Note 25 — Chapter III · Fairy Ways and Words (continued 2)

In Cardiganshire a conjurer is called dyn hysbys, where hysbys (or, in older orthography, hyspys) means ‘informed’: it is the man who is informed on matters which are dark to others; but the word is also used of facts—Y mae ’r peth yn hysbys, ‘the thing is known or manifest.’ The word is divisible into hy-spys, which would be in Irish, had it existed in the language, so-scese for an early su-squesti̭a-s, the related Irish words being ad-chiu, ‘I see,’ pass. preterite ad-chess, ‘was seen,’ and the like, in which ci and ces have been equated by Zimmer with the Sanskrit verb caksh, ‘to see,’ from a root quas. The adjective cynnil applied to the dyn hyspys in Glamorgan means now, as a rule, ‘economical’ or ‘thrifty,’ but in this instance it would seem to have signified ‘shrewd,’ ‘cunning,’ or ‘clever,’ though it would probably come nearer the original meaning of the word to render it by ‘smart,’ for it is in Irish conduail, which is found applied to ingenious work, such as the ornamentation on the hilt of a sword. Another term for a wizard or conjurer is gwr cyfarwyđ, with which the reader is already familiar. Here cyfarwyđ forms a link with the kyvarỽyd of the Mabinogion, where it usually means a professional man, especially one skilled in story and history; and what constituted his knowledge was called kyvarỽydyt, which included, among other things, acquaintance with boundaries and pedigrees, but it meant most frequently perhaps story; see the (Oxford) Mabinogion, pp. 5, 61, 72, 93. All these terms should, strictly speaking, have gwr—gwr hyspys, gwr cynnil, and gwr cyfarwyđ—but for the fact that modern Welsh tends to restrict gwr to signify ‘a husband’ or ‘a married man,’ while dyn, which only signifies a mortal, is made to mean man, and provided with a feminine dynes, ‘woman,’ unknown to good Welsh literature. Thus the spoken language is in this matter nearly on a level with English and French, which have quite lost the word for vir and ἀνήρ. ↑