Anno Mundi 2532, number of the lakes formed, 2.
Anno,,Mundi,, 2533, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 1.
Anno,,Mundi,, 2535, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 2.
Anno,,Mundi,, 2545, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 1.
Anno,,Mundi,, 2546, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 1.
Anno,,Mundi,, 2859, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 2.
Anno,,Mundi,, 2860, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 2.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3503, number,,of,,the,, rivers formed,, 21.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3506, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 9.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3510, number,,of,,the,, rivers formed,, 5.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3520, number,,of,,the,, rivers formed,, 9.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3581, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 9.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3656, number,,of,,the,, rivers formed,, 3.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3751, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 1.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3751,,, number,,of,,the,, rivers formed,, 3.
Anno,,Mundi,, 3790, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 4.
Anno,,Mundi,, 4169, number,,of,,the,, rivers formed,, 5.
Anno,,Mundi,, 4694, number,,of,,the,, lakes formed,, 1.

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 named17.’ 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 gives18 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 crocodile19: 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. 9b:—

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 associated20 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 Eachcheann21, 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 weed22 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 heart23. 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 Lorc24. 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 Brittany25. 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 well26. 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 Erin27. 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 Morois28. 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 devil29, 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 Fon30.

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 House31, and the island of which we read in the pages of Plutarch, that it contains Cronus held in the bonds of perennial sleep32.

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 Giraldus33, 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 follows34:—

Nid kywiw35 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 coward36.

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 Dwyuaur37.

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 Nemed38, 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:—