Chapter VII: Triumphs of the Water-World (2)

It is interesting to note the fact, that Celtic folklore connects the underground divinities intimately with water; for one may briefly say that they have access wherever water can take them. With this qualification the belief may be said to have lingered lately in Wales, for instance, in connexion with Llyn Barfog, near Aberdovey. 'It is believed to be very perilous,' Mr. Pughe says, 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 Llyn Pair Mill, and that long-continued heavy rains followed.' Then we have the story related to Mr. Reynolds as to Llyn y Fan Fach, how there emerged from the water a huge hairy fellow of hideous aspect, who stormed at the disturbers of his peace, and uttered the threat that unless they left him alone in his own place he would drown a whole town. Thus the power of the water spirit is represented as equal to producing excessive wet weather and destructive floods. He is in all probability not to be dissociated from the 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 Llanrwst. Some such a local legend has been generalized into a sort of universal flood story in the late Triad, iii. 97, as follows:--'Three masterpieces of the Isle of Prydain: the Ship of Nefyd Naf Neifion, that carried in her male and female of every kind when the Lake of Llïon burst; and Hu the Mighty's Ychen Bannog dragging the afanc of the lake to land, so that the lake burst no more; and the Stones of Gwydon Ganhebon, on which one read all the arts and sciences of the world.' A story similar to the Conwy one, but no longer to be got so complete, as far as I know, seems to have been current in various parts of the Principality, especially around Llyn Syfadon and on the banks of the Anglesey pool called Llyn yr Wyth Eidion, 'the Pool of the Eight Oxen,' for so many is Hu represented here as requiring in dealing with the Anglesey afanc. According to Mr. Pughe of Aberdovey, the same feat was performed at Llyn Barfog, not, however, by Hu and his oxen, but by Arthur and his horse. To be more exact the task may be here considered as done by Arthur superseding Hu: see p. 142 above. That, however, is of no consequence here, and I return to the afanc: the Fan Fach legend told to Mr. Reynolds makes the lake ruler huge and hairy, hideous and rough-spoken, but he expresses himself in human speech, in fact in two lines of doggerel: see p. 19 above. On the other hand, the Llyn Cwm Llwch 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 Llyn Du'r Ardu, 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):--

Gog6n py pegor I know what (sort of) pigmy
yssyd ydan vor. There is beneath the sea.
Gogwn eu heissor I know their kind,
pa6b yny oscord. Each in his troop.

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

Ar gnyuer pegor And every dwarf
y ssit y dan mor. There is beneath the sea,
Ar gnyuer edeinauc And every winged thing
aoruc kyuoethauc. The Mighty One hath made,
Ac vei. vei. paup. And were there to each
tri trychant tauaud Thrice three hundred tongues--
Nyellynt ve traethaud. They could not relate
kyuoetheu [y] trindaud The powers of the Trinity.

I should rather suppose, then, that the pigmies in the water-world were believed to consist of many grades or classes, and to be innumerable like the 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 lleua]. She said she was willing enough to do him that service, and so he laid his head on her knee, and she began to array his locks, as Neapolitan damsels also do by their swains. But soon she got a great fright, for growing amongst the man's hair, she found a great quantity of liobhagach an locha, a certain slimy green weed [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) Moroed, 'the Black of (the) Seas,' steed of Elidyr Mwynfawr, that carried seven human beings and a half from Pen Llech Elidyr in the North to Pen Llech Elidyr in 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 Moroed is in the story of Kulhwch and Olwen called Du March Moro, 'Black the Steed of Moro,' the horse ridden in the hunt of Twrch Trwyth by Gwyn ab Nud, king of the other world; and he appears as a knight with his name unmistakably rendered into Brun de Morois in the romance of Durmart le Galois, who carries away Arthur's queen on his horse to his castle in Morois [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, Dafyd ab Gwilym, who makes Blodeuwed 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 Enlli 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 Mydfai shepherd. It is probable that a divinity of the same order belonged to every other lake of any considerable dimensions in the country. But it will be remembered that in the case of the story of Llyn Du'r Ardu 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 Llïon, 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 Nefyd Naf Neifion, that carried in it a male and female of every kind when the lake of Llïon 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 Llywarch Brydyd y Moch, a poet who flourished towards the end of the twelfth century, as follows [34]:--

Nid kywiw [35] a llwfyr 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 Llywelyn 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 deva or deiva, whence the Romans called their station on its banks Deva, possibly as a shortening of ad Devam; but that Deva should have simply and directly meant the river is rendered probable by the fact that Ptolemy elsewhere gives it as the name of the northern Dee, which enters the sea near Aberdeen. From the same stem were formed the names Dwyf-an and Dwyf-ach, which are treated in the Triads as masculine and feminine respectively. In its course the Welsh Dee receives a river Ceirw not far above Corwen, and that river flows through farms called Ar-dwyfan and Hendre' Ar-dwyfan, and adjoining Ardwyfan is another farm called Foty Ardwyfan, 'Shielings of Ardwyfan,' while Hendre' Ardwyfan means the old stead or winter abode of Ardwyfan. Ardwyfan itself would seem to mean 'On Dwyfan,' and Hendre' Ardwyfan, which may be supposed the original homestead, stands near a burn which flows into the Ceirw. That burn I should suppose to have been the Dwyfan, and perhaps the name extended to the Ceirw itself; but Dwyfan is not now known as the name of any stream in the neighbourhood. Elsewhere we have two rivers called Dwyfor or Dwyfawr and Dwyfach, which unite a little below the village of Llan Ystumdwy; and from there to the sea, the stream is called Dwyfor, the mouth of which is between Criccieth and Afon Wen, in Carnarvonshire. Ystumdwy, commonly corrupted into Stindwy, seems to mean Ystum-dwy, 'the bend of the Dwy'; so that here also we have Dwyfach and Dwy, as in the case of the Dee. Possibly Dwyfor was previously called simply Dwy or even Dwyfan; but it is now explained as Dwy-fawr, 'great Dwy,' which was most likely suggested by Dwyfach, as this latter explains itself to the country people as Dwy-fach, 'little Dwy.' However, it is but right to say that in Llywelyn ab Gruffyd'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 Strallyn and its lake lying behind the great rocky barrier on the left as one goes from Tremadoc towards Aber Glaslyn Bridge. Still more so is this the case with the Dee and Bala Lake, which is wont to rise at times from seven to nine feet above its ordinary level. The inundation which then invades the valley from Bala down presents a sight more magnificent than comfortable to contemplate. In fact nothing could have been more natural than for the story elaborated by the writer of certain of the late Triads to have connected the most remarkable inundations with the largest piece of water in the Principality, and one liable to such sudden changes of level: in other words, that one should treat Llyn Llïon as merely one of the names of Bala Lake, now called in Welsh Llyn Tegid, and formerly sometimes Llyn Aerfen.

While touching at p. 286 on Gwaen Llifon with its Llyn Pencraig as one of those claiming to be the Llyn Llïon of the Triads, it was hinted that Llïon was but a thinner form of Llifon. Here one might mention perhaps another Llifon, for which, however, no case could be made. I allude to the name of the residence of the Wynns descended from Gilmin Troeddu, namely, Glyn Llifon, which means the river Llifon's Glen; but one could not feel surprised if the neighbouring Llyfni, draining the lakes of Nantlle, should prove to have once been also known as a Llifon, with the Nantlle waters conforming by being called Llyn Llifon. But however that may be, one may say as to the flood caused by the bursting of any such lake, that the notion of the universality of the catastrophe was probably contributed by the author of Triad iii. 13, from a non-Welsh source. He may have, however, not invented the vessel in which he places Dwyfan and Dwyfach: at all events, one version of the story of the Fan Fach represents the Lake Lady arriving in a boat. As to the writer of the other Triad, iii. 97, he says nothing about Dwyfan and his wife, but borrows Nefyd Naf Neifion's ship to save all that were to be saved; and here one may probably venture to identify Nefyd 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 It is old Neptune that has swam
O Droia fawr draw i Fôn. 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 Llyn Tegid thus, p. 78:

Drwyot, er dydiau'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 Llyn Du'r Ardu; the same, too, was the sex of the chief dweller of Llyn Cwm Llwch; the same remark is applicable also to the greatest divinity of these islands--the greatest, at any rate, so far as the scanty traces of his cult enable one to become acquainted with him. As his name comes 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 o or u as optional in the first syllable, and o as preferable, perhaps, to e in the second, for there is no room for reasonably doubting that we have here to do with the same name as Irish Nuadu, genitive Nuadat, conspicuous in the legendary history of Ireland. Now the Nuadu who naturally occurs to one first, was Nuadu Argetlám or Nuadu of the Silver Hand, from argat, 'silver, argentum,' and lám, 'hand.' Irish literature explains how he came to have a hand made of silver, and we can identify with him on Welsh ground a Llud Llawereint; for put back as it were into earlier Brythonic, this would be Ludo(ns) Lam'-argentios: that is to say, a reversal takes place in the order of the elements forming the epithet out of ereint (for older ergeint), 'silvern, argenteus,' and llaw, for earlier lama, 'hand.' Then comes the alliterative instinct into play, forcing Nudo(ns) Lamargentio(s) to become Ludo(ns) Lamargentio(s), whence the later form, Llud Llawereint, derives regularly [40]. Thus we have in Welsh the name Llûd, fashioned into that form under the influence of the epithet, whereas elsewhere it is Nûd, which occurs as a man's name in the pedigrees, while an intermediate form was probably Nudos or Nudo, of which a genitive NVDI occurs in a post-Roman inscription found near Yarrow Kirk in Selkirkshire. It is worthy of note that the modification of Nudo into Ludo must have taken place comparatively early--not improbably while the language was still Goidelic--as we seem to have a survival of the name in that of Lydney itself.

It is very possible that we have Ludo, Llud, also in Porthlud; 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 Llud, 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 Tamesa or Tamesis [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 Gwyliedyd for 1837, p. 185, by a contributor who publishes it from a manuscript which Lewis Morris began to write in 1724 and finished apparently in 1729. 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 Grippiach Greppiach,
Dal d'afel yn y wrach, Keep thy hold on the hag.
Hi aeth yn rhowyr 'faglach-- It got too late, thou urchin--
Mi eis i ir mwthlach [45].' 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 Llynclys, Syfadon, 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.