The late Dr. Pughe translated it thus:

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

For the last four words Stokes suggests ‘O pigling of a white sow’; but perhaps the most natural rendering of the words would be ‘O white porker of a sow!’—which does not recommend itself greatly on the score of sense, I must admit. The word occurs, also, in Breton as gwiz or gwéz, ‘truie, femelle du porc,’ and as gwys or guis in Old Cornish, while in Irish it was feis. Nevertheless, the editor of the Twrch Trwyth story did not know it; but it would be in no way surprising that a Welshman, who knew his language fairly well, should be baffled by such a word in case it was not in use in his own district in his own time. This, however, barely touches the fringe of the question. The range of the hunt, as already given, was mostly within the boundaries, so to say, of the portion of South Wales where we find Goidelic inscriptions in the Ogam character of the fifth or sixth century; and I am persuaded that the Goidelic language must have lived down to the sixth or seventh century in the south and in the north of Wales44, a tract of Mid-Wales being then, probably, the only district which can be assumed to have been completely Brythonic in point of speech. In this very story, probably, such a name as Garth Grugyn is but slightly modified from a Goidelic Gort Grucaind, ‘the enclosure of Grucand45 or Grugan’: compare Cúchulaind or Cúchulainn made in Welsh into Cocholyn. But the capital instance in the story of Twrch Trwyth as has already been indicated is that of Amanw, which I detect also as Ammann (probably to be read Ammanu), in the Book of Ỻan Dâv (or Liber Landavensis), p. 199: it is there borne by a lay witness to a grant of land called Tir Dimuner, which would appear to have been in what is now Monmouthshire. Interpreted as standing for in Banbh, ‘the Boar,’ it would make a man’s name of the same class as Ibleid, found elsewhere in the same manuscript (pp. 178, 184), meaning evidently i Bleiđ, now y Blaiđ, ‘the Wolf.’ But observe that the latter was Welsh and the former Goidelic, which makes all the difference for our story. The Goidel relating the story would say that a boar, banbh, was killed on the mountain or hill of in Banbh or of ‘the Boar’; and his Goidelic hearer could not fail to associate the place-name with the appellative. But a Brython could hardly understand what the words in Banbh meant, and certainly not after he had transformed them into Ammanw, with the nb assimilated into mm, and the accent shifted to the first syllable. It is needless to say that my remarks have no meaning unless Goidelic was the original language of the tale.

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

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

2. Twrch Trwyth makes for Cwm Kerwyn in the Preselly Mountains, and turns to bay, killing the following men, who are called Arthur’s four rhyswyr46 or champions—Gwarthegyđ son of Caw, Tarawg of Aỻt Clwyd, Rheiđwn son of Eli Atver, and Iscovan Hael.

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Ỻwydawc at bay in an uncertain locality kills Rudvyw Rys47 and many others.

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

By way of notes on these items, I would begin with the last by asking, what is one to make of these Men of Ỻydaw? First of all, one notices that their names are singular: thus Hirpeissawc, ‘Long-coated or Long-robed,’ is a curious name for their king, as it sounds more like an epithet than a name itself. Then Ỻygatruđ (also Ỻysgatruđ, which I cannot understand, except as a scribal error) Emys is also unusual: one would have rather expected Emys Lygatruđ, ‘Emys the Red-eyed.’ As it stands it looks as if it meant the ‘Red-eyed One of Emys.’ Moreover Emys reminds one of the name of Emyr Ỻydaw, the ancestor in Welsh hagiology of a number of Welsh saints. It looks as if the redactor of the Red Book had mistaken an r for an s in copying from a pre-Norman original. That he had to work on such a manuscript is proved by the remaining instance, Gwrbothu Hên, ‘G. the Ancient,’ in which we have undoubtedly a pre-Norman spelling of Gwrfođw: the same redactor having failed to recognize the name, left it without being converted into the spelling of his own school. In the Book of Ỻan Dâv it will be found variously written Gurbodu, Guoruodu, and Guruodu. Then the epithet hên, ‘old or ancient,’ reminds one of such instances as Math Hên and Gofynion Hên, to be noticed a little later in this chapter. Let us now direct the reader’s attention for a moment to the word Ỻydaw, in order to see whether that may not suggest something. The etymology of it is contested, so one has to infer its meaning, as well as one can, from the way in which it is found used. Now it is the ordinary Welsh word for Brittany or Little Britain, and in Irish it becomes Letha, which is found applied not only to Armorica but also to Latium. Conversely one could not be surprised if a Goidel, writing Latin, rendered his own Letha or the Welsh Ỻydaw by Latium, even when no part of Italy was meant. Now it so happens that Ỻydaw occurs in Wales itself, to wit in the name of Ỻyn Ỻydaw, a Snowdonian lake already mentioned, p. 475. It is thus described by Pennant, ii. 339:—‘We found, on arriving at the top, an hollow a mile in length, filled with Ỻyn Ỻydaw, a fine lake, winding beneath the rocks, and vastly indented by rocky projections, here and there jutting into it. In it was one little island, the haunt of black-backed gulls, which breed here, and, alarmed by such unexpected visitants, broke the silence of this sequestered place by their deep screams.’ But since Pennant’s time mining operations48 have been carried on close to the margin of this lake; and in the course of them the level of the water is said to have been lowered to the extent of sixteen feet, when, in the year 1856, an ancient canoe was discovered there. According to the late Mr. E. L. Barnwell, who has described it in the Archæologia Cambrensis for 1874, pp. 150–1, it was in the possession of Dr. Griffith Griffith of Tal y Treuđyn, near Harlech, who exhibited it at the Cambrian Archæological Association’s meeting at Machynỻeth in 186649. ‘It measures,’ Mr. Barnwell says, ‘nine feet nine inches—a not uncommon length in the Scotch early canoes,—and has been hollowed out of one piece of wood, as is universally the case with these early boats.’ He goes on to surmise that ‘this canoe may have been used to reach the island, for the sake of birds or eggs; or what is not impossible, the island may have been the residence of some one who had reasons for preferring so isolated an abode. It may, in fact, have been a kind of small natural crannog, and, in one sense, a veritable lake-dwelling, access to and from which was easy by means of such a canoe.’ Stokes conjectures Ỻydaw to have meant coast-land, and Thurneysen connects it with the Sanskrit pṛthivī and Old Saxon folda50, ‘earth’: and, so far as I can see, one is at liberty to assume a meaning that would satisfy Ỻydaw, ‘Armorica,’ and the Ỻydaw of Ỻyn Ỻydaw, ‘the Lake of Ỻydaw,’ namely that it signified land which one had to reach by boat, so that it was in fact applicable to a lake settlement of any kind, in other words, that Ỻydaw on Snowdon was the name of the lake-dwelling. So I cannot help suggesting, with great deference, that the place whence came the Men of Ỻydaw in the story of the hunting of Twrch Trwyth was the settlement in Syfađon lake (p. 73), and that the name of that stronghold, whether it was a crannog or a stockaded islet, was also Ỻydaw. For the power of that settlement over the surrounding country to have extended a few miles around would be but natural to suppose—the distance between the Yw and Ỻyn Syfađon is, I am told, under three miles. Should this guess prove well founded, we should have to scan with renewed care the allusions in our stories to Ỻydaw, and not assume that they always refer us to Brittany.

That the name Ỻydaw did on occasion refer to the region of Ỻyn Syfađon admits of indirect proof as follows:—The church of Ỻangorse on its banks is dedicated to a Saint Paulinus, after whom also is called Capel Peulin, in the upper course of the Towy, adjacent to the Cardiganshire parish of Ỻanđewi Brefi. Moreover, tradition makes Paulinus attend a synod in 519 at Ỻanđewi Brefi, where St. David distinguished himself by his preaching against Pelagianism. Paulinus was then an old man, and St. David had been one of his pupils at the Ty Gwyn, ‘Whitland,’ on the Taf, where Paulinus had established a religious house51; and some five miles up a tributary brook of the Taf is the church of Ỻandysilio, where an ancient inscription mentions a Paulinus. These two places, Whitland and Ỻandysilio, were probably in the cymwd of Peuliniog, which is called after a Paulinus, and through which we have just followed the hunt of Twrch Trwyth (p. 512). Now the inscription to which I have referred reads52, with ligatures:—

CLVTORIGI
FILI PAVLINI
MARINILATIO

This probably means ‘(the Monument) of Clutorix, son of Paulinus from Latium in the Marsh’; unless one ought rather to treat Marini as an epithet to Paulini. In either case Latio has probably to be construed ‘of or from Latium’: compare a Roman inscription found at Bath (Hübner’s No. 48), which begins with C. Murrius. | C. F. Arniensis | Foro. Iuli. Modestus53, and makes in English, according to Mr. Haverfield, ‘Gaius Murrius Modestus, son of Gaius, of the tribe Arniensis, of the town Forum Iulii.’ The easiest way to explain the last line as a whole is probably to treat it as a compound with the qualifying word deriving its meaning, not from mare, ‘the sea,’ but from the Late Latin mara, ‘a marsh or bog.’ Thus Marini-Latium would mean ‘Marshy Latium,’ to distinguish it from Latium in Italy, and from Letha or Ỻydaw in the sense of Brittany, which was analogously termed in Medieval Irish Armuirc Letha54, that is the Armorica of Letha. This is borne out by the name of the church of Paulinus, which is in Welsh Ỻan y Gors, anglicized Ỻangorse, ‘the Church of the Marsh or Bog,’ and that is exactly the meaning of the name given it in the Taxatio of Pope Nicholas, which is that of Ecclesia de Mara. In other terms, we have in the qualified Latium of the inscription the Latium or Letha which came to be called in Welsh Ỻydaw. It is, in my opinion, from that settlement as their head quarters, that the Men of Ỻydaw sallied forth to take part in the hunt in Ystrad Yw, where the boar Ỻwydog was killed.

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

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

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

‘Another wonder there is in the district called Buaỻt: there is there a heap of stones, and one stone is placed on the top of the pile with the footmark of a dog in it. Cafaỻ, the dog of the warrior Arthur, when chasing the pig Trwyd printed the mark of his foot on it, and Arthur afterwards collected a heap of stones underneath the stone in which was the footmark of his dog, and it is called Cafaỻ’s Cairn. And men come and take the stone away in their hands for the space of a day and a night, and on the following day the stone is found on the top of its heap55.’

Lady Charlotte Guest, in a note to the Kulhwch story in her Mabinogion, ii. 360, appears to have been astonished to find that Carn Cavaỻ, as she writes it, was no fabulous mound but an actual ‘mountain in the district of Builth, to the south of Rhayader Gwy, and within sight of that town.’ She went so far as to persuade one of her friends to visit the summit, and he begins his account of it to her with the words: ‘Carn Cavaỻ, or as it is generally pronounced Corn Cavaỻ, is a lofty and rugged mountain.’ On one of the cairns on the mountain he discovered what may have been the very stone to which the Mirabilia story refers; but the sketch with which he accompanied his communication cannot be said to be convincing, and he must have been drawing on his imagination when he spoke of this somewhat high hill as a lofty mountain. Moreover his account of its name only goes just far enough to be misleading: the name as pronounced in the neighbourhood of Rhayader is Corn Gafaỻt by Welsh-speaking people, and Corn Gavalt by monoglot Englishmen. So it is probable that at one time the pronunciation was Carn Gavaỻ56. But to return to the incident recorded by Nennius, one has to remark that it does not occur in the Kulhwch; nor, seeing the position of the hill, can it have been visited by Arthur or his dog in the course of the Twrch Trwyth hunt as described by the redactor of the story in its present form. This suggests the reflection not only that the Twrch story is very old, but that it was put together by selecting certain incidents out of an indefinite number, which, taken all together, would probably have formed a network covering the whole of South Wales as far north as the boundary of the portion of Mid-Wales occupied by the Brythons before the Roman occupation. In other words, the Goidels of this country had stories current among them to explain the names of the places with which they were familiar; and it is known that was the case with the Goidels of Ireland. Witness the place-name legends known in Medieval Irish as Dindṡenchas, with which the old literature of Ireland abounds. On what principle the narrator of the Kulhwch made his selection from the repertoire I cannot say; but one cannot help seeing that he takes little interest in the details, and that he shows still less insight into the etymological motif of the incidents which he mentions. However, this should be laid mainly to the charge, perhaps, of the early medieval redactor.

Among the reasons which have been suggested for the latter overlooking and effacing the play on the place-names, I have hinted that he did not always understand them, as they sometimes involved a language which may not have been his. This raises the question of translation: if the story was originally in Goidelic, what was the process by which it passed into Brythonic? Two answers suggest themselves, and the first comes to this: if the story was in writing, we may suppose a literary man to have sat down to translate it word for word from Goidelic to Brythonic, or else to adapt it in a looser fashion. In either case, one should suppose him a master of both languages, and capable of doing justice to the play on the place-names. But it is readily conceivable that the fact of his understanding both languages might lead him to miscalculate what was exactly necessary to enable a monoglot Brython to grasp his meaning clearly. Moreover, if the translator had ideas of his own as to style, he might object on principle to anything like an explanation of words being interpolated in the narrative. In short, one could see several loopholes through which a little confusion might force itself in, and prevent the monoglot reader or hearer of the translation from correctly grasping the story at all points as it was in the original. The other view, and the more natural one, as I think, is that we should postulate the interference of no special translator, but suppose the story, or rather a congeries of stories, to have been current among the natives of a certain part of South Wales, say the Loughor Valley, at a time when their language was still Goidelic, and that, as they gradually gave up Goidelic and adopted Brythonic, they retained their stories and translated the narrative, while they did not always translate the place-names occurring in that narrative. Thus, for instance, would arise the discrepancy between banw and Amanw, the latter of which to be Welsh should have been rendered y Banw, ‘the Boar.’ If this is approximately what took place, it is easy to conceive the possibility of many points of nicety being completely effaced in the course of such a rough process of transformation. In one or two small matters it happens that we can contrast the community as translator with the literary individual at work: I allude to the word Trwyth. That vocable was not translated, not metaphoned, if I may so term it, at all at the time: it passed, when it was still Trēth-i, from Goidelic into Brythonic, and continued in use without a break; for the changes whereby Trēth-i has become Trwyth have been such as other words have undergone in the course of ages, as already stated. On the other hand, the literary man who knew something of the two languages seems to have reasoned, that where a Goidelic th occurred between vowels, the correct etymological equivalent in Brythonic was t, subject to be mutated to d. So when he took the name over he metaphoned Trēth-i into Trēt-i, whence we have the Porcus Troit of Nennius, and Twrch Trwyd57 in Welsh poetry: these Troit and Trwyd were the literary forms as contrasted with the popular Trwyth. Now, if my surmises as to Echel and Egel are near the truth, their history must be similar; that is to say, Echel would be the literary form and Ecel, Egel the popular one respectively of the Goidelic Ecell. A third parallel offers itself in the case of the personal name Arwyli, borne by one of Echel’s companions: the Arwyl of that name has its etymological equivalent in the Arwystl- of Arwystli, the name of a district comprising the eastern slopes of Plinlimmon, and represented now by the Deanery of Arwystli. So Arwystli challenges comparison with the Irish Airgialla or Airgéill, anglicized Oriel, which denotes, roughly speaking, the modern counties of Armagh, Louth, and Monaghan. For here we have the same prefix ar placed in front of one and the same vocable, which in Welsh is gwystl, ‘a hostage,’ and in Irish giall, of the same meaning and origin. The reader will at once think of the same word in German as geisel, ‘a hostage,’ Old High German gīsal. But the divergence of sound between Arwystl-i and Arwyl-i arises out of the difference of treatment of sl in Welsh and Irish. In the Brythonic district of Mid-Wales we have Arwystli with sl treated in the Brythonic way, while in Arwyli we have the combination treated in the Goidelic way, the result being left standing when the speakers of Goidelic in South Wales learnt Brythonic58.

Careful observation may be expected to add to the number of these instructive instances. It is, however, not to be supposed that all double forms of the names in these stories are to be explained in exactly the same way. Thus, for instance, corresponding to Lug, genitive Loga, we have the two forms Ỻeu and Ỻew, of which the former alone matches the Irish. But it is to be observed that Ỻeu remains in some verses59 in the story of Math, whereas in the prose he appears to be called Ỻew. It is not improbable that the editing which introduced Ỻew dates comparatively late, and that it was done by a man who was not familiar with the Venedotian place-names of which Ỻeu formed part, namely, Dinỻeu and Nantỻeu, now Dinỻe and Nantỻe. Similarly the two brothers, Gofannon and Amaethon, as they are called in the Mabinogi of Math and in the Kulhwch story, are found also called Gofynyon and Amathaon. The former agrees with the Irish form Goibniu, genitive Goibnenn, whereas Gofannon does not. As to Amaethon or Amathaon the Irish counterpart has, unfortunately, not been identified. Gofannon and Amaethon have the appearance of being etymologically transparent in Welsh, and they have probably been remodelled by the hand of a literary redactor. There were also two forms of the name of Manawyđan in Welsh; for by the side of that there was another, namely, Manawydan, liable to be shortened to Manawyd: both occur in old Welsh poetry60. But manawyd or mynawyd is the Welsh word for an awl, which is significant here, as the Mabinogi called after Manawyđan makes him become a shoemaker on two occasions, whence the Triads style him one of the Three golden Shoemakers of the Isle of Prydain: see the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 308.

What has happened in the way of linguistic change in one of our stories, the Kulhwch, may have happened in others, say in the four branches of the Mabinogi, namely, Pwyỻ, prince of Dyved; Branwen, daughter of Ỻyr; Math, son of Mathonwy; and Manawyđan, son of Ỻyr. Some time ago I endeavoured to show that the principal characters in the Mabinogi of Math, namely, the sons and daughters of Dôn, are to be identified as a group with the Tuatha Dé Danann, ‘Tribes of the Goddess Danu or Donu,’ of Irish legend. I called attention to the identity of our Welsh Dôn with the Irish Donu, genitive Donann, Gofynion or Gofannon with Goibniu, genitive Goibnenn, and of Ỻeu or Ỻew with Lug. Since then Professor Zimmer has gone further, and suggested that the Mabinogion are of Irish origin; but that I cannot quite admit. They are of Goidelic origin, but they do not come from the Irish or the Goidels of Ireland: they come rather, as I think, from this country’s Goidels, who never migrated to the sister island, but remained here eventually to adopt Brythonic speech. There is no objection, however, so far as this argument is concerned, to their being regarded as this country’s Goidels descended either from native Goidels or from early Goidelic invaders from Ireland, or else partly from the one origin and partly from the other. This last is perhaps the safest view to accept as a working hypothesis. Now Professor Zimmer fixes on that of Mathonwy, among other names, as probably the Welsh adaptation of some such an Irish name as the genitive Mathgamnai61, now anglicized Mahony. This I am also prepared to accept in the sense that the Welsh form is a loan from a Goidelic one current some time or other in this country, and represented in Irish by Mathgamnai. The preservation of Goidelic th in Mathonwy stamps it as ranking with Trwyth, Egel, and Arwyli, as contrasted with a form etymologically more correct, of which we seem to have an echo in the Breton names Madganoe and Madgone62.

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

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

This saint, who is said to have prophesied of St. Columba and died in the year 534, is described in his Life (Aug. 19) as ortus ex Britannia63, which, coupled with Adamnan’s Brito, probably refers him to Wales; but it is remarkable that nevertheless he bore the very un-Brythonic name of Mochta or Mauchta64.

To return to the Mabinogion: I have long been inclined to identify Ỻwyd, son of Kilcoed, with the Irish Liath, son of Celtchar, of Cualu in the present county of Wicklow. Liath, whose name means ‘grey,’ is described as the comeliest youth of noble rank among the fairies of Erin; and the only time the Welsh Ỻwyd, whose name also means ‘grey,’ appears in the Mabinogion he is ascribed, not the comeliest figure, it is true, or the greatest personal beauty, but the most imposing disguise of a bishop attended by his suite: he was a great magician. The name of his father, Kil-coet, seems to me merely an inexact popular rendering of Celtchar, the name of Liath’s father: at any rate one fails here to detect the touch of the skilled translator or literary redactor.65 But the Mabinogi of Manawyđan, in which Ỻwyd figures, is also the one in which Pryderi king of Dyfed’s wife is called Kicua or Cigfa, a name which has no claim to be regarded as Brythonic. It occurs early, however, in the legendary history of Ireland: the Four Masters, under the year A.M. 2520, mention a Ciocbha as wife of a son of Parthalon; and the name seems to be related to that of a man called Cioccal, A.M. 2530. Lastly, Manawyđan, from whom the Mabinogi takes its name, is called mab Ỻyr, ‘son of Ỻyr,’ in Welsh, and Manannán mac Lir in Irish. Similarly with his brother Brân, and his sister Branwen, except that she has not been identified in Irish story. But in Irish literature the genitive Lir, as in mac Lir, ‘son of Ler,’ is so common, and the nominative so rare, that Lir came to be treated in late Irish as the nominative too; but a genitive of the form Lir suggests a nominative-accusative Ler, and as a matter of fact it occurs, for instance, in the couplet:—

So it seems probable that the Welsh Ỻyr67 is no other word than the Goidelic genitive Lir, retained in use with its pronunciation modified according to the habits of the Welsh language; and in that case68 it forms comprehensive evidence, that the stories about the Ỻyr family in Welsh legend were Goidelic before they put on a Brythonic garb.

As to the Mabinogion generally, one may say that they are devoted to the fortunes chiefly of three powerful houses or groups, the children of Dôn, the children of Ỻyr, and Pwyỻ’s family. This last is brought into contact with the Ỻyr group, which takes practically the position of superiority. Pwyỻ’s family belonged chiefly to Dyfed; but the power and influence of the sons of Ỻyr had a far wider range: we find them in Anglesey, at Harlech, in Gwales or the Isle of Grasholm off Pembrokeshire, at Aber Henvelen somewhere south of the Severn Sea, and in Ireland. But the expedition to Ireland under Brân, usually called Bendigeituran, ‘Brân69 the Blessed,’ proved so disastrous that the Ỻyr group, as a whole, disappears, making way for the children of Dôn. These last came into collision with Pwyỻ’s son, Pryderi, in whose country Manawyđan, son of Ỻyr, had ended his days. Pryderi, in consequence of Gwydion’s deceit (pp. 69, 501, 525), makes war on Math and the children of Dôn: he falls in it, and his army gives hostages to Math. Thus after the disappearance of the sons of Ỻyr, the children of Dôn are found in power in their stead in North Wales70, and that state of things corresponds closely enough to the relation between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Lir family in Irish legend. There Lir and his family are reckoned in the number of the Tuatha Dé Danann, but within that community Lir was so powerful that it was considered but natural that he should resent a rival candidate being elected king in preference to him. So the Tuatha Dé took pains to conciliate Lir, as did also their king, who gave his daughter to Lir to wife, and when she died he gave him another of his daughters71; and with the treatment of her stepchildren by that deceased wife’s sister begins one of the three Sorrowful Tales of Erin, known to English readers as the Fate of the Children of Lir. But the reader should observe the relative position: the Tuatha Dé remain in power, while the children of Lir belong to the past, which is also the sequence in the Mabinogion. Possibly this is not to be considered as having any significance, but it is to be borne in mind that the Lir-Ỻyr group is strikingly elemental in its patronymic Lir, Ỻyr. The nominative, as already stated, was ler, ‘sea,’ and so Cormac renders mac Lir by filius maris. How far we may venture to consider the sea to have been personified in this context, and how early, it is impossible to say. In any case it is deserving of notice that one group of Goidels to this day do not say mac Lir, ‘son of Lir,’ filium maris, but always ‘son of the lir’: I allude to the Gaels of the Isle of Man, in whose language Manannán mac Lir is always Mannanan mac y Lir, or as they spell it, Lear; that is to say ‘Mannanan, son of the ler.’ Manxmen have been used to consider Manannan their eponymous hero, and first king of their island: they call him more familiarly Mannanan beg mac y Lear, ‘Little Mannanan, son of the ler’. This we may, though no Manxman of the present day attaches any meaning to the word lir or lear, interpreted as ‘Little Mannanan, son of the Sea.’ The wanderings at large of the children of Lir before being eclipsed by the Danann-Dôn group, remind one of the story of the labours of Hercules, where it relates that hero’s adventures on his return from robbing Geryon of his cattle. Pomponius Mela, ii. 5 (p. 50), makes Hercules on that journey fight in the neighbourhood of Aries with two sons of Poseidon or Neptune, whom he calls (in the accusative) Albiona and Bergyon. To us, with our more adequate knowledge of geography, the locality and the men cannot appear the most congruous, but there can hardly be any mistake as to the two personal names being echoes of those of Albion and Iverion, Britain and Ireland.

The whole cycle of the Mabinogion must have appeared strange to the story-teller and the poet of medieval Wales, and far removed from the world in which they lived. We have possibly a trace of this feeling in the epithet hên, ‘old, ancient,’ given to Math in a poem in the Red Book of Hergest, where we meet with the line72:—

Similarly in the confused list of heroes which the story-teller of the Kulhwch (Mabinogion, p. 108) was able to put together, we seem to have Gofannon, Math’s relative, referred to under the designation of Gouynyon Hen, ‘Gofynion the Ancient.’ To these might be added others, such as Gwrbothu Hên, mentioned above, p. 531, and from another source Ỻeu Hen73, ‘Ỻew the Ancient.’ So strange, probably, and so obscure did some of the contents of the stories themselves seem to the story-tellers, that they may be now and then suspected of having effaced some of the features which it would have interested us to find preserved. This state of things brings back to my mind words of Matthew Arnold’s, to which I had the pleasure of listening more years ago than I care to remember. He was lecturing at Oxford on Celtic literature, and observing ‘how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant,’ Matthew Arnold went on to say, ‘building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely—stones “not of this building,” but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the mediæval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh.’ This becomes intelligible only on the theory of the stories having been in Goidelic before they put on a Welsh dress.

When saying that the Mabinogion and some of the stories contained in the Kulhwch, such as the Hunting of Twrch Trwyth, were Goidelic before they became Brythonic, I wish to be understood to use the word Goidelic in a qualified sense. For till the Brythons came, the Goidels were, I take it, the ruling race in most of the southern half of Britain, with the natives as their subjects, except in so far as that statement has to be limited by the fact, that we do not know how far they and the natives had been amalgamating together. In any case, the hostile advent of another race, the Brythons, would probably tend to hasten the process of amalgamation. That being so, the stories which I have loosely called Goidelic may have been largely aboriginal in point of origin, and by that I mean native, pre-Celtic and non-Aryan. It comes to this, then: we cannot say for certain whose creation Brân, for instance, should be considered to have been—that of Goidels or of non-Aryan natives. He sat, as the Mabinogi of Branwen describes him, on the rock of Harlech, a figure too colossal for any house to contain or any ship to carry. This would seem to challenge comparison with Cernunnos, the squatting god of ancient Gaul, around whom the other gods appear as mere striplings, as proved by the monumental representations in point. In these74 he sometimes appears antlered like a stag; sometimes he is provided either with three normal heads or with one head furnished with three faces; and sometimes he is reduced to a head provided with no body, which reminds one of Brân, who, when he had been rid of his body in consequence of a poisoned wound inflicted on him in his foot in the slaughter of the Meal-bag Pavilion, was reduced to the Urđawl Ben, ‘Venerable or Dignified Head,’ mentioned in the Mabinogi of Branwen75. The Mabinogi goes on to relate how Brân’s companions began to enjoy, subject to certain conditions, his ‘Venerable Head’s’ society, which involved banquets of a fabulous duration and of a nature not readily to be surpassed by those around the Holy Grail. In fact here we have beyond all doubt one of the heathen originals of which the Grail is a Christian version. But the multiplicity of faces or heads of the Gaulish divinity find their analogues in a direction hitherto unnoticed as far as I know, namely, among the Letto-Slavic peoples of the Baltic sea-board. Thus the image of Svatovit in the island of Rügen is said to have had four faces76; and the life of Otto of Bamberg relates77 how that high-handed evangelist proceeded to convert the ancient Prussians to Christianity. Among other things we are told how he found at Stettin an idol called Triglaus, a word referring to the three heads for which the god was remarkable. The saint took possession of the image and hewed away the body, reserving for himself the three heads, which are represented adhering together, forming one piece. This he sent as a trophy to Rome, and in Rome it may be still. Were it perchance to be found, it might be expected to show a close resemblance to the tricephal of the Gaulish altar found at Beaune in Burgundy.

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

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

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

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

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

Probably the folklore and mythology of the Goidels of Wales and of Ireland were in the mass much the same, though in some instances they reach us in different stages of development: thus in such a case as that of Dôn and Danu (genitive Danann) the Welsh allusions in point refer to Dôn at a conspicuously earlier stage of her rôle than that represented by the Irish literature touching the Tuatha Dé Danann78.

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