Chapter VII · Triumphs of the Water-world
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Une des légendes les plus répandues en Bretagne est celle d’une prétendue ville d’Is, qui, à une époque inconnue, aurait été engloutie par la mer. On montre, à divers endroits de la côte, l’emplacement de cette cité fabuleuse, et les pécheurs vous en font d’étranges récits. Les jours de tempête, assurent-ils, on voit, dans les creux des vagues, le sommet des flèches de ses églises; les jours de calme, on entend monter de l’abîme le son de ses cloches, modulant l’hymne du jour.—Renan.
More than once in the last chapter was the subject of submersions and cataclysms brought before the reader, and it may be convenient to enumerate here the most remarkable cases, and to add one or two to their number, as well as to dwell at somewhat greater length on some instances which may be said to have found their way into Welsh literature. He has already been told of the outburst of the Glasfryn Lake (p. 367) and Ffynnon Gywer (p. 376), of Ỻyn Ỻech Owen (p. 379) and the Crymlyn (p. 191), also of the drowning of Cantre’r Gwaelod (p. 383); not to mention that one of my informants had something to say (p. 219) of the submergence of Caer Arianrhod, a rock now visible only at low water between Celynnog Fawr and Dinas Dinỻe, on the coast of Arfon. But, to put it briefly, it is an ancient belief in the Principality that its lakes generally have swallowed up habitations of men, as in the case of Ỻyn Syfađon (p. 73) and the Pool of Corwrion (p. 57). To these I now proceed to add other instances, to wit those of Bala Lake, Kenfig Pool, Ỻynclys, and Helig ab Glannog’s territory including Traeth Lafan.
‘It was said by the old people that on the site of this bog once stood the old town of Swansea, and that in clear and calm weather the chimneys and even the church steeple could be seen at the bottom of the lake, and in the loneliness of the night the bells were often heard ringing in the lake. It was also said that should any person happen to stand with his face towards the lake when the wind is blowing across the lake, and if any of the spray of that water should touch his clothes, it would be only with the greatest difficulty he could save himself from being attracted or sucked into the water. The lake was at one time much larger than at present. The efforts made to drain it have drawn a good deal of the water from it, but only to convert it into a bog, which no one can venture to cross except in exceptionally dry seasons or hard frost.’
On this I wish to remark in passing, that, while common sense would lead one to suppose that the wind blowing across the water would help the man facing it to get away whenever he chose, the reasoning here is of another order, one characteristic in fact of the ways and means of sympathetic magic. For specimens in point the reader may be conveniently referred to page 360, where he may compare the words quoted from Mr. Hartland, especially as to the use there mentioned of stones or pellets thrown from one’s hands. In the case of Crymlyn, the wind blowing off the face of the water into the onlooker’s face and carrying with it some of the water in the form of spray which wets his clothes, howsoever little, was evidently regarded as establishing a link of connexion between him and the body of the water—or shall I say rather, between him and the divinity of the water?—and that this link was believed to be so strong that it required the man’s utmost effort to break it and escape being drawn in and drowned like Cynan. The statement, supremely silly as it reads, is no modern invention; for one finds that Nennius—or somebody else—reasoned in precisely the same way, except that for a single onlooker he substitutes a whole army of men and horses, and that he points the antithesis by distinctly stating, that if they kept their backs turned to the fascinating flood they would be out of danger. The conditions which he had in view were, doubtless, that the men should face the water and have their clothing more or less wetted by the spray from it. The passage (§ 69) to which I refer is in the Mirabilia, and Geoffrey of Monmouth is found to repeat it in a somewhat better style of Latin (ix. 7): the following is the Nennian version:—
Aliud miraculum est, id est Oper Linn Liguan. Ostium fluminis illius fluit in Sabrina et quando Sabrina inundatur ad sissam, et mare inundatur similiter in ostio supra dicti fluminis et in stagno ostii recipitur in modum voraginis et mare non vadit sursum et est litus juxta flumen et quamdiu Sabrina inundatur ad sissam, istud litus non tegitur et quando recedit mare et Sabrina, tunc Stagnum Liuan eructat omne quod devoravit de mari et litus istud tegitur et instar montis in una unda eructat et rumpit. Et si fuerit exercitus totius regionis, in qua est, et direxerit faciem contra undam, et exercitum trahit unda per vim humore repletis vestibus et equi similiter trahuntur. Si autem exercitus terga versus fuerit contra eam, non nocet ei unda.
Next comes the story of Ỻynclys Pool in the neighbourhood of Oswestry. That piece of water is said to be of extraordinary depth, and its name means the ‘swallowed court.’ The village of Ỻynclys is called after it, and the legend concerning the pool is preserved in verses printed among the compositions of the local poet, John F. M. Dovaston, who published his works in 1825. The first stanza runs thus:—
Clerk Willin he sat at king Alaric’s board,
And a cunning clerk was he;
For he’d lived in the land of Oxenford
With the sons of Grammarie.
How much exactly of the poem comes from Dovaston’s own muse, and how much comes from the legend, I cannot tell. Take for instance the king’s name, this I should say is not derived from the story; but as to the name of the clerk, that possibly is, for the poet bases it on Croes-Willin, the Welsh form of which has been given me as Croes-Wylan, that is Wylan’s Cross, the name of the base of what is supposed to have been an old cross, a little way out of Oswestry on the north side; and I have been told that there is a farm in the same neighbourhood called Tre’ Wylan, ‘Wylan’s Stead.’ To return to the legend, Alaric’s queen was endowed with youth and beauty, but the king was not happy; and when he had lived with her nine years he told Clerk Willin how he first met her when he was hunting ‘fair Blodwell’s rocks among.’ He married her on the condition that she should be allowed to leave him one night in every seven, and this she did without his once knowing whither she went on the night of her absence. Clerk Willin promised to restore peace to the king if he would resign the queen to him, and a tithe annually of his cattle and of the wine in his cellar to him and the monks of the White Minster. The king consented, and the wily clerk hurried away with his book late at night to the rocks by the Giant’s Grave, where there was an ogo’ or cave which was supposed to lead down to Faery. While the queen was inside the cave, he began his spells and made it irrevocable that she should be his, and that his fare should be what fed on the king’s meadow and what flowed in his cellar. When the clerk’s potent spells forced the queen to meet him to consummate his bargain with the king, what should he behold but a grim ogress, who told him that their spells had clashed. She explained to him how she had been the king’s wife for thirty years, and how the king began to be tired of her wrinkles and old age. Then, on condition of returning to the Ogo to be an ogress one night in seven, she was given youth and beauty again, with which she attracted the king anew. In fact, she had promised him happiness
Till within his hall the flag-reeds tall
And the long green rushes grow.
The ogress continued in words which made the clerk see how completely he had been caught in his own net:
Then take thy bride to thy cloistered bed,
As by oath and spell decreed,
And nought be thy fare but the pike and the dare,
And the water in which they feed.
The clerk had succeeded in restoring peace at the king’s banqueting board, but it was the peace of the dead;
For down went the king, and his palace and all,
And the waters now o’er it flow,
And already in his hall do the flag-reeds tall
And the long green rushes grow.
But the visitor will, Dovaston says, find Willin’s peace relieved by the stories which the villagers have to tell of that wily clerk, of Croes-Willin, and of ‘the cave called the Grim Ogo’; not to mention that when the lake is clear, they will show you the towers of the palace below, the Ỻynclys, which the Brython of ages gone by believed to be there.
We now come to a different story about this pool, namely, one which has been preserved in Latin by the historian Humfrey Lhuyd, or Humphrey Ỻwyd, to the following effect:—
The only version known to me in the Welsh language of the Ỻynclys legend is to be found printed in the Brython for 1863, p. 338, and it may be summarized as follows:—The Ỻynclys family were notorious for their riotous living, and at their feasts a voice used to be heard proclaiming, ‘Vengeance is coming, coming,’ but nobody took it much to heart. However, one day a reckless maid asked the voice, ‘When?’ The prompt reply was to the effect that it was in the sixth generation: the voice was heard no more. So one night, when the sixth heir in descent from the time of the warning last heard was giving a great drinking feast, and music had been vigorously contributing to the entertainment of host and guest, the harper went outside for a breath of air; but when he turned to come back, lo and behold! the whole court had disappeared. Its place was occupied by a quiet piece of water, on whose waves he saw his harp floating, nothing more.
These inundation legends have many points of similarity among themselves: thus in those of Ỻynclys, Syfađon, Ỻyn Tegid, and Tyno Helig, though they have a ring of austerity about them, the harper is a favoured man, who always escapes when the banqueters are all involved in the catastrophe. The story, moreover, usually treats the submerged habitations as having sunk intact, so that the ancient spires and church towers may still at times be seen: nay the chimes of their bells may be heard by those who have ears for such music. In some cases there may have been, underlying the legend, a trace of fact such as has been indicated to me by Mr. Owen M. Edwards, of Lincoln College, in regard to Bala Lake. When the surface of that water, he says, is covered with broken ice, and a south-westerly wind is blowing, the mass of fragments is driven towards the north-eastern end near the town of Bala; and he has observed that the friction produces a somewhat metallic noise which a quick imagination may convert into something like a distant ringing of bells. Perhaps the most remarkable instance remains to be mentioned: I refer to Cantre’r Gwaelod, as the submerged country of Gwyđno Garanhir is termed, see p. 382 above. To one portion of his fabled realm the nearest actual centres of population are Aberdovey and Borth on either side of the estuary of the Dovey. As bursar of Jesus College I had business in 1892 in the Golden Valley of Herefordshire, and I stayed a day or two at Dorstone enjoying the hospitality of the rectory, and learning interesting facts from the rector, Mr. Prosser Powell, and from Mrs. Powell in particular, as to the folklore of the parish, which is still in several respects very Welsh. Mrs. Powell, however, did not confine herself to Dorstone or the Dore Valley, for she told me as follows:—‘I was at Aberdovey in 1852, and I distinctly remember that my childish imagination was much excited by the legend of the city beneath the sea, and the bells which I was told might be heard at night. I used to lie awake trying, but in vain, to catch the echoes of the chime. I was only seven years old, and cannot remember who told me the story, though I have never forgotten it.’ Mrs. Powell added that she has since heard it said, that at a certain stage of the tide at the mouth of the Dovey, the way in which the waves move the pebbles makes them produce a sort of jingling noise which has been fancied to be the echo of distant bells ringing.
These clues appeared too good to be dropped at once, and the result of further inquiries led Mrs. Powell afterwards to refer me to The Monthly Packet for the year 1859, where I found an article headed ‘Aberdovey Legends,’ and signed M. B., the initials, Mrs. Powell thought, of Miss Bramston of Winchester. The writer gives a sketch of the story of the country overflowed by the neighbouring portion of Cardigan Bay, mentioning, p. 645, that once on a time there were great cities on the banks of the Dovey and the Disynni. ‘Cities with marble wharfs,’ she says, ‘busy factories, and churches whose towers resounded with beautiful peals and chimes of bells.’ She goes on to say that ‘Mausna is the name of the city on the Dovey; its eastern suburb was at the sand-bank now called Borth, its western stretched far out into the sea.’ What the name Mausna may be I have no idea, unless it is the result of some confusion with that of the great turbary behind Borth, namely Mochno, or Cors Fochno, ‘Bog of Mochno.’ The name Borth stands for Y Borth, ‘the Harbour,’ which, more adequately described, was once Porth Wyđno, ‘Gwyđno’s Harbour.’ The writer, however, goes on with the story of the wicked prince, who left open the sluices of the sea-wall protecting his country and its capital: we read on as follows:—‘But though the sea will not give back that fair city to light and air, it is keeping it as a trust but for a time, and even now sometimes, though very rarely, eyes gazing down through the green waters can see not only the fluted glistering sand dotted here and there with shells and tufts of waving sea-weed, but the wide streets and costly buildings of that now silent city. Yet not always silent, for now and then will come chimes and peals of bells, sometimes near, sometimes distant, sounding low and sweet like a call to prayer, or as rejoicing for a victory. Even by day these tones arise, but more often they are heard in the long twilight evenings, or by night. English ears have sometimes heard these sounds even before they knew the tale, and fancied that they must come from some church among the hills, or on the other side of the water, but no such church is there to give the call; the sound and its connexion is so pleasant, that one does not care to break the spell by seeking for the origin of the legend, as in the idler tales with which that neighbourhood abounds.’
A story I heard on the cliffs of the West,
That oft, through the breakers dividing,
A city is seen on the ocean’s wild breast,
In turreted majesty riding.
But brief is the glimpse of that phantom so bright:
Soon close the white waters to screen it.
Now that a number of our inundation stories have been passed in review in this and the previous chapter, some room may be given to the question of their original form. They separate themselves, as it will have been seen, into at least two groups: (1) those in which the cause of the catastrophe is ethical, the punishment of the wicked and dissolute; and (2) those in which no very distinct suggestion of the kind is made. It is needless to say that everything points to the comparative lateness of the fully developed ethical motive; and we are not forced to rest content with this theoretical distinction, for in more than one of the instances we have the two kinds of story. In the case of Ỻyn Tegid, the less known and presumably the older story connects the formation of the lake with the neglect to keep the stone door of the well shut, while the more popular story makes the catastrophe a punishment for wicked and riotous living: compare pp. 377, 408, above. So with the older story of Cantre’r Gwaelod, on which we found the later one of the tipsy Seithennin as it were grafted, p. 395. The keeping of the well shut in the former case, as also in that of Ffynnon Gywer, was a precaution, but the neglect of it was not the cause of the ensuing misfortune. Even if we had stories like the Irish ones, which make the sacred well burst forth in pursuit of the intruder who has gazed into its depths, it would by no means be of a piece with the punishment of riotous and lawless living. Our comparison should rather be with the story of the Curse of Pantannas, where a man incurred the wrath of the fairies by ploughing up ground which they wished to retain as a green sward; but the threatened vengeance for that act of culture did not come to pass for a century, till the time of one, in fact, who is not charged with having done anything to deserve it. The ethics of that legend are, it is clear, not easy to discover, and in our inundation stories one may trace stages of development from a similarly low level. The case may be represented thus: a divinity is offended by a man, and for some reason or other the former wreaks his vengeance, not on the offender, but on his descendants. This minimum granted, it is easy to see, that in time the popular conscience would fail to rest satisfied with the cruel idea of a jealous divinity visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. One may accordingly distinguish the following stages:—
1. The legend lays it down as a fact that the father was very wicked.
2. It makes his descendants also wicked like him.
3. It represents the same punishment overtaking father and sons, ancestor and descendants.
4. The simplest way to secure this kind of equal justice was, no doubt, to let the offending ancestors live on to see their descendants of the generation for whose time the vengeance had been fixed, and to let them be swept away with them in one and the same cataclysm, as in the Welsh versions of the Syfađon and Kenfig legends, possibly also in those of Ỻyn Tegid and Tyno Helig, which are not explicit on this point.
Tâd I (Father)
1
Brother A II B Mâb (Son)
2 2
i Cousin Aa III Ba Wyr (Grandson)
3 3
ii Cousin Ab IV Bb Gorwyr (Great-Grandson)
4 4
iii Cousin Ac V Bc Esgynnyđ (G.G.Grandson)
5 5
iv Cousin Ad VI Bd Goresgynnyđ (G.G.G.Grandson).
In reckoning the relationships between the collateral members of the family, one counts not generations or begettings, not removes or degrees, but ancestry or the number of ancestors, so that the father or founder of the family only counts once. Thus his descendants Ad and Bd in the sixth generation or lifetime, are fourth cousins separated from one another by nine ancestors: that is, they are related in the ninth âch. In other words, Ad has five ancestors and Bd has also five, but as they have one ancestor in common, the father of the family, they are not separated by 5 + 5 ancestors, but by 5 + 5 - 1, that is by 9. Similarly, one being always subtracted, the third cousins Ac and Bc are related in the seventh âch, and the second cousin in the fifth âch: so with the others in odd numbers downwards, and also with the relatives reckoned upwards to the seventh or eighth generation, which would mean collaterals separated by eleven or thirteen ancestors respectively. This reckoning, which is purely conjectural, is based chiefly on the Kenfig story, which foretold the vengeance to come in the ninth âch and otherwise in the time of the goresgynnyđ, that is to say in the sixth lifetime. This works out all right if only by the ninth âch we understand the generation or lifetime when the collaterals are separated by nine ancestors, for that is no other than the sixth from the founder of the family. The Welsh version of the Ỻynclys legend fixes on the same generation, as it says yn oes wyrion, gorwyrion, esgynnyđ a goresgynnyđ, ‘in the lifetime of grandsons, great-grandsons, ascensors, and their children,’ for these last’s time is the sixth generation. In the case of the Syfađon legend the time of the vengeance is the ninth cenhedlaeth or generation, which must be regarded as probably a careless way of indicating the generation when the collaterals are separated by nine ancestors, that is to say the sixth from the father of the family. It can hardly have the other meaning, as the sinning ancestors are represented as then still living. The case of the Tyno Helig legend is different, as we have the time announced to the offending ancestor described as amser dy wyrion, dy orwyrion, a dy esgynyđion, ‘the time of thy grandsons, thy great-grandsons, and thy ascensors,’ which would be only the fifth generation with collaterals separated only by seven ancestors, and not nine. But the probability is that goresgynyđion has been here accidentally omitted, and that the generation indicated originally was the same as in the others. This, however, will not explain the Bala legend, which fixes the time for the third generation, namely, immediately after the birth of the offending prince’s first grandson. If, however, as I am inclined to suppose, the sixth generation with collaterals severed by nine ancestors was the normal term in these stories, it is easy to understand that the story-teller might wish to substitute a generation nearer to the original offender, especially if he was himself to be regarded as surviving to share in the threatened punishment: his living to see the birth of his first grandson postulated no extraordinary longevity.
The question why fairy vengeance is so often represented deferred for a long time can no longer be put off. Here three or four answers suggest themselves:—
1. The story of the Curse of Pantannas relates how the offender was not the person punished, but one of his descendants a hundred or more years after his time, while the offender is represented escaping the fairies’ vengeance because he entreated them very hard to let him go unpunished. All this seems to me but a sort of protest against the inexorable character of the little people, a protest, moreover, which was probably invented comparatively late.
2. The next answer is the very antithesis of the Pantannas one; for it is, that the fairies delay in order to involve all the more men and women in the vengeance wreaked by them: I confess that I see no reason to entertain so sinister an idea.
Whatever the causes may have been which gave our stories their form in regard of the delay in the fairy revenge, it is clear that Welsh folklore could not allow this delay to extend beyond the sixth generation with its cousinship of nine ancestries, if, as I gather, it counted kinship no further. Had one projected it on the seventh or the eighth generation, both of which are contemplated in the Laws, it would not be folklore. It would more likely be the lore of the landed gentry and of the powerful families whose pedigrees and ramifications of kinship were minutely known to the professional men on whom it was incumbent to keep themselves, and those on whom they depended, well informed in such matters.
It remains for me to consider the non-ethical motive of the other stories, such as those which ascribe negligence and the consequent inundation to the woman who has the charge of the door or lid of the threatening well. Her negligence is not the cause of the catastrophe, but it leaves the way open for it. What then can have been regarded the cause? One may gather something to the point from the Irish story where the divinity of the well is offended because a woman has gazed into its depths, and here probably, as already suggested (p. 392), we come across an ancient tabu directed against women, which may have applied only to certain wells of peculiarly sacred character. It serves, however, to suggest that the divinities of the water-world were not disinclined to seize every opportunity of extending their domain on the earth’s surface; and I am persuaded that this was once a universal creed of some race or other in possession of these islands. Besides the Irish legends already mentioned (pp. 382, 384) of the formation of Lough Neagh, Lough Ree, and others, witness the legendary annals of early Ireland, which, by the side of battles, the clearing of forests, and the construction of causeways, mention the bursting forth of lakes and rivers; that is to say, the formation or the coming into existence, or else the serious expansion, of certain of the actual waters of the country. For the present purpose the details given by The Four Masters are sufficient, and I have hurriedly counted their instances as follows:—
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
Kereist oth uebyd gwryd garwy.
With a coward Dyfrdonwy water ill agrees:
From thy boyhood hast thou loved Garwy’s valour.
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.
Nofiad a wnaeth hen Neifion
O Droia fawr draw i Fôn.
It is old Neptune that has swam
From great Troy afar to Mona.
In the same way Môr Neifion, ‘Sea of Neifion,’ seems to have signified the ocean, the high seas.
To return to the Triad about Dwyfan and Dwyfach, not only does it make them from being water divinities into a man and woman, but there is no certainty even that both were not feminine. In modern Welsh all rivers are treated as feminine, and even Dyfrdwyf has usually to submit, though the modern bard Tegid, analysing the word into Dwfr Dwyf, ‘Water of the Divinity or Divine Water,’ where dwfr, ‘water,’ could only be masculine, addressed Ỻyn Tegid thus, p. 78:
Drwyot, er dyđiau’r Drywon,
Y rhwyf y Dyfrdwyf ei don.
Through thee, from the days of the Druids,
The Dwfr Dwyf impels his wave.
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.
It is very possible that we have Lūdo, Ỻuđ, also in Porthluđ; which Geoffrey of Monmouth gives, iii. 20, as the Welsh for Ludesgata or Ludgate, in London, which gate, according to him, was called after an ancient king of Britain named Lud. He seems to have been using an ancient tradition, and there would be nothing improbable in the conjecture that Geoffrey’s Lud was our Ỻuđ, and that the great water divinity of that name had another sanctuary on the hill by the Thames, somewhere near the present site of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and occupying a post as it were prophetic of Britain’s rule of the water-ways in later times.
‘But to return to the question of the words approaching to the nature of the thing intended, there is an old story current among us concerning a woman whose children had been exchanged by the Tylwyth Teg. Whether it is truth or falsehood does not much matter, yet it shows what the men of that age thought concerning the sound of words, and how they fancied that the language of those sprites was of a ghastly and lumpy kind. The story is as follows:—The woman whose two children had been exchanged, chanced to overhear the two fairy heirs, whom she got instead of them, reasoning with one another beyond what became their age and persons. So she picked up the two sham children, one under each arm, in order to go and throw them from a bridge into a river, that they might be drowned as she fancied. But hardly had the one in his fall reached the bottom when he cried out to his comrade in the following words:—
Grippiach greppiach
Dal d’afel yn y wrach,
Hi aeth yn rhowyr ’faglach—
Grippiach Greppiach,
Keep thy hold on the hag.
It got too late, thou urchin—
I fell into the ….
In spite of the obscurity of these words, it is quite clear that it was thought the most natural thing in the world to return the fairies to the river, and no sooner were they dropped there than the right infants were found to have been sent home.
The same thing may be learned also from the story of the Curse of Pantannas, pp. 187–8 above; for when the time of the fairies’ revenge is approaching, the merry party gathered together at Pantannas are frightened by a piercing voice rising from a black and cauldron-like pool in the river; and after a while they hear it a second time rising above the noise of the river as it cascades over the shoulder of a neighbouring rock. Shortly afterwards an ugly, diminutive woman appears on the table near the window, and had it not been for the rudeness of one of those present she would have disclosed the future to them, but, as it was, she said very little in a vague way and went away offended; but as long as she was there the voice from the river was silent. Here we have the Welsh counterpart of the ben síde, pronounced banshee in Anglo-Irish, and meaning a fairy woman who is supposed to appear to certain Irish families before deaths or other misfortunes about to befall them. It is doubtless to some such fairy persons the voices belong, which threaten vengeance on the heir of Pantannas and on the wicked prince and his descendants previous to the cataclysm which brings a lake into the place of a doomed city: witness such cases as those of Ỻynclys, Syfađon, and Kenfig.
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.