Note 32 — Chapter X · Difficulties of the Folklorist

Brefi is the name of the river from which this Ỻanđewi takes its distinctive name; and it is pronounced there much the same as brefu, ‘the act of lowing, bellowing, or bleating.’ Now the Brefi runs down through the Foelaỻt Farm, which lies between two very big rocks popularly fancied to have been once united, and treated by Howells, somewhat inconsistently, as the permanent forms taken by the two oxen. The story which Howells seems to have jumbled up with that of one or more lake legends, is to be found given in Samuel Rush Meyrick’s County of Cardigan: see pp. 265–6, where one reads of a wild tradition that when the church was building there were two oxen to draw the stone required; and one of the two died in the effort to drag the load, while the other bellowed nine times and thereby split the hill, which before presented itself as an obstacle. The single ox was then able to bring the load unassisted to the site of the church. It is to this story that the doggerel already given refers; and, curiously enough, most of the district between Ỻanđewi and Ystrad Fflur, or Strata Florida, is more or less associated with the Ychen Bannog. Thus a ridge running east and west at a distance of some three miles from Tregaron, and separating Upper and Lower Caron from one another, bears the name of Cwys yr Ychen Bannog, or the Furrow of the Ychen Bannog. It somewhat resembles in appearance an ancient dyke, but it is said to be nothing but ‘a long bank of glacial till32.’ Moreover there used to be preserved within the church of Ỻanđewi a remarkable fragment of a horn commonly called Madcorn yr Ych Bannog, ‘the mabcorn or core of the Bannog Ox’s Horn.’ It is now in the possession of Mr. Parry of Ỻidiardau, near Aberystwyth; and it has been pronounced by Prof. Boyd Dawkins to have belonged to ‘the great urus (Bos Primigenius), that Charlemagne hunted in the forests of Aachen, and the monks of St. Galle ate on their feast days.’ He adds that the condition of the horn proves it to have been derived from a peat bog or alluvium33. On the whole, it seems to me probable that the wild legends about the Ychen Bannog34 in Cardiganshire have underlying them a substratum of tradition going back to a time when the urus was not as yet extinct in Wales. How far the urus was once treated in this country as an emblem of divinity, it is impossible to say; but from ancient Gaul we have such a name as Urogeno-nertus35, meaning a man of the strength of an Urogen, that is, of the offspring of a urus; not to mention the Gaulish Tarvos Trigaranus, or the bull with three cranes on his back. With this divine animal M. d’Arbois de Jubainville would identify the Donnos underlying such Gallo-Roman names as Donnotaurus, and that of the wonderful bull called Donn in the principal epic story of Ireland36, where we seem to trace the same element in the river-name given by Ptolemy as Mo-donnos, one of the streams of Wicklow, or else the Slaney. This would be the earliest instance known of the prefixing of the pronoun mo, ‘my,’ in its reverential application, which was confined in later ages to the names of Goidelic saints.