, who, when he had been rid of his body in
consequence of a poisoned wound inflicted on him in his foot in the
slaughter of the Meal-bag Pavilion, was reduced to the Urdawl Ben,
'Venerable or Dignified Head,' mentioned in the Mabinogi of Branwen
[152]. The Mabinogi goes on to relate how Brân's companions began to
enjoy, subject to certain conditions, his 'Venerable Head's' society,
which involved banquets of a fabulous duration and of a nature not
readily to be surpassed by those around the Holy Grail. In fact here
we have beyond all doubt one of the heathen originals of which the
Grail is a Christian version. But the multiplicity of faces or heads
of the Gaulish divinity find their analogues in a direction hitherto
unnoticed as far as I know, namely, among the Letto-Slavic peoples
of the Baltic sea-board. Thus the image of Svatovit in the island of
Rügen is said to have had four faces [153]; and the life of Otto of
Bamberg relates [154] how that high-handed evangelist proceeded to
convert the ancient Prussians to Christianity. Among other things
we are told how he found at Stettin an idol called Triglaus, a word
referring to the three heads for which the god was remarkable. The
saint took possession of the image and hewed away the body, reserving
for himself the three heads, which are represented adhering together,
forming one piece. This he sent as a trophy to Rome, and in Rome it
may be still. Were it perchance to be found, it might be expected to
show a close resemblance to the tricephal of the Gaulish altar found
at Beaune in Burgundy.

Before closing this chapter a word may be permitted as to the Goidelic
element in the history of Wales: it will come again before the reader
in a later chapter, but what has already been advanced or implied
concerning it may here be recapitulated as follows:--

It has been suggested that the hereditary dislike of the Brython for
the Goidel argues their having formerly lived in close proximity to
one another: see p. 473 above.

The tradition that the cave treasures of the Snowdon district belong
by right to the Goidels, means that they were formerly supposed
to have hidden them away when hard pressed by the Brythons: see
pp. 471-2 above.

The sundry instances of a pair of names for a single person or place,
one Goidelic (Brythonicized) still in use, and the other Brythonic
(suggested by the Goidelic one), literary mostly and obsolete, go to
prove that the Goidels were not expelled, but allowed to remain to
adopt Brythonic speech.

Evidence of the indebtedness of story-tellers in Wales to their
brethren of the same profession in Ireland is comparatively scarce; and
almost in every instance of recent research establishing a connexion
between topics or incidents in the Arthurian romances and the native
literature of Ireland, the direct contact may be assumed to have been
with the folklore and legend of the Goidelic inhabitants of Wales,
whether before or after their change of language.

Probably the folklore and mythology of the Goidels of Wales and of
Ireland were in the mass much the same, though in some instances they
reach us in different stages of development: thus in such a case as
that of Dôn and Danu (genitive Danann) the Welsh allusions in point
refer to Dôn at a conspicuously earlier stage of her rôle than that
represented by the Irish literature touching the Tuatha Dé Danann
[155].

The common point of view from which our ancestors liked to look at
the scenery around them is well illustrated by the fondness of the
Goidel, in Wales and Ireland alike, for incidents to explain his
place-names. He required the topography--indeed he requires it still,
and hence the activity of the local etymologist--to connote story or
history: he must have something that will impart the cold light of
physical nature, river and lake, moor and mountain, a warmer tint,
a dash of the pathetic element, a touch of the human, borrowed from
the light and shade of the world of imagination and fancy in which
he lives and dreams.

CHAPTER X

DIFFICULTIES OF THE FOLKLORIST

                    For priests, with prayers and other godly gear,
                    Have made the merry goblins disappear;
                    And, where they played their merry pranks before,
                    Have sprinkled holy water on the floor.--Dryden.

The attitude of the Kymry towards folklore and popular superstitions
varies according to their training and religious views; and I
distinguish two classes of them in this respect. First of all,
there are those who appear to regret the ebb of the tide of ancient
beliefs. They maintain that people must have been far more interesting
when they believed in the fairies; and they rave against Sunday schools
and all other schools for having undermined the ancient superstitions
of the peasantry: it all comes, they say, of over-educating the
working classes. Of course one may occasionally wish servant maids
still believed that they might get presents from the fairies for being
neat and tidy; and that, in the contrary case of their being sluts,
they would be pinched black and blue during their sleep by the little
people: there may have been some utility in beliefs of that kind. But,
if one takes an impartial view of the surroundings in which this
kind of mental condition was possible, no sane man could say that
the superstitious beliefs of our ancestors conduced on the whole to
their happiness. Fancy a state of mind in which this sort of thing is
possible:--A member of the family is absent, let us say, from home
in the evening an hour later than usual, and the whole household is
thrown into a panic because they imagine that he has strayed on fairy
ground, and has been spirited away to the land of fairy twilight,
whence he may never return; or at any rate only to visit his home
years, or maybe ages, afterwards, and then only to fall into a heap
of dust just as he has found out that nobody expects or even knows
him. Or take another instance:--A man sets out in the morning on an
important journey, but he happens to sneeze, or he sees an ill-omened
bird, or some other dreaded creature, crossing his path: he expects
nothing that day but misfortune, and the feeling of alarm possibly
makes him turn back home, allowing the object of his journey to be
sacrificed. That was not a satisfactory state of things or a happy one,
and the unhappiness might be wholly produced by causes over which the
patient had absolutely no control, so long at any rate as the birds
of the air have wings, and so long as sneezing does not belong to
the category of voluntary actions. Then I might point to the terrors
of magic; but I take it to be unnecessary to dwell on such things,
as most people have heard about them or read of them in books. On
the whole it is but charitable to suppose that those who regret the
passing away of the ages of belief and credulity have not seriously
attempted to analyse the notions which they are pleased to cherish.

Now, as to the other class of people, namely, those who object to
folklore in every shape and form, they may be roughly distinguished
into different groups, such as those to whom folklore is an
abomination, because they hold that it is opposed to the Bible, and
those who regard it as too trivial to demand the attention of any
serious person. I have no occasion for many words with the former,
since nearly everything that is harmful in popular superstition has
ceased in Wales to be a living force influencing one's conduct; or if
this be not already the case, it is fast becoming so. Those therefore
who condemn superstitions have really no reason to set their faces
against the student of folklore: it would be just as if historians were
to be boycotted because they have, in writing history--frequently,
the more the pity--to deal with dark intrigues, cruel murders, and
sanguinary wars. Besides, those who study folklore do not thereby
help to strengthen the hold of superstition on the people. I have
noticed that any local peculiarity of fashion, the moment it becomes
known to attract the attention of strangers, is, one may say, doomed:
a Celt, like anybody else, does not like to be photographed in a light
which may perchance show him at a disadvantage. It is much the same,
I think, with him as the subject of the studies of the folklorist:
hence the latter has to proceed with his work very quietly and very
warily. If, then, I pretended to be a folklorist, which I can hardly
claim to be, I should say that I had absolutely no quarrel with him
who condemns superstition on principle. On the other hand, I should
not consider it fair of him to regard me as opposed to the progress
of the race in happiness and civilization, just because I am curious
to understand its history.

With regard to him, however, who looks at the collecting and
the studying of folklore as trivial work and a waste of time,
I should gather that he regards it so on account, first perhaps,
of his forgetting the reality their superstitions were to those
who believed in them; and secondly, on account of his ignorance
of their meaning. As a reality to those who believed in them,
the superstitions of our ancestors form an integral part of their
history. However, I need not follow that topic further by trying to
show how 'the proper study of mankind is man,' and how it is a mark of
an uncultured people not to know or care to know about the history of
the race. So the ancient Roman historian, Tacitus, evidently thought;
for, when complaining how little was known as to the original peopling
of Britain, he adds the suggestive words ut inter barbaros, 'as usual
among barbarians.' Conversely, I take it for granted that no liberally
educated man or woman of the present day requires to be instructed
as to the value of the study of history in all its aspects, or to be
told that folklore cannot be justly called trivial, seeing that it
has to do with the history of the race--in a wider sense, I may say
with the history of the human mind and the record of its development.

As history has been mentioned, it may be here pointed out that one
of the greatest of the folklorist's difficulties is that of drawing
the line between story and history. Nor is that the worst of it; for
the question as between fact and fiction, hard as it is in itself,
is apt to be further complicated by questions of ethnology. This
may be illustrated by reference to a group of legends which project
a vanishing distinction between the two kindred races of Brythons
and Goidels in Wales; and into the story of some of them Arthur is
introduced playing a principal rôle. They seem to point to a time
when the Goidels had as yet wholly lost neither their own language
nor their own institutions in North Wales: for the legends belong
chiefly to Gwyned, and cluster especially around Snowdon, where the
characteristics of the Goidel as the earlier Celt may well have
lingered latest, thanks to the comparatively inaccessible nature
of the country. One of these legends has already been summarized as
representing Arthur marching up the side of Snowdon towards Bwlch y
Saethau, where he falls and is buried under a cairn named from him
Carned Arthur: see p. 473. We are not told who his enemies were;
but with this question has usually been associated the late Triad,
iii. 20, which alludes to Arthur meeting in Nanhwynain with Medrawd
or Medrod (Modred) and Idawc Corn Prydain, and to his being betrayed,
for the benefit and security of the Saxons in the island. An earlier
reference to the same story occurs in the Dream of Rhonabwy in the
Red Book of Hergest [156], in which Idawc describes himself as Idawc
son of Mynio, and as nicknamed Idawc Cord Prydain--which means 'Idawc
the Churn-staff of Prydain'--in reference presumably to his activity
in creating dissension. He confesses to having falsified the friendly
messages of Arthur to Medrod, and to succeeding thereby in bringing
on the fatal battle of Camlan, from which Idawc himself escaped to
do penance for seven years on the Llech Las, 'Grey Stone [157],'
in Prydain or Pictland.

Another story brings Arthur and the giant Rhita into collision, the
latter of whom has already been mentioned as having, according to
local tradition, his grave on the top of Snowdon: see pp. 474-9. The
story is a very wild one. Two kings who were brothers, Nyniaw or Nynio
and Peibiaw or Peibio, quarrelled thus: one moonlight night, as they
were together in the open air, Nynio said to Peibio, 'See, what a
fine extensive field I possess.' 'Where is it?' asked Peibio. 'There
it is,' said Nynio, 'the whole firmament.' 'See,' said Peibio,
'what innumerable herds of cattle and sheep I have grazing in thy
field.' 'Where are they?' asked Nynio. 'There they are,' said Peibio,
'the whole host of stars that thou seest, each of golden brightness,