Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx (Volume 2 of 2)

CELTIC FOLKLORE

J. RHŶS

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK

CELTIC FOLKLORE

WELSH AND MANX

BY
JOHN RHŶS, M.A., D.Litt.
HON. LL.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
PROFESSOR OF CELTIC
PRINCIPAL OF JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD

VOLUME II
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
MDCCCCI

Oxford
PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
BY HORACE HART, M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

CHAPTER VII

Triumphs of the Water-world

Une des légendes les plus répandues en Bretagne est celle d’une prétendue ville d’Is, qui, à une époque inconnue, aurait été engloutie par la mer. On montre, à divers endroits de la côte, l’emplacement de cette cité fabuleuse, et les pécheurs vous en font d’étranges récits. Les jours de tempête, assurent-ils, on voit, dans les creux des vagues, le sommet des flèches de ses églises; les jours de calme, on entend monter de l’abîme le son de ses cloches, modulant l’hymne du jour.—Renan.

More than once in the last chapter was the subject of submersions and cataclysms brought before the reader, and it may be convenient to enumerate here the most remarkable cases, and to add one or two to their number, as well as to dwell at somewhat greater length on some instances which may be said to have found their way into Welsh literature. He has already been told of the outburst of the Glasfryn Lake (p. 367) and Ffynnon Gywer (p. 376), of Ỻyn Ỻech Owen (p. 379) and the Crymlyn (p. 191), also of the drowning of Cantre’r Gwaelod (p. 383); not to mention that one of my informants had something to say (p. 219) of the submergence of Caer Arianrhod, a rock now visible only at low water between Celynnog Fawr and Dinas Dinỻe, on the coast of Arfon. But, to put it briefly, it is an ancient belief in the Principality that its lakes generally have swallowed up habitations of men, as in the case of Ỻyn Syfađon (p. 73) and the Pool of Corwrion (p. 57). To these I now proceed to add other instances, to wit those of Bala Lake, Kenfig Pool, Ỻynclys, and Helig ab Glannog’s territory including Traeth Lafan.

Perhaps it is best to begin with historical events, namely those implied in the encroachment of the sea and the sand on the coast of Glamorganshire, from the Mumbles, in Gower, to the mouth of the Ogmore, below Bridgend. It is believed that formerly the shores of Swansea Bay were from three to five miles further out than the present strand, and the oyster dredgers point to that part of the bay which they call the Green Grounds, while trawlers, hovering over these sunken meadows of the Grove Island, declare that they can sometimes see the foundations of the ancient homesteads overwhelmed by a terrific storm which raged some three centuries ago. The old people sometimes talk of an extensive forest called Coed Arian, ‘Silver Wood,’ stretching from the foreshore of the Mumbles to Kenfig Burrows, and there is a tradition of a long-lost bridle path used by many generations of Mansels, Mowbrays, and Talbots, from Penrice Castle to Margam Abbey. All this is said to be corroborated by the fishing up every now and then in Swansea Bay of stags’ antlers, elks’ horns, those of the wild ox, and wild boars’ tusks, together with the remains of other ancient tenants of the submerged forest. Various references in the registers of Swansea and Aberavon mark successive stages in the advance of the desolation from the latter part of the fifteenth century down. Among others a great sandstorm is mentioned, which overwhelmed the borough of Cynffig or Kenfig, and encroached on the coast generally: the series of catastrophes seems to have culminated in an inundation caused by a terrible tidal wave in the early part of the year 1607[1].

To return to Kenfig, what remains of that old town is near the sea, and it is on all sides surrounded by hillocks of finely powdered sand and flanked by ridges of the same fringing the coast. The ruins of several old buildings half buried in the sand peep out of the ground, and in the immediate neighbourhood is Kenfig Pool, which is said to have a circumference of nearly two miles. When the pool formed itself I have not been able to discover: from such accounts as have come in my way I should gather that it is older than the growing spread of the sand, but the island now to be seen in it is artificial and of modern make[2]. The story relating to the lake is given as follows in the volume of the Iolo Manuscripts, p. 194, and the original, from which I translate, is crisp, compressed, and, as I fancy, in Iolo’s own words:—

‘A plebeian was in love with Earl Clare’s daughter: she would not have him as he was not wealthy. He took to the highway, and watched the agent of the lord of the dominion coming towards the castle from collecting his lord’s money. He killed him, took the money, and produced the coin, and the lady married him. A splendid banquet was held: the best men of the country were invited, and they made as merry as possible. On the second night the marriage was consummated, and when happiest one heard a voice: all ear one listened and caught the words, “Vengeance comes, vengeance comes, vengeance comes,” three times. One asked, “When?” “In the ninth generation (âch),” said the voice. “No reason for us to fear,” said the married pair; “we shall be under the mould long before.” They lived on, however, and a goresgynnyđ, that is to say, a descendant of the sixth direct generation, was born to them, also to the murdered man a goresgynnyđ, who, seeing that the time fixed was come, visited Kenfig. This was a discreet youth of gentle manners, and he looked at the city and its splendour, and noted that nobody owned a furrow or a chamber there except the offspring of the murderer: he and his wife were still living. At cockcrow he heard a cry, “Vengeance is come, is come, is come.” It is asked, “On whom?” and answered, “On him who murdered my father of the ninth âch.” He rises in terror: he goes towards the city; but there is nothing to see save a large lake with three chimney tops above the surface emitting smoke that formed a stinking ….[3] On the face of the waters the gloves of the murdered man float to the young man’s feet: he picks them up, and sees on them the murdered man’s name and arms; and he hears at dawn of day the sound of praise to God rendered by myriads joining in heavenly music. And so the story ends.’

On this coast is another piece of water in point, namely Crymlyn, or ‘Crumlin Pool,’ now locally called the Bog. It appears also to have been sometimes called Pwỻ Cynan, after the name of a son of Rhys ab Tewdwr, who, in his flight after his father’s defeat on Hirwaen Wrgan, was drowned in its waters[4]. It lies on Lord Jersey’s estate, at a distance of about one mile east of the mouth of the Tawe, and about a quarter of a mile from high-water mark, from which it is separated by a strip of ground known in the neighbourhood as Crymlyn Burrows. The name Crymlyn means Crooked Lake, which, I am told, describes the shape of this piece of water. When the bog becomes a pool it encloses an island consisting of a little rocky hillock showing no trace of piles, or walling, or any other handiwork of man[5]. The story about this pool also is that it covers a town buried beneath its waters. Mr. Wirt Sikes’ reference to it has already been mentioned, and I have it on the evidence of a native of the immediate neighbourhood, that he has often heard his father and grandfather talk about the submerged town. Add to this that Cadrawd, to whom I have had already (pp. 23, 376) to acknowledge my indebtedness, speaks in the columns of the South Wales Daily News for February 15, 1899, of Crymlyn as follows:—

‘It was said by the old people that on the site of this bog once stood the old town of Swansea, and that in clear and calm weather the chimneys and even the church steeple could be seen at the bottom of the lake, and in the loneliness of the night the bells were often heard ringing in the lake. It was also said that should any person happen to stand with his face towards the lake when the wind is blowing across the lake, and if any of the spray of that water should touch his clothes, it would be only with the greatest difficulty he could save himself from being attracted or sucked into the water. The lake was at one time much larger than at present. The efforts made to drain it have drawn a good deal of the water from it, but only to convert it into a bog, which no one can venture to cross except in exceptionally dry seasons or hard frost.’

On this I wish to remark in passing, that, while common sense would lead one to suppose that the wind blowing across the water would help the man facing it to get away whenever he chose, the reasoning here is of another order, one characteristic in fact of the ways and means of sympathetic magic. For specimens in point the reader may be conveniently referred to page 360, where he may compare the words quoted from Mr. Hartland, especially as to the use there mentioned of stones or pellets thrown from one’s hands. In the case of Crymlyn, the wind blowing off the face of the water into the onlooker’s face and carrying with it some of the water in the form of spray which wets his clothes, howsoever little, was evidently regarded as establishing a link of connexion between him and the body of the water—or shall I say rather, between him and the divinity of the water?—and that this link was believed to be so strong that it required the man’s utmost effort to break it and escape being drawn in and drowned like Cynan. The statement, supremely silly as it reads, is no modern invention; for one finds that Nennius—or somebody else—reasoned in precisely the same way, except that for a single onlooker he substitutes a whole army of men and horses, and that he points the antithesis by distinctly stating, that if they kept their backs turned to the fascinating flood they would be out of danger. The conditions which he had in view were, doubtless, that the men should face the water and have their clothing more or less wetted by the spray from it. The passage (§ 69) to which I refer is in the Mirabilia, and Geoffrey of Monmouth is found to repeat it in a somewhat better style of Latin (ix. 7): the following is the Nennian version:—

Aliud miraculum est, id est Oper Linn Liguan. Ostium fluminis illius fluit in Sabrina et quando Sabrina inundatur ad sissam, et mare inundatur similiter in ostio supra dicti fluminis et in stagno ostii recipitur in modum voraginis et mare non vadit sursum et est litus juxta flumen et quamdiu Sabrina inundatur ad sissam, istud litus non tegitur et quando recedit mare et Sabrina, tunc Stagnum Liuan eructat omne quod devoravit de mari et litus istud tegitur et instar montis in una unda eructat et rumpit. Et si fuerit exercitus totius regionis, in qua est, et direxerit faciem contra undam, et exercitum trahit unda per vim humore repletis vestibus et equi similiter trahuntur. Si autem exercitus terga versus fuerit contra eam, non nocet ei unda.

‘There is another wonder, to wit Aber Ỻyn Ỻiwan. The water from the mouth of that river flows into the Severn, and when the Severn is in flood up to its banks, and when the sea is also in flood at the mouth of the above-named river and is sucked in like a whirlpool into the pool of the Aber, the sea does not go on rising: it leaves a margin of beach by the side of the river, and all the time the Severn is in flood up to its bank, that beach is not covered. And when the sea and the Severn ebb, then Ỻyn Ỻiwan brings up all it had swallowed from the sea, and that beach is covered while Ỻyn Ỻiwan discharges its contents in one mountain-like wave and vomits forth. Now if the army of the whole district in which this wonder is, were to be present with the men facing the wave, the force of it would, once their clothes are drenched by the spray, draw them in, and their horses would likewise be drawn. But if the men should have their backs turned towards the water, the wave would not harm them[6].’

One story about the formation of Bala Lake, or Ỻyn Tegid[7] as it is called in Welsh, has been given at p. 376: here is another which I translate from a version in Hugh Humphreys’ Ỻyfr Gwybodaeth Gyffredinol (Carnarvon), second series, vol. i, no. 2, p. 1. I may premise that the contributor, whose name is not given, betrays a sort of literary ambition which has led him to relate the story in a confused fashion; and among other things he uses the word edifeirwch, ‘repentance,’ throughout, instead of dial, ‘vengeance.’ With that correction it runs somewhat as follows:—Tradition relates that Bala Lake is but the watery tomb of the palaces of iniquity; and that some old boatmen can on quiet moonlight nights in harvest see towers in ruins at the bottom of its waters, and also hear at times a feeble voice saying, Dial a đaw, dial a đaw, ‘Vengeance will come’; and another voice inquiring, Pa bryd y daw, ‘When will it come?’ Then the first voice answers, Yn y drydeđ genhedlaeth, ‘In the third generation.’ Those voices were but a recollection over oblivion, for in one of those palaces lived in days of yore an oppressive and cruel prince, corresponding to the well-known description of one of whom it is said, ‘Whom he would he slew; and whom he would he kept alive.’ The oppression and cruelty practised by him on the poor farmers were notorious far and near. This prince, while enjoying the morning breezes of summer in his garden, used frequently to hear a voice saying, ‘Vengeance will come.’ But he always laughed the threat away with reckless contempt. One night a poor harper from the neighbouring hills was ordered to come to the prince’s palace. On his way the harper was told that there was great rejoicing at the palace at the birth of the first child of the prince’s son. When he had reached the palace the harper was astonished at the number of the guests, including among them noble lords, princes, and princesses: never before had he seen such splendour at any feast. When he had begun playing the gentlemen and ladies dancing presented a superb appearance. So the mirth and wine abounded, nor did he love playing for them any more than they loved dancing to the music of his harp. But about midnight, when there was an interval in the dancing, and the old harper had been left alone in a corner, he suddenly heard a voice singing in a sort of a whisper in his ear, ‘Vengeance, vengeance!’ He turned at once, and saw a little bird hovering above him and beckoning him, as it were, to follow him. He followed the bird as fast as he could, but after getting outside the palace he began to hesitate. But the bird continued to invite him on, and to sing in a plaintive and mournful voice the word ‘Vengeance, vengeance!’ The old harper was afraid of refusing to follow, and so they went on over bogs and through thickets, whilst the bird was all the time hovering in front of him and leading him along the easiest and safest paths. But if he stopped for a moment the same mournful note of ‘Vengeance, vengeance!’ would be sung to him in a more and more plaintive and heartbreaking fashion. They had by this time reached the top of the hill, a considerable distance from the palace. As the old harper felt rather fatigued and weary, he ventured once more to stop and rest, but he heard the bird’s warning voice no more. He listened, but he heard nothing save the murmuring of the little burn hard by. He now began to think how foolish he had been to allow himself to be led away from the feast at the palace: he turned back in order to be there in time for the next dance. As he wandered on the hill he lost his way, and found himself forced to await the break of day. In the morning, as he turned his eyes in the direction of the palace, he could see no trace of it: the whole tract below was one calm, large lake, with his harp floating on the face of the waters.

Next comes the story of Ỻynclys Pool in the neighbourhood of Oswestry. That piece of water is said to be of extraordinary depth, and its name means the ‘swallowed court.’ The village of Ỻynclys is called after it, and the legend concerning the pool is preserved in verses printed among the compositions of the local poet, John F. M. Dovaston, who published his works in 1825. The first stanza runs thus:—

Clerk Willin he sat at king Alaric’s board,

And a cunning clerk was he;

For he’d lived in the land of Oxenford

With the sons of Grammarie.

How much exactly of the poem comes from Dovaston’s own muse, and how much comes from the legend, I cannot tell. Take for instance the king’s name, this I should say is not derived from the story; but as to the name of the clerk, that possibly is, for the poet bases it on Croes-Willin, the Welsh form of which has been given me as Croes-Wylan, that is Wylan’s Cross, the name of the base of what is supposed to have been an old cross, a little way out of Oswestry on the north side; and I have been told that there is a farm in the same neighbourhood called Tre’ Wylan, ‘Wylan’s Stead.’ To return to the legend, Alaric’s queen was endowed with youth and beauty, but the king was not happy; and when he had lived with her nine years he told Clerk Willin how he first met her when he was hunting ‘fair Blodwell’s rocks among.’ He married her on the condition that she should be allowed to leave him one night in every seven, and this she did without his once knowing whither she went on the night of her absence. Clerk Willin promised to restore peace to the king if he would resign the queen to him, and a tithe annually of his cattle and of the wine in his cellar to him and the monks of the White Minster. The king consented, and the wily clerk hurried away with his book late at night to the rocks by the Giant’s Grave, where there was an ogo’ or cave which was supposed to lead down to Faery. While the queen was inside the cave, he began his spells and made it irrevocable that she should be his, and that his fare should be what fed on the king’s meadow and what flowed in his cellar. When the clerk’s potent spells forced the queen to meet him to consummate his bargain with the king, what should he behold but a grim ogress, who told him that their spells had clashed. She explained to him how she had been the king’s wife for thirty years, and how the king began to be tired of her wrinkles and old age. Then, on condition of returning to the Ogo to be an ogress one night in seven, she was given youth and beauty again, with which she attracted the king anew. In fact, she had promised him happiness

Till within his hall the flag-reeds tall

And the long green rushes grow.

The ogress continued in words which made the clerk see how completely he had been caught in his own net:

Then take thy bride to thy cloistered bed,

As by oath and spell decreed,

And nought be thy fare but the pike and the dare,

And the water in which they feed.

The clerk had succeeded in restoring peace at the king’s banqueting board, but it was the peace of the dead;

For down went the king, and his palace and all,

And the waters now o’er it flow,

And already in his hall do the flag-reeds tall

And the long green rushes grow.

But the visitor will, Dovaston says, find Willin’s peace relieved by the stories which the villagers have to tell of that wily clerk, of Croes-Willin, and of ‘the cave called the Grim Ogo’; not to mention that when the lake is clear, they will show you the towers of the palace below, the Ỻynclys, which the Brython of ages gone by believed to be there.

We now come to a different story about this pool, namely, one which has been preserved in Latin by the historian Humfrey Lhuyd, or Humphrey Ỻwyd, to the following effect:—

‘After the description of Gwynedh, let vs now come to Powys, the seconde kyngedome of VVales, which in the time of German Altisiodorensis [St. Germanus of Auxerre], which preached sometime there, agaynst Pelagius Heresie: was of power, as is gathered out of his life. The kynge wherof, as is there read, bycause he refused to heare that good man: by the secret and terrible iudgement of God, with his Palace, and all his householde: was swallowed vp into the bowels of the Earth, in that place, whereas, not farre from Oswastry, is now a standyng water, of an vnknowne depth, called Lhunclys, that is to say: the deuouryng of the Palace. And there are many Churches founde in the same Province, dedicated to the name of German[8].’

I have not succeeded in finding the story in any of the lives of St. Germanus, but Nennius, § 32, mentions a certain Benli, whom he describes as rex iniquus atque tyrannus valde, who, after refusing to admit St. Germanus and his following into his city, was destroyed with all his courtiers, not by water, however, but by fire from heaven. But the name Benli, in modern Welsh spelling Benỻi[9], points to the Moel Famau range of mountains, one of which is known as Moel Fenỻi, between Ruthin and Mold, rather than to any place near Oswestry. In any case there is no reason to suppose that this story with its Christian and ethical motive is anything like so old as the substratum of Dovaston’s verses.

The only version known to me in the Welsh language of the Ỻynclys legend is to be found printed in the Brython for 1863, p. 338, and it may be summarized as follows:—The Ỻynclys family were notorious for their riotous living, and at their feasts a voice used to be heard proclaiming, ‘Vengeance is coming, coming,’ but nobody took it much to heart. However, one day a reckless maid asked the voice, ‘When?’ The prompt reply was to the effect that it was in the sixth generation: the voice was heard no more. So one night, when the sixth heir in descent from the time of the warning last heard was giving a great drinking feast, and music had been vigorously contributing to the entertainment of host and guest, the harper went outside for a breath of air; but when he turned to come back, lo and behold! the whole court had disappeared. Its place was occupied by a quiet piece of water, on whose waves he saw his harp floating, nothing more.

Here must, lastly, be added one more legend of submergence, namely, that supposed to have taken place some time or other on the north coast of Carnarvonshire. In the Brython for 1863, pp. 393–4, we have what purports to be a quotation from Owen Jones’ Aberconwy a’i Chyffiniau, ‘Conway and its Environs,’ a work which I have not been able to find. Here one reads of a tract of country supposed to have once extended from the Gogarth[10], ‘the Great Orme,’ to Bangor, and from Ỻanfair Fechan to Ynys Seiriol, ‘Priestholme or Puffin Island,’ and of its belonging to a wicked prince named Helig ab Glannawc or Glannog[11], from whom it was called Tyno Helig, ‘Helig’s Hollow.’ Tradition, the writer says, fixes the spot where the court stood about halfway between Penmaen Mawr and Pen y Gogarth, ‘the Great Orme’s Head,’ over against Trwyn yr Wylfa; and the story relates that here a calamity had been foretold four generations before it came, namely as the vengeance of Heaven on Helig ab Glannog for his nefarious impiety. As that ancient prince rode through his fertile heritage one day at the approach of night, he heard the voice of an invisible follower warning him that ‘Vengeance is coming, coming.’ The wicked old prince once asked excitedly, ‘When?’ The answer was, ‘In the time of thy grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and their children.’ Peradventure Helig calmed himself with the thought, that, if such a thing came, it would not happen in his lifetime. But on the occasion of a great feast held at the court, and when the family down to the fifth generation were present taking part in the festivities, one of the servants noticed, when visiting the mead cellar to draw more drink, that water was forcing its way in. He had only time to warn the harper of the danger he was in, when all the others, in the midst of their intoxication, were overwhelmed by the flood.

These inundation legends have many points of similarity among themselves: thus in those of Ỻynclys, Syfađon, Ỻyn Tegid, and Tyno Helig, though they have a ring of austerity about them, the harper is a favoured man, who always escapes when the banqueters are all involved in the catastrophe. The story, moreover, usually treats the submerged habitations as having sunk intact, so that the ancient spires and church towers may still at times be seen: nay the chimes of their bells may be heard by those who have ears for such music. In some cases there may have been, underlying the legend, a trace of fact such as has been indicated to me by Mr. Owen M. Edwards, of Lincoln College, in regard to Bala Lake. When the surface of that water, he says, is covered with broken ice, and a south-westerly wind is blowing, the mass of fragments is driven towards the north-eastern end near the town of Bala; and he has observed that the friction produces a somewhat metallic noise which a quick imagination may convert into something like a distant ringing of bells. Perhaps the most remarkable instance remains to be mentioned: I refer to Cantre’r Gwaelod, as the submerged country of Gwyđno Garanhir is termed, see p. 382 above. To one portion of his fabled realm the nearest actual centres of population are Aberdovey and Borth on either side of the estuary of the Dovey. As bursar of Jesus College I had business in 1892 in the Golden Valley of Herefordshire, and I stayed a day or two at Dorstone enjoying the hospitality of the rectory, and learning interesting facts from the rector, Mr. Prosser Powell, and from Mrs. Powell in particular, as to the folklore of the parish, which is still in several respects very Welsh. Mrs. Powell, however, did not confine herself to Dorstone or the Dore Valley, for she told me as follows:—‘I was at Aberdovey in 1852, and I distinctly remember that my childish imagination was much excited by the legend of the city beneath the sea, and the bells which I was told might be heard at night. I used to lie awake trying, but in vain, to catch the echoes of the chime. I was only seven years old, and cannot remember who told me the story, though I have never forgotten it.’ Mrs. Powell added that she has since heard it said, that at a certain stage of the tide at the mouth of the Dovey, the way in which the waves move the pebbles makes them produce a sort of jingling noise which has been fancied to be the echo of distant bells ringing.

These clues appeared too good to be dropped at once, and the result of further inquiries led Mrs. Powell afterwards to refer me to The Monthly Packet for the year 1859, where I found an article headed ‘Aberdovey Legends,’ and signed M. B., the initials, Mrs. Powell thought, of Miss Bramston of Winchester. The writer gives a sketch of the story of the country overflowed by the neighbouring portion of Cardigan Bay, mentioning, p. 645, that once on a time there were great cities on the banks of the Dovey and the Disynni. ‘Cities with marble wharfs,’ she says, ‘busy factories, and churches whose towers resounded with beautiful peals and chimes of bells.’ She goes on to say that ‘Mausna is the name of the city on the Dovey; its eastern suburb was at the sand-bank now called Borth, its western stretched far out into the sea.’ What the name Mausna may be I have no idea, unless it is the result of some confusion with that of the great turbary behind Borth, namely Mochno, or Cors Fochno, ‘Bog of Mochno.’ The name Borth stands for Y Borth, ‘the Harbour,’ which, more adequately described, was once Porth Wyđno, ‘Gwyđno’s Harbour.’ The writer, however, goes on with the story of the wicked prince, who left open the sluices of the sea-wall protecting his country and its capital: we read on as follows:—‘But though the sea will not give back that fair city to light and air, it is keeping it as a trust but for a time, and even now sometimes, though very rarely, eyes gazing down through the green waters can see not only the fluted glistering sand dotted here and there with shells and tufts of waving sea-weed, but the wide streets and costly buildings of that now silent city. Yet not always silent, for now and then will come chimes and peals of bells, sometimes near, sometimes distant, sounding low and sweet like a call to prayer, or as rejoicing for a victory. Even by day these tones arise, but more often they are heard in the long twilight evenings, or by night. English ears have sometimes heard these sounds even before they knew the tale, and fancied that they must come from some church among the hills, or on the other side of the water, but no such church is there to give the call; the sound and its connexion is so pleasant, that one does not care to break the spell by seeking for the origin of the legend, as in the idler tales with which that neighbourhood abounds.’

The dream about ‘the wide streets and costly buildings of that now silent city’ seems to have its counterpart on the western coast of Erin—somewhere, let us say, off the cliffs of Moher[12], in County Clare—witness Gerald Griffin’s lines, to which a passing allusion has already been made, p. 205:—

A story I heard on the cliffs of the West,

That oft, through the breakers dividing,

A city is seen on the ocean’s wild breast,

In turreted majesty riding.

But brief is the glimpse of that phantom so bright:

Soon close the white waters to screen it.

The allusion to the submarine chimes would make it unpardonable to pass by unnoticed the well-known Welsh air called Clychau Aberdyfi, ‘The Bells of Aberdovey,’ which I have always suspected of taking its name from fairy bells[13]. This popular tune is of unknown origin, and the words to which it is usually sung make the bells say un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump, chwech, ‘one, two, three, four, five, six’; and I have heard a charming Welsh vocalist putting on saith, ‘seven,’ in her rendering of the song. This is not to be wondered at, as her instincts must have rebelled against such a commonplace number as six in a song redolent of old-world sentiment. But our fairy bells ought to have stopped at five: this would seem to have been forgotten when the melody and the present words were wedded together. At any rate our stories seem to suggest that fairy counting did not go beyond the fingering of one hand. The only Welsh fairy represented counting is made to do it all by fives: she counts un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump; un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump, as hard as her tongue can go. For on the number of times she can repeat the five numerals at a single breath depends the number of the live stock of each kind, which are to form her dowry: see p. 8 above, and as to music in fairy tales, see pp. 202, 206, 292.

Now that a number of our inundation stories have been passed in review in this and the previous chapter, some room may be given to the question of their original form. They separate themselves, as it will have been seen, into at least two groups: (1) those in which the cause of the catastrophe is ethical, the punishment of the wicked and dissolute; and (2) those in which no very distinct suggestion of the kind is made. It is needless to say that everything points to the comparative lateness of the fully developed ethical motive; and we are not forced to rest content with this theoretical distinction, for in more than one of the instances we have the two kinds of story. In the case of Ỻyn Tegid, the less known and presumably the older story connects the formation of the lake with the neglect to keep the stone door of the well shut, while the more popular story makes the catastrophe a punishment for wicked and riotous living: compare pp. 377, 408, above. So with the older story of Cantre’r Gwaelod, on which we found the later one of the tipsy Seithennin as it were grafted, p. 395. The keeping of the well shut in the former case, as also in that of Ffynnon Gywer, was a precaution, but the neglect of it was not the cause of the ensuing misfortune. Even if we had stories like the Irish ones, which make the sacred well burst forth in pursuit of the intruder who has gazed into its depths, it would by no means be of a piece with the punishment of riotous and lawless living. Our comparison should rather be with the story of the Curse of Pantannas, where a man incurred the wrath of the fairies by ploughing up ground which they wished to retain as a green sward; but the threatened vengeance for that act of culture did not come to pass for a century, till the time of one, in fact, who is not charged with having done anything to deserve it. The ethics of that legend are, it is clear, not easy to discover, and in our inundation stories one may trace stages of development from a similarly low level. The case may be represented thus: a divinity is offended by a man, and for some reason or other the former wreaks his vengeance, not on the offender, but on his descendants. This minimum granted, it is easy to see, that in time the popular conscience would fail to rest satisfied with the cruel idea of a jealous divinity visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. One may accordingly distinguish the following stages:—

1. The legend lays it down as a fact that the father was very wicked.

2. It makes his descendants also wicked like him.

3. It represents the same punishment overtaking father and sons, ancestor and descendants.

4. The simplest way to secure this kind of equal justice was, no doubt, to let the offending ancestors live on to see their descendants of the generation for whose time the vengeance had been fixed, and to let them be swept away with them in one and the same cataclysm, as in the Welsh versions of the Syfađon and Kenfig legends, possibly also in those of Ỻyn Tegid and Tyno Helig, which are not explicit on this point.

Let us for a moment examine the indications of the time to which the vengeance is put off. In the case of the landed families of ancient Wales, every member of them had his position and liabilities settled by his pedigree, which had to be exactly recorded down to the eighth generation or eighth lifetime in Gwyneđ, and to the seventh in Gwent and Dyfed. Those generations were reckoned the limits of recognized family relationship according to the Welsh Laws, and to keep any practical reckoning of the kind, extending always back some two centuries, must have employed a class of professional men[14]. In any case the ninth generation, called in Welsh y nawfed âch, which is a term in use all over the Principality at the present day, is treated as lying outside all recognized kinship. Thus if AB wishes to say that he is no relation to CD, he will say that he is not related o fewn y nawfed âch, ‘within the ninth degree,’ or hyd y nawfed âch, ‘up to the ninth degree,’ it being understood that in the ninth degree and beyond it no relationship is reckoned. Folklore stories, however, seem to suggest another interpretation of the word âch, and fewer generations in the direct line as indicated in the following table. For the sake of simplicity the founder of the family is here assumed to have at least two sons, A and B, and each succeeding generation to consist of one son only; and lastly the women are omitted altogether:—

In reckoning the relationships between the collateral members of the family, one counts not generations or begettings, not removes or degrees, but ancestry or the number of ancestors, so that the father or founder of the family only counts once. Thus his descendants A^d and B^d in the sixth generation or lifetime, are fourth cousins separated from one another by nine ancestors: that is, they are related in the ninth âch. In other words, A^d has five ancestors and B^d has also five, but as they have one ancestor in common, the father of the family, they are not separated by 5 + 5 ancestors, but by 5 + 5 - 1, that is by 9. Similarly, one being always subtracted, the third cousins A^c and B^c are related in the seventh âch, and the second cousin in the fifth âch: so with the others in odd numbers downwards, and also with the relatives reckoned upwards to the seventh or eighth generation, which would mean collaterals separated by eleven or thirteen ancestors respectively. This reckoning, which is purely conjectural, is based chiefly on the Kenfig story, which foretold the vengeance to come in the ninth âch and otherwise in the time of the goresgynnyđ, that is to say in the sixth lifetime. This works out all right if only by the ninth âch we understand the generation or lifetime when the collaterals are separated by nine ancestors, for that is no other than the sixth from the founder of the family. The Welsh version of the Ỻynclys legend fixes on the same generation, as it says yn oes wyrion, gorwyrion, esgynnyđ a goresgynnyđ, ‘in the lifetime of grandsons, great-grandsons, ascensors, and their children,’ for these last’s time is the sixth generation. In the case of the Syfađon legend the time of the vengeance is the ninth cenhedlaeth or generation, which must be regarded as probably a careless way of indicating the generation when the collaterals are separated by nine ancestors, that is to say the sixth from the father of the family. It can hardly have the other meaning, as the sinning ancestors are represented as then still living. The case of the Tyno Helig legend is different, as we have the time announced to the offending ancestor described as amser dy wyrion, dy orwyrion, a dy esgynyđion, ‘the time of thy grandsons, thy great-grandsons, and thy ascensors,’ which would be only the fifth generation with collaterals separated only by seven ancestors, and not nine. But the probability is that goresgynyđion has been here accidentally omitted, and that the generation indicated originally was the same as in the others. This, however, will not explain the Bala legend, which fixes the time for the third generation, namely, immediately after the birth of the offending prince’s first grandson. If, however, as I am inclined to suppose, the sixth generation with collaterals severed by nine ancestors was the normal term in these stories, it is easy to understand that the story-teller might wish to substitute a generation nearer to the original offender, especially if he was himself to be regarded as surviving to share in the threatened punishment: his living to see the birth of his first grandson postulated no extraordinary longevity.

The question why fairy vengeance is so often represented deferred for a long time can no longer be put off. Here three or four answers suggest themselves:—

1. The story of the Curse of Pantannas relates how the offender was not the person punished, but one of his descendants a hundred or more years after his time, while the offender is represented escaping the fairies’ vengeance because he entreated them very hard to let him go unpunished. All this seems to me but a sort of protest against the inexorable character of the little people, a protest, moreover, which was probably invented comparatively late.

2. The next answer is the very antithesis of the Pantannas one; for it is, that the fairies delay in order to involve all the more men and women in the vengeance wreaked by them: I confess that I see no reason to entertain so sinister an idea.

3. A better answer, perhaps, is that the fairies were not always in a position to harm him who offended them. This may well have been the belief as regards any one who had at his command the dreaded potency of magic. Take for instance the Irish story of a king of Erin called Eochaid Airem, who, with the aid of his magician or druid Dalán, defied the fairies, and dug into the heart of their underground station, until, in fact, he got possession of his queen, who had been carried thither by a fairy chief named Mider. Eochaid, assisted by his druid and the powerful Ogams which the latter wrote on rods of yew, was too formidable for the fairies, and their wrath was not executed till the time of Eochaid’s unoffending grandson, Conaire Mór, who fell a victim to it, as related in the epic story of Bruden Dáderga, so called from the palace where Conaire was slain[15].

4. Lastly, it may be said that the fairies being supposed deathless, there would be no reason why they should hurry; and even in case the delay meant a century or two, that makes no perceptible approach to the extravagant scale of time common enough in our fairy tales, when, for instance, they make a man who has whiled ages away in fairyland, deem it only so many minutes[16].

Whatever the causes may have been which gave our stories their form in regard of the delay in the fairy revenge, it is clear that Welsh folklore could not allow this delay to extend beyond the sixth generation with its cousinship of nine ancestries, if, as I gather, it counted kinship no further. Had one projected it on the seventh or the eighth generation, both of which are contemplated in the Laws, it would not be folklore. It would more likely be the lore of the landed gentry and of the powerful families whose pedigrees and ramifications of kinship were minutely known to the professional men on whom it was incumbent to keep themselves, and those on whom they depended, well informed in such matters.

It remains for me to consider the non-ethical motive of the other stories, such as those which ascribe negligence and the consequent inundation to the woman who has the charge of the door or lid of the threatening well. Her negligence is not the cause of the catastrophe, but it leaves the way open for it. What then can have been regarded the cause? One may gather something to the point from the Irish story where the divinity of the well is offended because a woman has gazed into its depths, and here probably, as already suggested (p. 392), we come across an ancient tabu directed against women, which may have applied only to certain wells of peculiarly sacred character. It serves, however, to suggest that the divinities of the water-world were not disinclined to seize every opportunity of extending their domain on the earth’s surface; and I am persuaded that this was once a universal creed of some race or other in possession of these islands. Besides the Irish legends already mentioned (pp. 382, 384) of the formation of Lough Neagh, Lough Ree, and others, witness the legendary annals of early Ireland, which, by the side of battles, the clearing of forests, and the construction of causeways, mention the bursting forth of lakes and rivers; that is to say, the formation or the coming into existence, or else the serious expansion, of certain of the actual waters of the country. For the present purpose the details given by The Four Masters are sufficient, and I have hurriedly counted their instances as follows:—

This makes an aggregate of thirty-five lakes and forty-six rivers, that is to say a total of eighty-one eruptions. But I ought, perhaps, to explain that under the head of lakes I have included not only separate pieces of water, but also six inlets of the sea, such as Strangford Lough and the like. Still more to the point is it to mention that of the lakes two are said to have burst forth at the digging of graves. Thus, A.M. 2535, The Four Masters have the following: ‘Laighlinne, son of Parthalon, died in this year. When his grave was dug, Loch Laighlinne sprang forth in Ui Mac Uais, and from him it is named[17].’ O’Donovan, the editor and translator of The Four Masters, supposes it to be somewhere to the south-west of Tara, in Meath. Similarly, A.M. 4694, they say of a certain Melghe Molbthach, ‘When his grave was digging, Loch Melghe burst forth over the land in Cairbre, so that it was named from him.’ This is said to be now called Lough Melvin, on the confines of the counties of Donegal, Leitrim, and Fermanagh. These two instances are mentioned by The Four Masters; and here is one given by Stokes in the Rennes Dindṡenchas: see the Revue Celtique, xv. 428–9. It has to do with Loch Garman, as Wexford Harbour was called in Irish, and it runs thus: ‘Loch Garman, whence is it? Easy to say. Garman Glas, son of Dega, was buried there, and when his grave was dug then the lake burst throughout the land. Whence Loch Garman.’ It matters not here that there are alternative accounts of the name.

The meaning of all this seems to be that cutting the green sward or disturbing the earth beneath was believed in certain cases to give offence to some underground divinity or other connected with the world of waters. That divinity avenged the annoyance or offence given him by causing water to burst forth and form a lake forthwith. The nearness of such divinities to the surface seems not a little remarkable, and it is shown not only in the folklore which has been preserved for us by The Four Masters, but also by the usual kind of story about a neglected well door. These remarks suggest the question whether it was not one of the notions which determined surface burials, that is, burials in which no cutting of the ground took place, the cists or chambers and the bodies placed in them being covered over by the heaping on of earth or stones brought from a more or less convenient distance. It might perhaps be said that all this only implied individuals of a character to desecrate the ground and call forth the displeasure of the divinities concerned; and for that suggestion folklore parallels, it is true, could be adduced. But it is hardly adequate: the facts seem to indicate a more general objection on the part of the powers in point; and they remind one rather of the clause said to be inserted in mining leases in China with the object, if one may trust the newspapers, of preventing shafts from being sunk below a certain depth, for fear of offending the susceptibilities of the demons or dragons ruling underground.

It is interesting to note the fact, that Celtic folklore connects the underground divinities intimately with water; for one may briefly say that they have access wherever water can take them. With this qualification the belief may be said to have lingered lately in Wales, for instance, in connexion with Ỻyn Barfog, near Aberdovey. ‘It is believed to be very perilous,’ Mr. Pughe says, p. 142 above, ‘to let the waters out of the lake’; and not long before he wrote, in 1853, an aged inhabitant of the district informed him ‘that she recollected this being done during a period of long drought, in order to procure motive power for Ỻyn Pair Mill, and that long-continued heavy rains followed.’ Then we have the story related to Mr. Reynolds as to Ỻyn y Fan Fach, how there emerged from the water a huge hairy fellow of hideous aspect, who stormed at the disturbers of his peace, and uttered the threat that unless they left him alone in his own place he would drown a whole town. Thus the power of the water spirit is represented as equal to producing excessive wet weather and destructive floods. He is in all probability not to be dissociated from the afanc in the Conwy story which has already been given (pp. 130–3). Now the local belief is that the reason why the afanc had to be dragged out of the river was that he caused floods in the river and made it impossible for people to cross on their way to market at Ỻanrwst. Some such a local legend has been generalized into a sort of universal flood story in the late Triad, iii. 97, as follows:—‘Three masterpieces of the Isle of Prydain: the Ship of Nefyđ Naf Neifion, that carried in her male and female of every kind when the Lake of Ỻïon burst; and Hu the Mighty’s Ychen Bannog dragging the afanc of the lake to land, so that the lake burst no more; and the Stones of Gwyđon Ganhebon, on which one read all the arts and sciences of the world.’ A story similar to the Conwy one, but no longer to be got so complete, as far as I know, seems to have been current in various parts of the Principality, especially around Ỻyn Syfađon and on the banks of the Anglesey pool called Ỻyn yr Wyth Eidion, ‘the Pool of the Eight Oxen,’ for so many is Hu represented here as requiring in dealing with the Anglesey afanc. According to Mr. Pughe of Aberdovey, the same feat was performed at Ỻyn Barfog, not, however, by Hu and his oxen, but by Arthur and his horse. To be more exact the task may be here considered as done by Arthur superseding Hu: see p. 142 above. That, however, is of no consequence here, and I return to the afanc: the Fan Fach legend told to Mr. Reynolds makes the lake ruler huge and hairy, hideous and rough-spoken, but he expresses himself in human speech, in fact in two lines of doggerel: see p. 19 above. On the other hand, the Ỻyn Cwm Ỻwch story, which puts the same doggerel, p. 21, into the mouth of the threatening figure in red who sits in a chair on the face of that lake, suggests nothing abnormal about his personal appearance. Then as to the Conwy afanc, he is very heavy, it is true, but he also speaks the language of the country. He is lured, be it noticed, out of his home in the lake by the attractions of a young woman, who lets him rest his head in her lap and fall asleep. When he wakes to find himself in chains he takes a cruel revenge on her. But with infinite toil and labour he is dragged beyond the Conwy watershed into one of the highest tarns on Snowdon; for there is here no question of killing him, but only of removing him where he cannot harm the people of the Conwy Valley. It is true that the story of Peredur represents that knight cutting an afanc’s head off, but so much the worse for the compiler of that romance, as we have doubtless in the afanc some kind of a deathless being. However, the description which the Peredur story gives[18] of him is interesting: he lives in a cave at the door of which is a stone pillar: he sees everybody that comes without anybody seeing him; and from behind the pillar he kills all comers with a poisoned spear.

Hitherto we have the afanc described mostly from a hostile point of view: let us change our position, which some of the stories already given enable us to do. Take for instance the first of the whole series, where it describes, p. 7, the Fan Fach youth’s despair when the lake damsel, whose love he had gained, suddenly dived to fetch her father and her sister. There emerged, it says, out of the lake two most beautiful ladies, accompanied by a hoary-headed man of noble mien and extraordinary stature, but having otherwise all the force and strength of youth. This hoary-headed man of noble mien owned herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, a number of which were allowed to come out of the lake to form his daughter’s dowry, as the narrative goes on to show. In the story of Ỻyn Du’r Arđu, p. 32, he has a consort who appears with him to join in giving the parental sanction to the marriage which their daughter was about to make with the Snowdon shepherd. In neither of these stories has this extraordinary figure any name given him, and it appears prima facie probable that the term afanc is rather one of abuse in harmony with the unlovely description of him supplied by the other stories. But neither in them does the term yr afanc suit the monster meant, for there can be no doubt that in the word afanc we have the etymological equivalent of the Irish word abacc, ‘a dwarf’; and till further light is shed on these words one may assume that at one time afanc also meant a dwarf or pigmy in Welsh. In modern Welsh it has been regarded as meaning a beaver, but as that was too small an animal to suit the popular stories, the word has been also gravely treated as meaning a crocodile[19]: this is in the teeth of the unanimous treatment of him as anthropomorphic in the legends in point. If one is to abide by the meaning dwarf or pigmy, one is bound to regard afanc as one of the terms originally applied to the fairies in their more unlovely aspects: compare the use of crimbil, p. 263. Here may also be mentioned pegor, ‘a dwarf or pigmy,’ which occurs in the Book of Taliessin, poem vii. (p. 135):—

Gogỽn py pegor

yssyd ydan vor.

Gogwn eu heissor

paỽb yny oscord.

I know what (sort of) pigmy

There is beneath the sea.

I know their kind,

Each in his troop.

Also the following lines in the twelfth-century manuscript of the Black Book of Carmarthen: see Evans’ autotype facsimile, fo. 9^b:—

Ar gnẏuer pegor

ẏ ssit ẏ dan mor.

Ar gnẏuer edeinauc

aoruc kyuoethauc.

Ac vei. vei. paup.

tri trẏchant tauaud

Nẏellẏnt ve traethaud.

kẏuoetheu [ẏ] trindaud

And every dwarf

There is beneath the sea,

And every winged thing

The Mighty One hath made,

And were there to each

Thrice three hundred tongues—

They could not relate

The powers of the Trinity.

I should rather suppose, then, that the pigmies in the water-world were believed to consist of many grades or classes, and to be innumerable like the Luchorpáin of Irish legend, which were likewise regarded as diminutive. With the Luchorpáin were also associated[20] Fomori or Fomoraig (modern Irish spelling Fomhoraigh), and Goborchinn, ‘Horse-heads.’ The etymology of the word Fomori has been indicated at p. 286 above, but Irish legendary history has long associated it with muir, ‘sea,’ genitive mara, Welsh mor, and it has gone so far as to see in them, as there suggested, not submarine but transmarine enemies and invaders of Ireland. So the singular fomor, now written fomhor, is treated in O’Reilly’s Irish Dictionary as meaning ‘a pirate, a sea robber, a giant,’ while in Highland Gaelic, where it is written fomhair or famhair, it is regularly used as the word for giant. The Manx Gaelic corresponding to Irish fomor and its derivative fomorach, is foawr, ‘a giant,’ and foawragh, ‘gigantic,’ but also ‘a pirate.’ I remember hearing, however, years ago, a mention made of the Fomhoraigh, which, without conveying any definite allusion to their stature, associated them with subterranean places:—An undergraduate from the neighbourhood of Killorglin, in Kerry, happened to relate in my hearing, how, when he was exploring some underground ráths near his home, he was warned by his father’s workmen to beware of the Fomhoraigh. But on the borders of the counties of Mayo and Sligo I have found the word used as in the Scottish Highlands, namely, in the sense of giants, while Dr. Douglas Hyde and others inform me that the Giant’s Causeway is called in Irish Clochán na bh-Fomhorach.

The Goborchinns or Horse-heads have also an interest, not only in connexion with the Fomori, as when we read of a king of the latter called Eocha Eachcheann[21], or Eochy Horse-head, but also as a link between the Welsh afanc and the Highland water-horse, of whom Campbell has a good deal to say in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands. See more especially iv. 337, where he remarks among other things, that ‘the water-horse assumes many shapes; he often appears as a man,’ he adds, ‘and sometimes as a large bird.’ A page or two earlier he gives a story which illustrates the statement, at the same time that it vividly reminds one of that part of the Conwy legend which (p. 130) represents the afanc resting his head on the lap of the damsel forming one of the dramatis personæ. Here follows Campbell’s own story, omitting all about a marvellous bull, however, that was in the end to checkmate the water-horse:—

‘A long time after these things a servant girl went with the farmer’s herd of cattle to graze them at the side of a loch, and she sat herself down near the bank. There, in a little while, what should she see walking towards her but a man, who asked her to fasg his hair [Welsh ỻeua]. She said she was willing enough to do him that service, and so he laid his head on her knee, and she began to array his locks, as Neapolitan damsels also do by their swains. But soon she got a great fright, for growing amongst the man’s hair, she found a great quantity of liobhagach an locha, a certain slimy green weed[22] that abounds in such lochs, fresh, salt, and brackish. The girl knew that if she screamed there was an end of her, so she kept her terror to herself, and worked away till the man fell asleep as he was with his head on her knee. Then she untied her apron strings, and slid the apron quietly on to the ground with its burden upon it, and then she took her feet home as fast as it was in her heart[23]. Now when she was getting near the houses, she gave a glance behind her, and there she saw her caraid (friend) coming after her in the likeness of a horse.’

The equine form belongs also more or less constantly to the kelpie of the Lowlands of Scotland and of the Isle of Man, where we have him in the glashtyn, whose amorous propensities are represented as more repulsive than what appears in Welsh or Irish legend: see p. 289 above, and the Lioar Manninagh for 1897, p. 139. Perhaps in Man and the Highlands the horsy nature of this being has been reinforced by the influence of the Norse Nykr, a Northern Proteus or old Nick, who takes many forms, but with a decided preference for that of ‘a gray water-horse’: see Vigfusson’s Icelandic-English Dictionary. But the idea of associating the equine form with the water divinity is by no means confined to the Irish and the Northern nations: witness the Greek legend of the horse being of Poseidon’s own creation, and the beast whose form he sometimes assumed.

It is in this sort of a notion of a water-horse one is probably to look for the key to the riddle of such conceptions as that of March ab Meirchion, the king with horse’s ears, and the corresponding Irish figure of Labraid Lorc[24]. In both of these the brute peculiarities are reduced almost to a minimum: both are human in form save their ears alone. The name Labraid Lorc is distinct enough from the Welsh March, but under this latter name one detects traces of him with the horse’s ears in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany[25]. We have also probably the same name in the Morc of Irish legend: at any rate Morc, Marc, or Margg, seems to be the same name as the Welsh March, which is no other word than march, ‘a steed or charger.’ Now the Irish Morc is not stated to have had horse’s ears, but he and another called Conaing are represented in the legendary history of early Erin as the naval leaders of the Fomori, a sort of position which would seem to fit the Brythonic March also were he to be treated in earnest as an historical character. But short of that another treatment may be suspected of having been actually dealt out to him, namely, that of resolving the water-horse into a horse and his master. Of this we seem to have two instances in the course of the story of the formation of Lough Neagh in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 39–41:—

There was once a good king named Maired reigning over Munster, and he had two sons, Eochaid and Rib. He married a wife named Ebliu (genitive Eblinde), who fell in love with her stepson, Eochaid. The two brothers make up their minds to leave their father and to take Ebliu with them, together with all that was theirs, including in all a thousand men. They proceed northwards, but their druids persuade them that they cannot settle down in the same district, so Rib goes westwards to a plain known as Tír Cluchi Midir acus Maic Óic, ‘the Play-ground of Mider and the Mac Óc,’ so called after the two great fairy chiefs of Ireland. Mider visits Rib’s camp and kills their horses, then he gives them a big horse of his own ready harnessed with a pack-saddle. They had to put all their baggage on the big horse’s back and go away, but after a while the nag lay down and a well of water formed there, which eventually burst forth, drowning them all: this is Loch Ri, ‘Rib’s Loch, or Lough Ree,’ on the Shannon. Eochaid, the other brother, went with his party to the banks of the Boyne near the Brug, where the fairy chief Mac Óc or Mac ind Óc had his residence: he destroyed Eochaid’s horses the first night, and the next day he threatened to destroy the men themselves unless they went away. Thereupon Eochaid said that they could not travel without horses, so the Mac Óc gave them a big horse, on whose back they placed all they had. The Mac Óc warned them not to unload the nag on the way, and not to let him halt lest he should be their death. However, when they had reached the middle of Ulster, they thoughtlessly took all their property off the horse’s back, and nobody bethought him of turning the animal’s head back in the direction from which they had come: so he also made a well[26]. Over that well Eochaid had a house built, and a lid put on the well, which he set a woman to guard. In the sequel she neglected it, and the well burst forth and formed Lough Neagh, as already mentioned, p. 382 above. What became of the big horses in these stories one is not told, but most likely they were originally represented as vanishing in a spring of water where each of them stood. Compare the account of Undine at her unfaithful husband’s funeral. In the procession she mysteriously appeared as a snow-white figure deeply veiled, but when one rose from kneeling at the grave, where she had knelt nought was to be seen save a little silver spring of limpid water bubbling out of the turf and trickling on to surround the new grave:—Da man sich aber wieder erhob, war die weisse Fremde verschwunden; an der Stelle, wo sie geknieet hatte, quoll ein silberhelles Brünnlein aus dem Rasen; das rieselte und rieselte fort, bis es den Grabhügel des Ritters fast ganz umzogen hatte; dann rann es fürder und ergoss sich in einen Weiher, der zur Seite des Gottesackers lag.

The late and grotesque story of the Gilla Decair may be mentioned next: he was one of the Fomorach, and had a wonderful kind of horse on whose back most of Finn’s chief warriors were induced to mount. Then the Gilla Decair and his horse hurried towards Corkaguiny, in Kerry, and took to the sea, for he and his horse travelled equally well on sea and land. Thus Finn’s men, unable to dismount, were carried prisoners to an island not named, on which Dermot in quest of them afterwards landed, and from which, after great perils, he made his way to Tír fo Thuinn, ‘Terra sub Unda,’ and brought his friends back to Erin[27]. Now the number of Finn’s men taken away by force by the Gilla Decair was fifteen, fourteen on the back of his horse and one clutching to the animal’s tail, and the Welsh Triads, i. 93 = ii. 11, seem to re-echo some similar story, but they give the number of persons not as fifteen but just one half, and describe the horse as Du (y) Moroeđ, ‘the Black of (the) Seas,’ steed of Elidyr Mwynfawr, that carried seven human beings and a half from Pen Ỻech Elidyr in the North to Pen Ỻech Elidyr in Môn, ‘Anglesey.’ It is explained that Du carried seven on his back, and that one who swam with his hands on that horse’s crupper was reckoned the half man in this case. Du Moroeđ is in the story of Kulhwch and Olwen called Du March Moro, ‘Black the Steed of Moro,’ the horse ridden in the hunt of Twrch Trwyth by Gwyn ab Nuđ, king of the other world; and he appears as a knight with his name unmistakably rendered into Brun de Morois in the romance of Durmart le Galois, who carries away Arthur’s queen on his horse to his castle in Morois[28]. Lastly, here also might be mentioned the incident in the story of Peredur or Perceval, which relates how to that knight, when he was in the middle of a forest much distressed for the want of a horse, a lady brought a fine steed as black as a blackberry. He mounted and he found his beast marvellously swift, but on his making straight for a vast river the knight made the sign of the cross, whereupon he was left on the ground, and his horse plunged into the water, which his touch seemed to set ablaze. The horse is interpreted to have been the devil[29], and this is a fair specimen of the way in which Celtic paganism is treated by the Grail writers when they feel in the humour to assume an edifying attitude.

If one is right in setting Môn, ‘Anglesey,’ over against the anonymous isle to which the Gilla Decair hurries Finn’s men away, Anglesey would have to be treated as having once been considered one of the Islands of the Dead and the home of Other-world inhabitants. We have a trace of this in a couplet in a poem by the medieval poet, Dafyđ ab Gwilym, who makes Blodeuweđ the Owl give a bit of her history as follows:—

Merch i arglwyd, ail Meirchion,

Wyf i, myn Dewi! o Fon[30].

Daughter to a lord, son of Meirchion,

Am I, by St. David! from Mona.

This, it will be seen, connects March ab Meirchion, as it were ‘Steed son of Steeding,’ with the Isle of Anglesey. Add to this that the Irish for Anglesey or Mona was Móin Conaing, ‘Conaing’s Swamp,’ so called apparently after Conaing associated with Morc, a name which is practically March in Welsh. Both were leaders of the Fomori in Irish tales: see my Arthurian Legend, p. 356.

On the great place given to islands in Celtic legend and myth it is needless here to expatiate: witness Brittia, to which Procopius describes the souls of the departed being shipped from the shores of the Continent, the Isle of Avallon in the Romances, that of Gwales in the Mabinogion, Ynys Enỻi or Bardsey, in which Merlin and his retinue enter the Glass House[31], and the island of which we read in the pages of Plutarch, that it contains Cronus held in the bonds of perennial sleep[32].

Let us return to the more anthropomorphic figure of the afanc, and take as his more favoured representative the virile personage described emerging from the Fan Fach Lake to give his sanction to the marriage of his daughter with the Myđfai shepherd. It is probable that a divinity of the same order belonged to every other lake of any considerable dimensions in the country. But it will be remembered that in the case of the story of Ỻyn Du’r Arđu two parents appeared with the lake maiden—her father and her mother—and we may suppose that they were divinities of the water-world. The same thing also may be inferred from the late Triad, iii. 13, which speaks of the bursting of the lake of Ỻïon, causing all the lands to be inundated so that all the human race was drowned except Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who escaped in a mastless ship: it was from them that the island of Prydain was repeopled. A similar Triad, iii. 97, but evidently of a different origin, has already been mentioned as speaking of the Ship of Nefyđ Naf Neifion, that carried in it a male and female of every kind when the lake of Ỻïon burst. This later Triad evidently supplies what had been forgotten in the previous one, namely, a pair of each kind of animal life, and not of mankind alone. But from the names Dwyfan and Dwyfach I infer that the writer of Triad iii. 13 has developed his universal deluge on the basis of the scriptural account of it, for those names belonged in all probability to wells and rivers: in other terms, they were the names of water divinities. At any rate there seems to be some evidence that two springs, whose waters flow into Bala Lake, were at one time called Dwyfan and Dwyfach, these names being borne both by the springs themselves and the rivers flowing from them. The Dwyfan and the Dwyfach were regarded as uniting in the lake, while the water on its issuing from the lake is called Dyfrdwy. Now Dyfrdwy stands for an older Dyfr-dwyf, which in Old Welsh was Dubr duiu, ‘the water of the divinity.’ One of the names of that divinity was Donwy, standing for an early form Danuvios or Danuvia, according as it was masculine or feminine. In either case it was practically the same name as that of the Danube or Danuvios, derived from a word which is represented in Irish by the adjective dána, ‘audax, fortis, intrepidus.’ The Dee has in Welsh poetry still another name, Aerfen, which seems to mean a martial goddess or the spirit of the battlefield, which is corroborated and explained by Giraldus[33], who represents the river as the accredited arbiter of the fortunes of the wars in its country between the Welsh and the English. The name Dyfrdonwy occurs in a poem by Ỻywarch Brydyđ y Moch, a poet who flourished towards the end of the twelfth century, as follows[34]:—

Nid kywiw[35] a ỻwfyr dwfyr dyfyrdonwy

Kereist oth uebyd gwryd garwy.

With a coward Dyfrdonwy water ill agrees:

From thy boyhood hast thou loved Garwy’s valour.

The prince praised was Ỻywelyn ab Iorwerth, whom the poet seems to identify here with the Dee, and it looks as if the water of the Dee formed some sort of a test which no coward could face: compare the case of the discreet cauldron that would not boil meat for a coward[36].

The dwy, dwyf, duiu, of the river’s Welsh name represent an early form dēva or dēiva, whence the Romans called their station on its banks Deva, possibly as a shortening of ad Devam; but that Dēva should have simply and directly meant the river is rendered probable by the fact that Ptolemy elsewhere gives it as the name of the northern Dee, which enters the sea near Aberdeen. From the same stem were formed the names Dwyf-an and Dwyf-ach, which are treated in the Triads as masculine and feminine respectively. In its course the Welsh Dee receives a river Ceirw not far above Corwen, and that river flows through farms called Ar-đwyfan and Hendre’ Ar-đwyfan, and adjoining Arđwyfan is another farm called Foty Arđwyfan, ‘Shielings of Arđwyfan,’ while Hendre’ Arđwyfan means the old stead or winter abode of Arđwyfan. Arđwyfan itself would seem to mean ‘On Dwyfan,’ and Hendre’ Arđwyfan, which may be supposed the original homestead, stands near a burn which flows into the Ceirw. That burn I should suppose to have been the Dwyfan, and perhaps the name extended to the Ceirw itself; but Dwyfan is not now known as the name of any stream in the neighbourhood. Elsewhere we have two rivers called Dwyfor or Dwyfawr and Dwyfach, which unite a little below the village of Ỻan Ystumdwy; and from there to the sea, the stream is called Dwyfor, the mouth of which is between Criccieth and Afon Wen, in Carnarvonshire. Ystumdwy, commonly corrupted into Stindwy, seems to mean Ystum-dwy, ‘the bend of the Dwy’; so that here also we have Dwyfach and Dwy, as in the case of the Dee. Possibly Dwyfor was previously called simply Dwy or even Dwyfan; but it is now explained as Dwy-fawr, ‘great Dwy,’ which was most likely suggested by Dwyfach, as this latter explains itself to the country people as Dwy-fach, ‘little Dwy.’ However, it is but right to say that in Ỻywelyn ab Gruffyđ’s grant of lands to the monks of Aber Conwy they seem to be called Dwyuech and Dwyuaur[37].

All these waters have in common the reputation of being liable to sudden and dangerous floods, especially the Dwyfor, which drains Cwm Straỻyn and its lake lying behind the great rocky barrier on the left as one goes from Tremadoc towards Aber Glaslyn Bridge. Still more so is this the case with the Dee and Bala Lake, which is wont to rise at times from seven to nine feet above its ordinary level. The inundation which then invades the valley from Bala down presents a sight more magnificent than comfortable to contemplate. In fact nothing could have been more natural than for the story elaborated by the writer of certain of the late Triads to have connected the most remarkable inundations with the largest piece of water in the Principality, and one liable to such sudden changes of level: in other words, that one should treat Ỻyn Ỻïon as merely one of the names of Bala Lake, now called in Welsh Ỻyn Tegid, and formerly sometimes Ỻyn Aerfen.

While touching at p. 286 on Gwaen Ỻifon with its Ỻyn Pencraig as one of those claiming to be the Ỻyn Ỻïon of the Triads, it was hinted that Ỻïon was but a thinner form of Ỻifon. Here one might mention perhaps another Ỻifon, for which, however, no case could be made. I allude to the name of the residence of the Wynns descended from Gilmin Troedđu, namely, Glyn Ỻifon, which means the river Ỻifon’s Glen; but one could not feel surprised if the neighbouring Ỻyfni, draining the lakes of Nantỻe, should prove to have once been also known as a Ỻifon, with the Nantỻe waters conforming by being called Ỻyn Ỻifon. But however that may be, one may say as to the flood caused by the bursting of any such lake, that the notion of the universality of the catastrophe was probably contributed by the author of Triad iii. 13, from a non-Welsh source. He may have, however, not invented the vessel in which he places Dwyfan and Dwyfach: at all events, one version of the story of the Fan Fach represents the Lake Lady arriving in a boat. As to the writer of the other Triad, iii. 97, he says nothing about Dwyfan and his wife, but borrows Nefyđ Naf Neifion’s ship to save all that were to be saved; and here one may probably venture to identify Nefyđ with Nemed[38], genitive Nemid, a name borne in Irish legend by a rover who is represented as one of the early colonizers of Erin. As to the rest, the name Neifion by itself is used in Welsh for Neptune and the sea, as in the following couplet of D. ab Gwilym’s poem lv:—

Nofiad a wnaeth hen Neifion

O Droia fawr draw i Fôn.

It is old Neptune that has swam

From great Troy afar to Mona.

In the same way Môr Neifion, ‘Sea of Neifion,’ seems to have signified the ocean, the high seas.

To return to the Triad about Dwyfan and Dwyfach, not only does it make them from being water divinities into a man and woman, but there is no certainty even that both were not feminine. In modern Welsh all rivers are treated as feminine, and even Dyfrdwyf has usually to submit, though the modern bard Tegid, analysing the word into Dwfr Dwyf, ‘Water of the Divinity or Divine Water,’ where dwfr, ‘water,’ could only be masculine, addressed Ỻyn Tegid thus, p. 78:

Drwyot, er dyđiau’r Drywon,

Y rhwyf y Dyfrdwyf ei don.

Through thee, from the days of the Druids,

The Dwfr Dwyf impels his wave.

This question, however, of the gender of river names, or rather the sex which personification ascribed them, is a most difficult one. If we glance at Ptolemy’s Geography written in the second century, we find in his account of the British Isles that he names more than fifty of our river mouths and estuaries, and that he divides their names almost equally into masculine and feminine. The modern Welsh usage has, it is seen, departed far from this, but not so far the folklore: the afanc is a male, and we have a figure of the same sex appearing as the father of the lake maiden in the Fan Fach story, and in that of Ỻyn Du’r Arđu; the same, too, was the sex of the chief dweller of Ỻyn Cwm Ỻwch; the same remark is applicable also to the greatest divinity of these islands—the greatest, at any rate, so far as the scanty traces of his cult enable one to become acquainted with him. As his name comes down into legend it belongs here, as well as to the deities of antiquity, just as much, in a sense, as the Dee. I refer to Nudons or Nodons, the remains[39] of whose sanctuary were many years ago brought to light on a pleasant hill in Lydney Park, on the western banks of the Severn. In the mosaic floor of the god’s temple there is a coloured inscription showing the expense of that part of the work to have been defrayed by the contributions (ex stipibus) of the faithful, and that it was carried out by two men, of whom one appears to have been an officer in command of a naval force guarding the coasts of the Severn Sea. In the midst of the mosaic inscription is a round opening in the floor of nine inches in diameter and surrounded by a broad band of red enclosed in two of blue. This has given rise to various speculations, and among others that it was intended for libations. The mosaics and the lettering of the inscriptions seem to point to the third century as the time when the sanctuary of Nudons was built under Roman auspices, though the place was doubtless sacred to the god long before. In any case it fell in exactly with the policy of the more astute of Roman statesmen to encourage such a native cult as we find traces of in Lydney Park.

One of the inscriptions began with D. M. Nodonti, ‘to the great god Nudons,’ and a little bronze crescent intended for the diadem of the god or of one of his priests gives a representation of him as a crowned, beardless personage driving a chariot with four horses; and on either side of him is a naked figure supposed to represent the winds, and beyond them on each of the two sides is a triton with the fore feet of a horse. The god holds the reins in his left hand, and his right uplifted grasps what may be a sceptre or possibly a whip, while the whole equipment of the god recalls in some measure the Chariot of the Sun. Another piece of the bronze ornament shows another triton with an anchor in one of his hands, and opposite him a fisherman in the act of hooking a fine salmon. Other things, such as oars and shell trumpets, together with mosaic representations of marine animals in the floor of the temple, compel us to assimilate Nudons more closely with Neptune than any other god of classical mythology.

The name of the god, as given in the inscriptions, varies between Nudons and Nodens, the cases actually occurring being the dative Nodonti, Nodenti, and Nudente, and the genitive Nodentis, so I should regard ō or ū as optional in the first syllable, and o as preferable, perhaps, to e in the second, for there is no room for reasonably doubting that we have here to do with the same name as Irish Nuadu, genitive Nuadat, conspicuous in the legendary history of Ireland. Now the Nuadu who naturally occurs to one first, was Nuadu Argetlám or Nuadu of the Silver Hand, from argat, ‘silver, argentum,’ and lám, ‘hand.’ Irish literature explains how he came to have a hand made of silver, and we can identify with him on Welsh ground a Ỻuđ Ỻawereint; for put back as it were into earlier Brythonic, this would be Lūdo(ns) Lām’-argenti̯os: that is to say, a reversal takes place in the order of the elements forming the epithet out of ereint (for older ergeint), ‘silvern, argenteus,’ and ỻaw, for earlier lāma, ‘hand.’ Then comes the alliterative instinct into play, forcing Nūdo(ns) Lāmargenti̯o(s) to become Lūdo(ns) Lāmargenti̯o(s), whence the later form, Ỻuđ Ỻawereint, derives regularly[40]. Thus we have in Welsh the name Ỻûđ, fashioned into that form under the influence of the epithet, whereas elsewhere it is Nûđ, which occurs as a man’s name in the pedigrees, while an intermediate form was probably Nūdos or Nūdo, of which a genitive NVDI occurs in a post-Roman inscription found near Yarrow Kirk in Selkirkshire. It is worthy of note that the modification of Nūdo into Lūdo must have taken place comparatively early—not improbably while the language was still Goidelic—as we seem to have a survival of the name in that of Lydney itself.

It is very possible that we have Lūdo, Ỻuđ, also in Porthluđ; which Geoffrey of Monmouth gives, iii. 20, as the Welsh for Ludesgata or Ludgate, in London, which gate, according to him, was called after an ancient king of Britain named Lud. He seems to have been using an ancient tradition, and there would be nothing improbable in the conjecture that Geoffrey’s Lud was our Ỻuđ, and that the great water divinity of that name had another sanctuary on the hill by the Thames, somewhere near the present site of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and occupying a post as it were prophetic of Britain’s rule of the water-ways in later times.

Perhaps as one seems to find traces of Nudons from the estuary of the Thames to that of the Severn and thence to Ireland, one may conclude that the god was one of the divinities worshipped by the Goidels. With regard to the Brythonic Celts, there is nothing to suggest that he belonged also to them except in the sense of his having been probably adopted by them from the Goidels. It might be further suggested that the Goidels themselves had in the first instance adopted him from the pre-Celtic natives, but in that case a goddess would have been rather more probable[41]. In fact in the case of the Severn we seem to have a trace of such a goddess in the Sabrina, Old Welsh Habren, now Hafren, so called after a princess whom Geoffrey, ii. 5, represents drowned in the river: she may have been the pre-Celtic goddess of the Severn, and the name corresponding to Welsh Hafren occurs in Ireland in the form of Sabrann, an old name of the river Lee that flows through Cork. Similarly one now reads sometimes of Father Thames after the fashion of classic phraseology, and in the Celtic period Nudons may have been closely identified with that river, but the ancient name Tămēsa or Tămēsis[42] was decidedly feminine, and it was, most likely, that of the river divinity from times when the pre-Celtic natives held exclusive possession of these islands. On the whole it appears safer to regard Nudons as belonging to a race that had developed on a larger scale the idea of a patriarchal or kingly ruler holding sway over a comparatively wide area. So Nudons may here be treated as ruled out of the discussion as to the origin of the fairies, to which a few paragraphs are now to be devoted.

Speaking of the rank and file of the fairies in rather a promiscuous fashion, one may say that we have found manifold proof of their close connexion with the water-world. Not only have we found them supposed to haunt places bordering on rivers, to live beneath the lakes, or to inhabit certain green isles capable of playing hide-and-seek with the ancient mariner, and perhaps not so very ancient either; but other considerations have been suggested as also pointing unmistakably to the same conclusion. Take for instance the indirect evidence afforded by the method of proceeding to recover an infant stolen by the fairies. One account runs thus: The mother who had lost her baby was to go with a wizard and carry with her to a river the child left her in exchange. The wizard would say, Crap ar y wrach, ‘Grip the hag,’ and the woman would reply, Rhy hwyr, gyfraglach, ‘Too late, you urchin[43].’ Before she uttered those words she had dropped the urchin into the river, and she would then return to her house. By that time the kidnapped child would be found to have come back home[44]. The words here used have not been quite forgotten in Carnarvonshire, but no distinct meaning seems to be attached to them now; at any rate I have failed to find anybody who could explain them. I should however guess that the wizard addressed his words to the fairy urchin with the intention, presumably, that the fairies in the river should at the same time hear and note what was about to be done. Another, and a somewhat more intelligible version, is given in the Gwyliedyđ for 1837, p. 185, by a contributor who publishes it from a manuscript which Lewis Morris began to write in 1724 and finished apparently in 1729. He was a native of Anglesey, and it is probably to that county the story belongs, which he gives to illustrate one of the phonological aspects of certain kinds of Welsh. That account differs from the one just cited in that it introduces no wizard, but postulates two fairy urchins between whom the dialogue occurs, which is not unusual in our changeling stories: see p. 62. After this explanation I translate Morris’ words thus:—

‘But to return to the question of the words approaching to the nature of the thing intended, there is an old story current among us concerning a woman whose children had been exchanged by the Tylwyth Teg. Whether it is truth or falsehood does not much matter, yet it shows what the men of that age thought concerning the sound of words, and how they fancied that the language of those sprites was of a ghastly and lumpy kind. The story is as follows:—The woman whose two children had been exchanged, chanced to overhear the two fairy heirs, whom she got instead of them, reasoning with one another beyond what became their age and persons. So she picked up the two sham children, one under each arm, in order to go and throw them from a bridge into a river, that they might be drowned as she fancied. But hardly had the one in his fall reached the bottom when he cried out to his comrade in the following words:—

Grippiach greppiach

Dal d’afel yn y wrach,

Hi aeth yn rhowyr ’faglach—

Mi eis i ir mwthlach[45].’

Grippiach Greppiach,

Keep thy hold on the hag.

It got too late, thou urchin—

I fell into the ….

In spite of the obscurity of these words, it is quite clear that it was thought the most natural thing in the world to return the fairies to the river, and no sooner were they dropped there than the right infants were found to have been sent home.

The same thing may be learned also from the story of the Curse of Pantannas, pp. 187–8 above; for when the time of the fairies’ revenge is approaching, the merry party gathered together at Pantannas are frightened by a piercing voice rising from a black and cauldron-like pool in the river; and after a while they hear it a second time rising above the noise of the river as it cascades over the shoulder of a neighbouring rock. Shortly afterwards an ugly, diminutive woman appears on the table near the window, and had it not been for the rudeness of one of those present she would have disclosed the future to them, but, as it was, she said very little in a vague way and went away offended; but as long as she was there the voice from the river was silent. Here we have the Welsh counterpart of the ben síde, pronounced banshee in Anglo-Irish, and meaning a fairy woman who is supposed to appear to certain Irish families before deaths or other misfortunes about to befall them. It is doubtless to some such fairy persons the voices belong, which threaten vengeance on the heir of Pantannas and on the wicked prince and his descendants previous to the cataclysm which brings a lake into the place of a doomed city: witness such cases as those of Ỻynclys, Syfađon, and Kenfig.

The last mentioned deserves some further scrutiny; and I take this opportunity of referring the reader back to pp. 403–4, in order to direct his attention to the fact that the voice so closely identifies itself with the wronged family that it speaks in the first person, as it cries, ‘Vengeance is come on him who murdered my father of the ninth generation!’ Now it is worthy of remark that the same personifying is also characteristic of the Cyhiraeth[46]. This spectral female used to be oftener heard than seen; but her blood-freezing shriek was as a rule to be heard when she came to a cross-road or to water, in which she splashed with her hands. At the same time she would make the most doleful noise and exclaim, in case the frightened hearer happened to be a wife, Fy ngwr, fy ngwr! ‘my husband, my husband!’ If it was the man the exclamation would be, Fy ngwraig, fy ngwraig! ‘my wife, my wife!’ Or in either case it might be, Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach! ‘my child, my child, my little child!’ These cries meant the approaching death of the hearer’s husband, wife, or child, as the case might be; but if the scream was inarticulate it was reckoned probable that the hearer himself was the person foremourned. Sometimes she was supposed to come, like the Irish banshee, in a dark mist to the window of a person who has been long ailing, and to flap her wings against the glass, while repeating aloud his or her name, which was believed to mean that the patient must die[47]. The picture usually given of the Cyhiraeth is of the most repellent kind: tangled hair, long black teeth, wretched, skinny, shrivelled arms of unwonted length out of all proportion to the body. Nevertheless it is, in my opinion, but another aspect of the banshee-like female who intervenes in the story of the Curse of Pantannas. One might perhaps treat both as survivals of a belief in a sort of personification of, or divinity identified with, a family or tribe, but for the fact that such language is emptied of most of its meaning by the abstractions which it would connect with a primitive state of society. So it is preferable, as coming probably near the truth, to say that what we have here is a trace of an ancestress. Such an idea of an ancestress as against that of an ancestor is abundantly countenanced by dim figures like that of the Dôn of the Mabinogion, and of her counterpart, after whom the Tribes of the goddess Donu or Danu[48] are known as Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish literature. But the one who most provokes comparison is the Old Woman of Beare, already mentioned, pp. 393–4: she figures largely in Irish folklore as a hag surviving to see her descendants reckoned by tribes and peoples. It may be only an accident that a poetically wrought legend pictures her not so much interested in the fortunes of her progeny as engaged in bewailing the unattractive appearance of her thin arms and shrivelled hands, together with the general wreck of the beauty which had been hers some time or other centuries before.

However, the evidence of folklore is not of a kind to warrant our building any heavy superstructure of theory on the supposition, that the foundations are firmly held together by a powerful sense of consistency or homogeneity. So I should hesitate to do anything so rash as to pronounce the fairies to be all of one and the same origin: they may well be of several. For instance, there may be those that have grown out of traditions about an aboriginal pre-Celtic race, and some may be the representatives of the ghosts of departed men and women, regarded as one’s ancestors; but there can hardly be any doubt that others, and those possibly not the least interesting, have originated in the demons and divinities—not all of ancestral origin—with which the weird fancy of our remote forefathers peopled lakes and streams, bays and creeks and estuaries. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that the reader is convinced that in the course of this chapter some interesting specimens have, so to say, been caught in their native element, or else in the enjoyment of an amphibious life of mirth and frolic, largely spent hard by sequestered lakes, near placid rivers or babbling brooks.

[1] For most of my information on this subject I have to thank Mr. David Davies, editor of the South Wales Daily Post, published at Swansea. [↑]

[2] I am indebted for this information to Mr. J. Herbert James of Vaynor, who visited Kenfig lately and has called my attention to an article headed ‘The Borough of Kenfig,’ in the Archæologia Cambrensis for 1898: see more especially the maps at pp. 138–42. [↑]

[3] Here the Welsh has a word edafwr, the exact meaning of which escapes me, and I gather from the remarks of local etymologers that no such word is now in use in Glamorgan. [↑]

[4] See the Book of Aberpergwm, printed as Brut y Tywysogion, in the Myvyrian Archaiology, ii. 524; also Morgan’s Antiquarian Survey of East Gower, p. 66, where the incident is given from ‘Brut y Tywysogion, A. D. 1088.’ It is, however, not in what usually passes by the name of Brut y Tywysogion, but comes, as the author kindly informs me, from a volume entitled ‘Brut y Tywysogion, the Gwentian Chronicle of Caradoc of Ỻancarvan, with a translation by the late Aneurin Owen, and printed for the Cambrian Archæological Association, 1863’: see pp. 70–1. [↑]

[5] For this also I have to thank Mr. Herbert James, who recently inspected the spot with Mr. Glascodine of Swansea. [↑]

[6] I do not know whether anybody has identified the spot which the writer had in view, or whether the coast of the Severn still offers any feature which corresponds in any way to the description. [↑]

[7] Supposed to be so called after a certain Tegid Foel, or ‘Tegid the Bald,’ of Penỻyn: the name Tegid is the phonetic spelling of what might be expected in writing as Tegyd—it is the Latin Tacitus borrowed, and comes with other Latin names in Pedigree I. of the Cuneđa dynasty; see the Cymmrodor, xi. 170. In point of spelling one may compare Idris for what might be expected written Idrys, of the same pronunciation, for an earlier Iuđrys or Iuđris. [↑]

[8] The translation was made by Thomas Twyne, and published in 1573 under the title of The Breuiary of Britayne, where the passage here given occurs, on fol. 69^b. The original was entitled Commentarioli Britannicæ Descriptionis Fragmentum, published at Cologne in 1572. The original of our passage, fol. 57^a, has Gụynedhia and Llụnclis. The stem ỻwnc of ỻyncaf, ‘I swallow,’ answers, according to Welsh idiom, to the use of what would be in English or Latin a participle. Similarly, when a compound is not used, the verbal noun (in the genitive) is used: thus ‘a feigned illness,’ in Welsh ‘a made illness,’ is saldra gwneyd, literally ‘an indisposition or illness of making.’ So ‘the deuouryng of the Palace’ is incorrect, and based on Ỻwyd’s vorago Palatij instead of Palatium voratum. [↑]

[9] For other occurrences of the name, see the Black Book, fol. 35^a, 52^a, and Morris’ Celtic Remains, where, s. v. Benỻi, the Welsh name of Bardsey, to wit, Ynys Enỻi, is treated by somebody, doubtless rightly, as a shortening of Ynys Fenỻi. [↑]

[10] The meaning of this name is not certain, but it seems to equate with the Irish Fochard, anglicized Faughard, in County Louth: see O’Donovan’s Four Masters, A. D. 1595; also the Book of the Dun Cow, where it is Focherd, genitive Focherda, dative Focheird, fo. 70^b, 73^b, 75^a, 75^b, 76^a, 77^a. [↑]

[11] This is sometimes given as Glannach, which looks like the Goidelic form of the name: witness Giraldus’ Enislannach in his Itin. Kambriæ, ii. 7 (p. 131). [↑]

[12] See Choice Notes, p. 92, and Gerald Griffin’s Poetical and Dramatic Works, p. 106. [↑]

[13] Failing to see this, various writers have tried to claim the honour of owning the bells for Aberteifi, ‘Cardigan,’ or for Abertawe, ‘Swansea’; but no arguments worthy of consideration have been urged on behalf of either place: see Cyfaiỻ yr Aelwyd for 1892, p. 184. [↑]

[14] For some of the data as to the reckoning of the pedigrees and branching of a family, see the first volume of Aneurin Owen’s Ancient Laws—Gwyneđ, III. i. 12–5 (pp. 222–7); Dyfed, II. i. 17–29 (pp. 408–11); Gwent, II. viii. 1–7 (pp. 700–3); also The Welsh People, pp. 230–1. [↑]

[15] See the Book of the Dun Cow, fol. 99^a & seq. [↑]

[16] For instances, the reader may turn back to pp. 154 or 191, but there are plenty more in the foregoing chapters; and he may also consult Howells’ Cambrian Superstitions, pp. 123–8, 141–2, 146. In one case, p. 123, he gives an instance of the contrary kind of imagination: the shepherd who joined a fairy party on Frenni Fach was convinced, when his senses and his memory returned, that, ‘although he thought he had been absent so many years, he had been only so many minutes.’ The story has the ordinary setting; but can it be of popular origin? The Frenni Fach is a part of the mountain known as the Frenni Fawr, in the north-east of Pembrokeshire; the names mean respectively the Little Breni, and the Great Breni. The obsolete word breni meant, in Old Welsh, the prow of a ship; local habit tends, however, to the solecism of Brenin Fawr, with brenin, ‘king,’ qualified by an adjective mutated feminine; but people at a distance who call it Frenni Fawr, pronounce the former vocable with nn. Lastly, Y Vrevi Vaỽr occurs in Maxen’s Dream in the Red Book (Oxford Mab. p. 89); but in the White Book (in the Peniarth collection), col. 187, the proper name is written Freni: for this information I have to thank Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans. [↑]

[17] It is right to say that another account is given in the Rennes Dindṡenchas, published by Stokes in the Revue Celtique, xvi. 164, namely, that Laiglinne with fifty warriors ‘came to the well of Dera son of Scera. A wave burst over them and drowned Laiglinne with his fifty warriors, and thereof a lake was made. Hence we say Loch Laiglinni, Laiglinne’s Lake.’ [↑]

[18] The Oxford Mabinogion, p. 224, and Guest’s, i. 343. [↑]

[19] See Afanc in the Geiriadur of Silvan Evans, who cites instances in point. [↑]

[20] See the Revue Celtique, i. 257, and my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 92–3. [↑]

[21] The Four Masters, A.M. 3520. [↑]

[22] In another version Campbell had found it to be sand and nothing else. [↑]

[23] As to this incident of a girl and a supernatural, Campbell says that he had heard it in the Isle of Man also, and elsewhere. [↑]

[24] See the Revue Celtique, ii. 197. He was also called Labraid Longsech, and Labraid Longsech Lorc. The explanation of Labraid Lorc is possibly that it was originally Labraid Morc, and that the fondness for alliteration brought it into line as Labraid Lorc: compare Ỻûđ Ỻaweraint in Welsh for Nûđ Ỻaweraint. This is not disproved by the fact that Labraid Lorc’s grandfather is said to have been called Loegaire Lorc: Loegaire Lorc and Labraid Lorc are rather to be regarded perhaps as duplicates of the same original. [↑]

[25] See my Arthurian Legend, p. 70; also Hibbert Lectures, p. 590. [↑]

[26] The original has in these passages respectively siblais a fual corbo thipra, ‘minxit urinam suam so that it was a spring’; ar na siblad a fúal ar na bad fochond báis doib, ‘ne mingat urinam suam lest it should be the cause of death to them’; and silis, ‘minxit,’ fo. 39b. For a translation of the whole story see Dr. O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica, pp. 265–9; also Joyce’s Old Celtic Romances, pp. 97–105. [↑]

[27] See the story in Dr. O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica, pp. 292–311. [↑]

[28] See Stengel’s edition of li Romans de Durmart le Galois (Tübingen, 1873), lines 4185–340, and my Arthurian Legend, pp. 68–9. [↑]

[29] See Williams’ Scint Greal, pp. 60–1, 474–5; Nutt’s Holy Grail, p. 44; and my Arthurian Legend, pp. 69–70. [↑]

[30] Barđoniaeth D. ab Gwilym, poem 183. A similar descent of Blodeuweđ’s appears implied in the following englyn—one of two—by Anthony Powel, who died in 1618: it is given by Taliesin ab Iolo in his essay on the Neath Valley, entitled Traethawd ar Gywreineđ, Hynafiaeth, a hen Bendefigion Glynn Neđ (Aberdare, 1886), p. 15:—

Crug ael, carn gadarn a godwyd yn fryn,

Yn hen fraenwaith bochlwyd;

Main a’i ỻuđ man y ỻađwyd,

Merch hoewen loer Meirchion lwyd.

It refers, with six other englynion by other authors, to a remarkable rock called Craig y Đinas, with which Taliesin associated a cave where Arthur or Owen Lawgoch and his men are supposed, according to him, to enjoy a secular sleep, and it implies that Blodeuweđ, whose end in the Mabinogi of Mâth was to be converted into an owl, was, according to another account, overwhelmed by Craig y Đinas. It may be Englished somewhat as follows:

Heaped on a brow, a mighty cairn built like a hill,

Like ancient work rough with age, grey-cheeked;

Stones that confine her where she was slain,

Grey Meirchion’s daughter quick and bright as the moon.

[↑]

[31] This comes from the late series of Triads, iii. 10, where Merlin’s nine companions are called naw beirđ cylfeirđ: cylfeirđ should be the plural of cylfarđ, which must be the same word as the Irish culbard, name of one of the bardic grades in Ireland. [↑]

[32] For some more remarks on this subject generally, see my Arthurian Legend, chapter xv, on the ‘Isles of the Dead.’ [↑]

[33] See his Itinerarium Kambriæ, ii. 11 (p. 139); also my Celtic Britain, p. 68, and Arthurian Legend, p. 364. [↑]

[34] From the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, i. 302. [↑]

[35] I regard nid kywiw as a corruption of ni chywiw from cyf-yw, an instance of the verb corresponding to cymod (= cym-bod), ‘peace, conciliation.’ The preterite has, in the Oxford Bruts, A.D. 1217 (p. 358), been printed kynni for what one may read kymu: the words would then be y kymu reinald y breỽys ar brenhin, ‘that Reginald de Breos was reconciled with the king, or settled matters with him.’ [↑]

[36] See the Book of Taliessin, poem xxx, in Skene’s Four Ancient Books, ii. 181; also Guest’s Mabinogion, ii. 354, and the Brython for 1860, p. 372^b, where more than one article of similar capacity of distinguishing brave men from cowards is mentioned. [↑]

[37] See Dugdale’s Monasticon, v. 672, where they are printed Dwynech and Dwynaur respectively. [↑]

[38] See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 649–50. [↑]

[39] A full account of them will be found in a volume devoted to them, and entitled Roman Antiquities at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, being a posthumous work of the Rev. W. Hiley Bathurst, with Notes by C. W. King, London, 1879. See also an article entitled ‘Das Heiligtum des Nodon,’ by Dr. Hübner in the Jahrbücher des Vereins von Alterthumsfreunden im Rheinlande, lxvii. pp. 29–46, where several things in Mr. King’s book are criticized. [↑]

[40] See my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 122, 125. [↑]

[41] On this subject, see The Welsh People, especially pp. 54–61. [↑]

[42] Why our dictionary makers have taken into their heads to treat it as Tamĕsis I know not. The Welsh is Tafwys with a diphthong regularly representing an earlier long e or ei in the second syllable. There is, as far as I know, no reason to suppose Tafwys an invention, rather than a genuine vocable of the same origin as the name of the Glamorganshire river Taff, in Welsh Taf, which is also the name of the river emptying itself at Laugharne, in Carmarthenshire. Tafwys, however, does not appear to occur in any old Welsh document; but no such weakness attaches to the testimony of the French Tamise, which could hardly come from Tamĕsis: compare also the place-name Tamise near the Scheldt in East Flanders; this, however, may be of a wholly different origin. [↑]

[43] A more difficult version has been sent me by Dewi Glan Ffrydlas, of Bethesda: Caffed y wrach, ‘Let him seize the hag’; Methu’r cryfaglach, ‘You have failed, urchin.’ But he has not been able to get any explanation of the words at the Penrhyn Quarries. Cryfaglach is also the form in Mur y Cryfaglach, ‘the Urchin’s Wall,’ in Jenkins’ Beđ Gelert, p. 249. He informs me that this is the name of an old ruin on an elevated spot some twenty or thirty yards from a swift brook, and not far in a south-south-easterly direction from Sir Edward Watkin’s chalet. [↑]

[44] For this I am indebted to Mr. Wm. Davies (p. 147 above), who tells me that he copied the original from Chwedlau a Thrađodiadau Gwyneđ, ‘Gwyneđ Tales and Traditions,’ published in a periodical, which I have not been able to consult, called Y Gordofigion, for the year 1873. [↑]

[45] The meaning of the word mwthlach is doubtful, as it is now current in Gwyneđ only in the sense of a soft, doughy, or puffy person who is all of a heap, so to say. Pughe gives mwythlan and mwythlen with similar significations. But mwthlach would seem to have had some such a meaning in the doggerel as that of rough ground or a place covered with a scrubby, tangled growth. It is possibly the same word as the Irish mothlach, ‘rough, bushy, ragged, shaggy’; see the Vision of Laisrén, edited by Professor K. Meyer, in the Otia Merseiana, pp. 114, 117. [↑]

[46] The account here given of the Cyhiraeth is taken partly from Choice Notes, pp. 31–2, and partly from Howells, pp. 31–4, 56–7, who appears to have got uncertain in his narrative as to the sex of the Cyhiraeth; but there is no reason whatsoever for regarding it as either male or female—the latter alone is warranted, as he might have gathered from her being called y Gyhiraeth, ‘the Cyhiraeth,’ never y Cyhiraeth as far as I know. In North Cardiganshire the spectre intended is known only by another name, that of Gwrach y Rhibyn, but y Gyhiraeth or yr hen Gyhiraeth is a common term of abuse applied to a lanky, cadaverous person, both there and in Gwyneđ; in books, however, it is found sometimes meaning a phantom funeral. The word cyhiraeth would seem to have originally meant a skeleton with cyhyrau, ‘sinews,’ but no flesh. However, cyhyrau, singular cyhyr, would be more correctly written with an i; for the words are pronounced—even in Gwyneđ—cyhir, cyhirau. The spelling cyhyraeth corresponds to no pronunciation I have ever heard of the word; but there is a third spelling, cyheuraeth, which corresponds to an actual cyhoereth or cyhoyreth, the colloquial pronunciation to be heard in parts of South Wales: I cannot account for this variant. Gwrach y Rhibyn means the Hag of the Rhibyn, and rhibyn usually means a row, streak, a line—ma’ nhw’n mynd yn un rhibyn, ‘they are going in a line.’ But what exactly Gwrach y Rhibyn should connote I am unable to say. I may mention, however, on the authority of Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans, that in Mid-Cardiganshire the term Gwrach y Rhibyn means a long roll or bustle of fern tied with ropes of straw and placed along the middle of the top of a hayrick. This is to form a ridge over which and on which the thatch is worked and supported: gwrach unqualified is, I am told, used in this sense in Glamorganshire. Something about the Gwrach sprite will be found in the Brython for 1860, p. 23^a, while a different account is given in Jenkins’ Beđ Gelert, pp. 80–1. [↑]

[47] This statement I give from Choice Notes, p. 32; but I must confess that I am sceptical as to the ‘wings of a leathery and bat-like substance,’ or of any other substance whatsoever. [↑]

[48] For more about her and similar ancestral personages, see The Welsh People, pp. 54–61. [↑]

CHAPTER VIII

Welsh Cave Legends

Ἐκεῖ μέντοι μίαν εἶναι νῆσον, ἐν ᾗ τὸν Κρόνον καθεῖρχθαι φρουρούμενον ὑπὸ τοῦ Βριάρεω καθεύδοντα· δεσμὸν γὰρ αὐτῷ τὸν ὕπνον μεμηχανῆσθαι, πολλοὺς δὲ περὶ αὐτὸν εἶναι δαίμονας ὀπαδοὺς καὶ θεράποντας.—Plutarch.

In previous chapters sundry allusions have been made to treasure caves besides that of Marchlyn Mawr, which has been given at length on pp. 234–7 above. Here follow some more, illustrative of this kind of folklore prevalent in Wales: they are difficult to classify, but most of them mention treasure with or without sleeping warriors guarding it. The others are so miscellaneous as to baffle any attempt to characterize them generally and briefly. Take for instance a cave in the part of Rhiwarth rock nearest to Cwm Ỻanhafan, in the neighbourhood of Ỻangynog in Montgomeryshire. Into that, according to Cynđelw in the Brython for 1860, p. 57, some men penetrated as far as the pound of candles lasted, with which they had provided themselves; but it appears to be tenanted by a hag who is always busily washing clothes in a brass pan.

Or take the following, from J. H. Roberts’ essay, as given in Welsh in Edwards’ Cymru for 1897, p. 190: it reminds one of an ordinary fairy tale, but it is not quite like any other which I happen to know:—In the western end of the Arennig Fawr there is a cave: in fact there are several caves there, and some of them are very large too; but there is one to which the finger of tradition points as an ancient abode of the Tylwyth Teg. About two generations ago, the shepherds of that country used to be enchanted by one of them called Mary, who was remarkable for her beauty. Many an effort was made to catch her or to meet her face to face, but without success, as she was too quick on her feet. She used to show herself day after day, and she might be seen, with her little harp, climbing the bare slopes of the mountain. In misty weather when the days were longest in summer, the music she made used to be wafted by the breeze to the ears of the love-sick shepherds. Many a time had the boys of the Fiỻtir Gerrig heard sweet singing when passing the cave in the full light of day, but they were subject to some spell, so that they never ventured to enter. But the shepherd of Boch y Rhaiadr had a better view of the fairies one Allhallows night (ryw noson Calangaeaf) when returning home from a merry-making at Amnođ. On the sward in front of the cave what should he see but scores of the Tylwyth Teg singing and dancing! He never saw another assembly in his life so fair, and great was the trouble he had to resist being drawn into their circles.

Let us now come to the treasure caves, and begin with Ogof Arthur, ‘Arthur’s Cave,’ in the southern side of Mynyđ y Cnwc[1] in the parish of Ỻangwyfan, on the south-western coast of Anglesey. The foot of Mynyđ y Cnwc is washed by the sea, and the mouth of the cave is closed by its waters at high tide, but the cave, which is spacious, has a vent-hole in the side of the mountain[2]. So it is at any rate reported in the Brython for 1859, p. 138, by a writer who explored the place, though not to the end of the mile which it is said to measure in length. He mentions a local tradition, that it contains various treasures, and that it temporarily afforded Arthur shelter in the course of his wars with the Gwyđelod or Goidels. But he describes also a cromlech on the top of Mynyđ y Cnwc, around which there was a circle of stones, while within the latter there lies buried, it is believed, an iron chest full of ancient gold. Various attempts are said to have been made by the more greedy of the neighbouring inhabitants to dig it up, but they have always been frightened away by portents. Here then the guardians of the treasure are creatures of a supernatural kind, as in many other instances, and especially that of Dinas Emrys to be mentioned presently.

Next comes the first of a group of cave legends involving treasure entrusted to the keeping of armed warriors. It is taken from Elijah Waring’s Recollections and Anecdotes of Edward Williams, Iolo Morgannwg (London, 1850), pp. 95–8, where it is headed ‘A popular Tale in Glamorgan, by Iolo Morgannwg’; a version of it in Welsh will be found in the Brython for 1858, p. 162, but Waring’s version is in several respects better, and I give it in his words:—‘A Welshman walking over London Bridge, with a neat hazel staff in his hand, was accosted by an Englishman, who asked him whence he came. “I am from my own country,” answered the Welshman, in a churlish tone. “Do not take it amiss, my friend,” said the Englishman; “if you will only answer my questions, and take my advice, it will be of greater benefit to you than you imagine. That stick in your hand grew on a spot under which are hid vast treasures of gold and silver; and if you remember the place, and can conduct me to it, I will put you in possession of those treasures.”

‘The Welshman soon understood that the stranger was what he called a cunning man, or conjurer, and for some time hesitated, not willing to go with him among devils, from whom this magician must have derived his knowledge; but he was at length persuaded to accompany him into Wales; and going to Craig-y-Dinas [Rock of the Fortress], the Welshman pointed out the spot whence he had cut the stick. It was from the stock or root of a large old hazel: this they dug up, and under it found a broad flat stone. This was found to close up the entrance into a very large cavern, down into which they both went. In the middle of the passage hung a bell, and the conjurer earnestly cautioned the Welshman not to touch it. They reached the lower part of the cave, which was very wide, and there saw many thousands of warriors lying down fast asleep in a large circle, their heads outwards, every one clad in bright armour, with their swords, shields, and other weapons lying by them, ready to be laid hold on in an instant, whenever the bell should ring and awake them. All the arms were so highly polished and bright, that they illumined the cavern, as with the light of ten thousand flames of fire. They saw amongst the warriors one greatly distinguished from the rest by his arms, shield, battle-axe, and a crown of gold set with the most precious stones, lying by his side.

‘In the midst of this circle of warriors they saw two very large heaps, one of gold, the other of silver. The magician told the Welshman that he might take as much as he could carry away of either the one or the other, but that he was not to take from both the heaps. The Welshman loaded himself with gold: the conjurer took none, saying that he did not want it, that gold was of no use but to those who wanted knowledge, and that his contempt of gold had enabled him to acquire that superior knowledge and wisdom which he possessed. In their way out he cautioned the Welshman again not to touch the bell, but if unfortunately he should do so, it might be of the most fatal consequence to him, as one or more of the warriors would awake, lift up his head, and ask if it was day. “Should this happen,” said the cunning man, “you must, without hesitation, answer No, sleep thou on; on hearing which he will again lay down his head and sleep.” In their way up, however, the Welshman, overloaded with gold, was not able to pass the bell without touching it—it rang—one of the warriors raised up his head, and asked, “Is it day?” “No,” answered the Welshman promptly, “it is not, sleep thou on;” so they got out of the cave, laid down the stone over its entrance, and replaced the hazel tree. The cunning man, before he parted from his companion, advised him to be economical in the use of his treasure; observing that he had, with prudence, enough for life: but that if by unforeseen accidents he should be again reduced to poverty, he might repair to the cave for more; repeating the caution, not to touch the bell if possible, but if he should, to give the proper answer, that it was not day, as promptly as possible. He also told him that the distinguished person they had seen was Arthur, and the others his warriors; and they lay there asleep with their arms ready at hand, for the dawn of that day when the Black Eagle and the Golden Eagle should go to war, the loud clamour of which would make the earth tremble so much, that the bell would ring loudly, and the warriors awake, take up their arms, and destroy all the enemies of the Cymry, who afterwards should repossess the Island of Britain, re-establish their own king and government at Caerỻeon, and be governed with justice, and blessed with peace so long as the world endures.

‘The time came when the Welshman’s treasure was all spent: he went to the cave, and as before overloaded himself. In his way out he touched the bell: it rang: a warrior lifted up his head, asking if it was day, but the Welshman, who had covetously overloaded himself, being quite out of breath with labouring under his burden, and withal struck with terror, was not able to give the necessary answer; whereupon some of the warriors got up, took the gold away from him, and beat him dreadfully. They afterwards threw him out, and drew the stone after them over the mouth of the cave. The Welshman never recovered the effects of that beating, but remained almost a cripple as long as he lived, and very poor. He often returned with some of his friends to Craig-y-Dinas; but they could never afterwards find the spot, though they dug over, seemingly, every inch of the hill.’

This story of Iolo’s closes with a moral, which I omit in order to make room for what he says in a note to the effect, that there are two hills in Glamorganshire called Craig-y-Dinas—nowadays the more usual pronunciation in South Wales is Craig y Đinas—one in the parish of Ỻantrissant and the other in Ystrad Dyfodwg. There was also a hill so called, Iolo says, in the Vale of Towy, not far from Carmarthen. He adds that in Glamorgan the tale is related of the Carmarthenshire hill, while in Carmarthenshire the hill is said to be in Glamorgan. According to Iolo’s son, Taliesin Williams[3] or Taliesin ab Iolo, the Craig y Đinas with which the Cave of Arthur (or Owen Lawgoch) is associated is the one on the borders of Glamorgan and Brecknockshire. That is also the opinion of my friend Mr. Reynolds, who describes this craig and dinas as a very bold rocky eminence at the top of the Neath Valley, near Pont Neđ Fechan. He adds that in this tale as related to his mother ‘in her very young days’ by a very old woman, known as Mari Shencin y Clochyđ ‘Jenkin the Sexton’s Mary,’ the place of Arthur was taken by Owen Lawgoch, ‘Owen of the Red Hand,’ of whom more anon.

The next Arthurian story is not strictly in point, for it makes no allusion to treasure; but as it is otherwise so similar to Iolo’s tale I cannot well avoid introducing it here. It is included in the composite story of Bwca ’r Trwyn, ‘the Bogie of the Nose,’ written out for me in Gwentian Welsh by Mr. Craigfryn Hughes. The cave portion relates how a Monmouthshire farmer, whose house was grievously troubled by the bogie, set out one morning to call on a wizard who lived near Caerleon, and how he on his way came up with a very strange and odd man who wore a three-cornered hat. They fell into conversation, and the strange man asked the farmer if he should like to see something of a wonder. He answered he would. ‘Come with me then,’ said the wearer of the cocked hat, ‘and you shall see what nobody else alive to-day has seen.’ When they had reached the middle of a wood this spiritual guide sprang from horseback and kicked a big stone near the road. It instantly moved aside to disclose the mouth of a large cave; and now said he to the farmer, ‘Dismount and bring your horse in here: tie him up alongside of mine, and follow me so that you may see something which the eyes of man have not beheld for centuries.’ The farmer, having done as he was ordered, followed his guide for a long distance: they came at length to the top of a flight of stairs, where two huge bells were hanging. ‘Now mind,’ said the warning voice of the strange guide, ‘not to touch either of those bells.’ At the bottom of the stairs there was a vast chamber with hundreds of men lying at full length on the floor, each with his head reposing on the stock of his gun. ‘Have you any notion who these men are?’ ‘No,’ replied the farmer, ‘I have not, nor have I any idea what they want in such a place as this.’ ‘Well,’ said the guide, ‘these are Arthur’s thousand soldiers reposing and sleeping till the Kymry have need of them. Now let us get out as fast as our feet can carry us.’ When they reached the top of the stairs, the farmer somehow struck his elbow against one of the bells so that it rang, and in the twinkling of an eye all the sleeping host rose to their feet shouting together, ‘Are the Kymry in straits?’ ‘Not yet: sleep you on,’ replied the wearer of the cocked hat, whereupon they all dropped down on their guns to resume their slumbers at once. ‘These are the valiant men,’ he went on to say, ‘who are to turn the scale in favour of the Kymry when the time comes for them to cast the Saxon yoke off their necks and to recover possession of their country.’ When the two had returned to their horses at the mouth of the cave, his guide said to the farmer, ‘Now go in peace, and let me warn you on the pain of death not to utter a syllable about what you have seen for the space of a year and a day: if you do, woe awaits you.’ After he had moved the stone back to its place the farmer lost sight of him. When the year had lapsed the farmer happened to pass again that way, but, though he made a long and careful search, he failed completely to find the stone at the mouth of the cave.

To return to Iolo’s yarn, one may say that there are traces of his story as at one time current in Merionethshire, but with the variation that the Welshman met the wizard not on London Bridge but at a fair at Bala, and that the cave was somewhere in Merioneth: the hero was Arthur, and the cave was known as Ogof Arthur. Whether any such cave is still known I cannot tell; but a third and interestingly told version is given in the Brython for 1858, p. 179, by the late Gwynionyđ, who gives the story as the popular belief in his native parish of Troed yr Aur, halfway between Newcastle Emlyn and Aber Porth, in South Cardiganshire. In this last version the hero is not Arthur, but the later man as follows:—Not the least of the wonders of imagination wont to exercise the minds of the old people was the story of Owen Lawgoch. One sometimes hears sung in our fairs the words:—

Yr Owain hwn yw Harri ’r Nawfed

Syđ yn trigo ’ngwlad estronied, &c.

This Owen is Henry the Ninth,

Who tarries in a foreign land, &c.

But this Owen Lawgoch, the national deliverer of our ancient race of Brythons, did not, according to the Troed yr Aur people, tarry in a foreign land, but somewhere in Wales, not far from Offa’s Dyke. They used to say that one Dafyđ Meirig of Bettws Bledrws, having quarrelled with his father, left for Ỻoegr[4], ‘England.’ When he had got a considerable distance from home, he struck a bargain with a cattle dealer to drive a herd of his beasts to London. Somewhere at the corner of a vast moor Dafyđ cut a very remarkable hazel stick; for a good staff is as essential to the vocation of a good drover as teeth are to a dog. So while his comrades had had their sticks broken before reaching London, Dafyđ’s remained as it was, and whilst they were conversing together on London Bridge a stranger accosted Dafyđ, wishing to know where he had obtained that wonderful stick. He replied that it was in Wales he had had it, and on the stranger’s assuring him that there were wondrous things beneath the tree on which it had grown, they both set out for Wales. When they reached the spot and dug a little they found that there was a great hollow place beneath. As night was spreading out her sable mantle, and as they were getting deeper, what should they find but stairs easy to step and great lamps illumining the vast chamber! They descended slowly, with mixed emotions of dread and invincible desire to see the place. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they found themselves near a large table, at one end of which they beheld sitting a tall man of about seven foot. He occupied an old-fashioned chair and rested his head on his left hand, while the other hand, all red, lay on the table and grasped a great sword. He was withal enjoying a wondrously serene sleep; and at his feet on the floor lay a big dog. After casting a glance at them, the wizard said to Dafyđ: ‘This is Owen Lawgoch, who is to sleep on till a special time, when he will wake and reign over the Brythons. That weapon in his hand is one of the swords of the ancient kings of Prydain. No battle was ever lost in which that sword was used.’ Then they moved slowly on, gazing at the wonders of that subterranean chamber; and they beheld everywhere the arms of ages long past, and on the table thousands of gold pieces bearing the images of the different kings of Prydain. They got to understand that it was permitted them to take a handful of each, but not to put any in their purses. They both visited the cave several times, but at last Dafyđ put in his purse a little of the gold bearing the image of one of the bravest of Owen’s ancestors. But after coming out again they were never able any more to find Owen’s subterranean palace.

Those are, says Gwynionyđ, the ideas cherished by the old people of Troed yr Aur in Keredigion, and the editor adds a note that the same sort of story is current among the peasantry of Cumberland, and perhaps of other parts of Britain. This remark will at once recall to the reader’s mind the well-known verses[5] of the Scottish poet, Leyden, as to Arthur asleep in a cave in the Eildon Hills in the neighbourhood of Melrose Abbey. But he will naturally ask why London Bridge is introduced into this and Iolo’s story, and in answer I have to say, firstly, that London Bridge formerly loomed very large in the popular imagination as one of the chief wonders of London, itself the most wonderful city in the world. Such at any rate was the notion cherished as to London and London Bridge by the country people of Wales, even within my own memory. Secondly, the fashion of selecting London Bridge as the opening scene of a treasure legend had been set, perhaps, by a widely spread English story to the following effect:—A certain pedlar of Swaffham in Norfolk had a dream, that if he went and stood on London Bridge he would have very joyful news; as the dream was doubled and trebled he decided to go. So he stood on the bridge two or three days, when at last a shopkeeper, observing that he loitered there so long, neither offering anything for sale nor asking for alms, inquired of him as to his business. The pedlar told him his errand, and was heartily laughed at by the shopkeeper, who said that he had dreamt that night that he was at a place called Swaffham in Norfolk, and that if he only dug under a great oak tree in an orchard behind a pedlar’s house there, he would find a vast treasure; but the place was utterly unknown to him, and he was not such a fool as to follow a silly dream. No, he was wiser than that; so he advised the pedlar to go home to mind his business. The pedlar very quietly took in the words as to the dream, and hastened home to Swaffham, where he found the treasure in his own orchard. The rest of the story need not be related here, as it is quite different from the Welsh ones, which the reader has just had brought under his notice[6].

To return to Owen Lawgoch, for we have by no means done with him: on the farm of Cil yr Ychen there stands a remarkable limestone hill called y Đinas, ‘the Fortress,’ hardly a mile to the north of the village of Ỻandybïe, in Carmarthenshire. This dinas and the lime-kilns that are gradually consuming it are to be seen on the right from the railway as you go from Ỻandeilo to Ỻandybïe. It is a steep high rock which forms a very good natural fortification, and in the level area on the top is the mouth of a very long cavern, known as Ogo’r Đinas, ‘the Dinas Cave.’ The entrance into it is small and low, but it gradually widens out, becoming in one place lofty and roomy with several smaller branch caves leading out of it; and it is believed that some of them connect Ogo’r Đinas with smaller caves at Pant y Ỻyn, ‘the Lake Hollow,’ where, as the name indicates, there is a small lake a little higher up: both Ogo’r Đinas and Pant y Ỻyn are within a mile of the village of Ỻandybïe[7]. Now I am informed, in a letter written in 1893 by one native, that the local legend about Ogo’r Đinas is that Owen Lawgoch and his men are lying asleep in it, while another native, Mr. Fisher, writing in the same year, but on the authority of somewhat later hearsay, expresses himself as follows:—‘I remember hearing two traditions respecting Ogo’r Đinas: (1) that King Arthur and his warriors lie sleeping in it with their right hands clasping the hilts of their drawn swords ready to encounter anyone who may venture to disturb their repose—is there not a dinas somewhere in Carnarvonshire with a similar legend? (2) That Owen Lawgoch lived in it some time or other: that is all that I remember having heard about him in connection with this ogof.’ Mr. Fisher proceeds, moreover, to state that it is said of an ogof at Pant y Ỻyn, that Owen Lawgoch and his men on a certain occasion took refuge in it, where they were shut up and starved to death. He adds that, however this may be, it is a fact that in the year 1813 ten or more human skeletons of unusual stature were discovered in an ogof there[8].

To this I may append a reference to the Geninen for 1896, p. 84, where Mr. Ỻeufer Thomas, who is also a native of the district, alludes to the local belief that Owen Lawgoch and his men are asleep, as already mentioned, in the cave of Pant y Ỻyn, and that they are to go on sleeping there till a trumpet blast and the clash of arms on Rhiw Goch rouse them to sally forth to combat the Saxons and to conquer, as set forth by Howells: see p. 381 above. It is needless to say that there is no reason, as will be seen presently, to suppose Owen Lawgoch to have ever been near any of the caves to which allusion has here been made; but that does not appreciably detract from the fascination of the legend which has gathered round his personality; and in passing I may be allowed to express my surprise that in such stories as these the earlier Owen has not been eclipsed by Owen Glyndwr: there must be some historical reason why that has not taken place. Can it be that a habit of caution made Welshmen speak of Owen Lawgoch when the other Owen was really meant?

The passage I have cited from Mr. Fisher’s letter raises the question of a dinas in Carnarvonshire, which that of his native parish recalled to his mind; and this is to be considered next. Doubtless he meant Dinas Emrys formerly called Din Emreis[9], ‘the Fortress of Ambrosius,’ situated near Beđgelert, and known in the neighbourhood simply as y Dinas, ‘the Fort.’ It is celebrated in the Vortigern legend as the place where the dragons had been hidden, that frustrated the building of that king’s castle; and the spot is described in Lewis’ Topographical Dictionary of Wales, in the article on Bethgelart (Beđ-Celert), as an isolated rocky eminence with an extensive top area, which is defended by walls of loose stones, and accessible only on one side. He adds that the entrance appears to have been guarded by two towers, and that within the enclosed area are the foundations of circular buildings of loose stones forming walls of about five feet in thickness. Concerning that Dinas we read in the Brython for 1861, p. 329, a legend to the following effect:—Now after the departure of Vortigern, Myrđin, or Merlin as he is called in English, remained himself in the Dinas for a long time, until, in fact, he went away with Emrys Ben-aur, ‘Ambrosius the Gold-headed’—evidently Aurelius Ambrosius is meant. When he was about to set out with the latter, he put all his treasure and wealth into a crochan aur, ‘a gold cauldron,’ and hid it in a cave in the Dinas, and on the mouth of the cave he rolled a huge stone, which he covered up with earth and sods, so that it was impossible for any one to find it. He intended this wealth to be the property of some special person in a future generation, and it is said that the heir to it is to be a youth with yellow hair and blue eyes. When that one comes near to the Dinas a bell will ring to invite him to the cave, which will open of itself as soon as his foot touches it. Now the fact that some such legend was once currently believed about Beđgelert and Nanhwynain is proved by the curious stories as to various attempts made to find the treasure, and the thunderstorms and portents which used to vanquish the local greed for gold. For several instances in point see the Brython, pp. 329–30; and for others, showing how hidden treasure is carefully reserved for the right sort of heir, see p. 148 above. To prove how widely this idea prevailed in Carnarvonshire, I may add a short story which Mrs. Williams-Ellis of Glasfryn got from the engineer who told her of the sacred eel of Ỻangybi (p. 366):—There was on Pentyrch, the hill above Ỻangybi, he said, a large stone so heavy and fixed so fast in the ground that no horses, no men could move it: it had often been tried. One day, however, a little girl happened to be playing by the stone, and at the touch of her little hand the stone moved. A hoard of coins was found under it, and that at a time when the little girl’s parents happened to be in dire need of it. Search had long been made by undeserving men for treasure supposed to be hidden at that spot; but it was always unsuccessful until the right person touched the stone to move. The failure of the wrong person to secure the treasure, even when discovered, is illustrated by a story given by Mr. Derfel Hughes in his Antiquities of Ỻandegai and Ỻanỻechid, pp. 35–6, to the effect that a servant man, somewhere up among the mountains near Ogwen Lake, chanced to come across the mouth of a cave with abundance of vessels of brass (pres) of every shape and description within it. He went at once and seized one of them, but, alas! it was too heavy for him to stir it. So he resolved to go away and return early on the morrow with a friend to help him; but before going he closed the mouth of the cave with stones and sods so as to leave it safe. While thus engaged he remembered having heard how others had like him found caves and failed to refind them. He could procure nothing readily that would satisfy him as a mark, so it occurred to him to dot his path with the chippings of his stick, which he whittled all the way as he went back until he came to a familiar track: the chips were to guide him back to the cave. So when the morning came he and his friend set out, but when they reached the point where the chips should begin, not one was to be seen: the Tylwyth Teg had picked up every one of them. So that discovery of articles of brass—more probably bronze—was in vain. But, says the writer, it is not fated to be always in vain, for there is a tradition in the valley that it is a Gwyđel, ‘Goidel, Irishman,’ who is to have these treasures, and that it will happen in this wise:—A Gwyđel will come to the neighbourhood to be a shepherd, and one day when he goes up the mountain to see to the sheep, just when it pleases the fates a black sheep with a speckled head will run before him and make straight for the cave: the sheep will go in, with the Gwyđel in pursuit trying to catch him. When the Gwyđel enters he sees the treasures, looks at them with surprise, and takes possession of them; and thus, in some generation to come, the Gwyđyl will have their own restored to them. That is the tradition which Derfel Hughes found in the vale of the Ogwen, and he draws from it the inference which it seems to warrant, in words to the following effect:—Perhaps this shows us that the Gwyđyl had some time or other something to do with these parts, and that we are not to regard as stories without foundations all that is said of that nation; and the sayings of old people to this day show that there is always some spite between our nation and the Gwyđyl. Thus, for instance, he goes on to say, if a man proves changeable, he is said to have become a Gwyđel (Y mae wedi troi’n Wyđel), or if one is very shameless and cheeky he is called a Gwyđel and told to hold his tongue (Taw yr hen Wyđel); and a number of such locutions used by our people proves, he thinks, the former prevalence of much contention between the two sister-nations. Expressions of the kind mentioned by Mr. Hughes are well known in all parts of the Principality, and it is difficult to account for them except on the supposition that Goidels and Brythons lived for a long time face to face, so to say, with one another over large areas in the west of our island.

The next story to be mentioned belongs to the same Snowdonian neighbourhood, and brings us back to Arthur and his Men. For a writer who has already been quoted from the Brython for 1861, p. 331, makes Arthur and his following set out from Dinas Emrys and cross Hafod y Borth mountain for a place above the upper reach of Cwmỻan, called Tregalan, where they found their antagonists. From Tregalan the latter were pushed up the bwlch or pass, towards Cwm Dyli; but when the vanguard of the army with Arthur leading had reached the top of the pass, the enemy discharged a shower of arrows at them. There Arthur fell, and his body was buried in the pass so that no enemy might march that way so long as Arthur’s dust rested there. That, he says, is the story, and there to this day remains in the pass, he asserts, the heap of stones called Carneđ Arthur, ‘Arthur’s Cairn’: the pass is called Bwlch y Saethau, ‘the Pass of the Arrows.’ Then Ogof Ỻanciau Eryri is the subject of the following story given at p. 371 of the same volume:—After Arthur’s death on Bwlch y Saethau, his men ascended to the ridge of the Ỻiweđ and descended thence into a vast cave called Ogof Ỻanciau Eryri, ‘the young Men of Snowdonia’s Cave,’ which is in the precipitous cliff on the left-hand side near the top of Ỻyn Ỻydaw. This is in Cwm Dyli, and there in that cave those warriors are said to be still, sleeping in their armour and awaiting the second coming of Arthur to restore the crown of Britain to the Kymry. For the saying is:—

Ỻancia’ ’Ryri a’u gwyn gyỻ a’i henniỻ hi.

Snowdonia’s youths with their white hazels will win it.

As the local shepherds were one day long ago collecting their sheep on the Ỻiweđ, one sheep fell down to a shelf in this precipice, and when the Cwm Dyli shepherd made his way to the spot he perceived that the ledge of rock on which he stood led to the hidden cave of Ỻanciau Eryri. There was light within: he looked in and beheld a host of warriors without number all asleep, resting on their arms and ready equipped for battle. Seeing that they were all asleep, he felt a strong desire to explore the whole place; but as he was squeezing in he struck his head against the bell hanging in the entrance. It rang so that every corner of the immense cave rang again, and all the warriors woke uttering a terrible shout, which so frightened the shepherd that he never more enjoyed a day’s health; nor has anybody since dared as much as to approach the mouth of the cave.

Thus far the Brython, and I have only to remark that this legend is somewhat remarkable for the fact of its representing the Youths of Eryri sleeping away in their cave without Arthur among them. In fact, that hero is described as buried not very far off beneath a carneđ or cairn on Bwlch y Saethau. As to the exact situation of that cairn, I may say that my attention was drawn some time ago to the following lines by Mr. William Owen, better known as Glaslyn, a living bard bred and born in the district:—

Gerỻaw Carneđ Arthur ar ysgwyđ y Wyđfa

Y gorweđ gweđiỻion y cawr enwog Ricca.

Near Arthur’s Cairn on the shoulder of Snowdon

Lie the remains of the famous giant Ricca.

These words recall an older couplet in a poem by Rhys Goch Eryri, who is said to have died in the year 1420. He was a native of the parish of Beđgelert, and his words in point run thus:—

Ar y drum oer dramawr,

Yno gorweđ Ricca Gawr.

On the ridge cold and vast,

There the Giant Ricca lies.

From this it is clear that Rhys Goch meant that the cairn on the top of Snowdon covered the remains of the giant whose name has been variously written Ricca, Ritta, and Rhita. So I was impelled to ascertain from Glaslyn whether I had correctly understood his lines, and he has been good enough to help me out of some of my difficulties, as I do not know Snowdon by heart, especially the Nanhwynain and Beđgelert side of the mountain:—The cairn on the summit of Snowdon was the Giant’s before it was demolished and made into a sort of tower which existed before the hotel was made. Glaslyn has not heard it called after Ricca’s name, but he states that old people used to call it Carneđ y Cawr, ‘the Giant’s Cairn.’ In 1850 Carneđ Arthur, ‘Arthur’s Cairn,’ was to be seen on the top of Bwlch y Saethau, but he does not know whether it is still so, as he has not been up there since the building of the hotel. Bwlch y Saethau is a lofty shoulder of Snowdon extending in the direction of Nanhwynain, and the distance from the top of Snowdon to it is not great; it would take you half an hour or perhaps a little more to walk from the one carneđ to the other. It is possible to trace Arthur’s march from Dinas Emrys up the slopes of Hafod y Borth, over the shoulder of the Aran and Braich yr Oen to Tregalan—or Cwm Tregalan, as it is now called—but from Tregalan he would have to climb in a north-easterly direction in order to reach Bwlch y Saethau, where he is related to have fallen and to have been interred beneath a cairn. This may be regarded as an ordinary or commonplace account of his death. But the scene suggests a far more romantic picture; for down below was Ỻyn Ỻydaw with its sequestered isle, connected then by means only of a primitive canoe with a shore occupied by men engaged in working the ore of Eryri. Nay with the eyes of Malory we seem to watch Bedivere making, with Excalibur in his hands, his three reluctant journeys to the lake ere he yielded it to the arm emerging from the deep. We fancy we behold how ‘euyn fast by the banke houed a lytyl barge wyth many fayr ladyes in hit,’ which was to carry the wounded Arthur away to the accompaniment of mourning and loud lamentation; but the legend of the Marchlyn bids us modify Malory’s language as to the barge containing many ladies all wearing black hoods, and take our last look at the warrior departing rather in a coracle with three wondrously fair women attending to his wounds[10].

Some further notes on Snowdon, together with a curious account of the Cave of Ỻanciau Eryri, have been kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. Ellis Pierce (Elis[11] o’r Nant) of Dolwyđelan:—In the uppermost part of the hollow called Cwmỻan 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[12] 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 Ỻanciau Eryri, which nobody can now find, the slope down to it begins from the top of the Ỻiweđ, 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 Ỻanberis side of the mountain. She often heard of Rhita[13] 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 Wyđfa Rhita, more correctly Gwyđfa Rita, ‘Rhita’s Gwyđfa.’ 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[14], 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 ‘Gwyđfa 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 Beđgelert. On starting he would say to his family, Mi a’i hyibio troed Gwyđfa Rhita ag mi đo’n ol rwbrud cin nos, or sometimes foru. That is, ‘I’ll go round the foot of Rhita’s Gwyđfa 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 Gwyđfa 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 Wyđfa, 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[15], ‘the Stone of the Eagle,’ mentioned in the boundaries of the lands on Snowdon granted to the Abbey of Aberconwy in Ỻewelyn’s charter, where also Snowdon mountain is called Wedua vawr, ‘the Great Gwyđfa.’ Now, as already suggested, the word gwyđfa takes us back to Rhita’s Carneđ 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 Maredyđ. 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 ỽydua[16]), 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 Carneđ Lywelyn, ‘Ỻewelyn’s Cairn,’ that Rhita’s Cairn was raised. He deserves more attention, however, when he places Carneđ Drystan, ‘Tristan or Tristram’s Cairn,’ on a spur of that mountain, to wit, towards the east above Ffynnon y Ỻyffaint[17]. 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 Ỻyn Gwynain, about a mile and a half above Dinas Emrys. In the Ỻwyd 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[18] 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,

A’i đewrion syđ o’i đeutu,

A’u gafael ar y cleđ:

Pan đaw yn đyđ yn Nghymru,

Daw Arthur Fawr i fynu

Yn fyw—yn fyw o’i feđ!

Great Arthur still is sleeping,

His warriors all around him,

With grip upon the steel:

When dawns the day on Cambry,

Great Arthur forth will sally

Alive to work her weal!

Not so with regard to the hopes associated with the name of Owen Lawgoch; for we have it on Gwynionyđ’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 Ỻychwr Valley who could repeat stanzas or couplets from the ballads in question. He traces these scraps to a booklet entitled Merlin’s Prophecy[19], 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 Myrđin, ‘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 Caerỻeon, ‘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 Gaerỻeon-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 Ỻandyssil, 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 Gruffyđ 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 Gruffyđ 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[20]. 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[21]. 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[22], 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[23] 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[24].

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 Ỻwyd, in her edition of Sir John Wynne’s History of the Gwydir Family[25], had found Owen Lawgoch to have been Owen ab Thomas ab Rhodri, brother to Ỻewelyn, 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[26], 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 Gruffyđ 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[27]. 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[28].’

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 Đinas, 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[29], 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 Ỻyn Syfađon, 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 Đinas, 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 Ỻanciau Eryri, the process of combining the two sets of story has been left to this day incomplete.

[1] This seems to be the Goidelic word borrowed, which in Mod. Irish is written cnocc or cnoc, ‘a hill’: the native Welsh form is cnwch, as in Cnwch Coch in Cardiganshire, Cnwch Dernog (corrupted into Clwch Dernog) in Anglesey, printed Kuwgh Dernok in the Record of Carnarvon, p. 59, where it is associated with other interesting names to be noticed later. [↑]

[2] All said by natives of Anglesey about rivers and mountains in their island must be taken relatively, for though the country has a very uneven surface it has no real mountain: they are apt to call a brook a river and a hillock a mountain, though the majestic heights of Arfon are within sight. [↑]

[3] See pp. 13–16 of his essay on the Neath Valley, referred to in a note at p. 439 above, where Craig y Đinas is also mentioned. [↑]

[4] This is an interesting word of obscure origin, to which I should like our ingenious etymologists to direct their attention. [↑]

[5] See the Poetical Works of John Leyden (Edinburgh, 1875), p. 36 (Scenes of Infancy, part ii); also my Arthurian Legend, p. 18. [↑]