Note 19 — Chapter XI · Folklore Philosophy

See Evans’ Black Book of Carmarthen, fo. 33b; also the Mabinogion, pp. 104, 306. The Irish lucht cumachtai would be in Welsh literally rendered ỻwyth cyfoeth, ‘the cyfoeth tribe or host,’ as it were. For cyfoeth, in Med. Welsh, meant power or dominion, whence cyfoethog, ‘powerful,’ and hoỻ-gyfoethog, ‘almighty’; but in Mod. Welsh cyfoeth and cyfoethog have been degraded to mean ‘riches’ and ‘rich’ respectively. Now if we dropped the prefix cum from the Irish cumachtai, and its equivalent cyf from the Welsh cyfoeth, we should have lucht cumachtai reduced to an approximate analogy to ỻwyth Oeth, ‘the Oeth tribe,’ for which we have the attested equivalent Teulu Oeth, ‘the Oeth household or family.’ Oeth, however, seems to have meant powerful rather than power, and this seems to have been its force in Gwalchmai’s poetry of the twelfth century, where I find it twice: see the Myvyrian Arch., i. 196b, 203a. In the former passage we have oeth dybydaf o dybwyf ryd, ‘I shall be powerful if I be free,’ and in the latter oeth ym uthrwyd, ‘mightily was I astonished or dismayed.’ An-oeth was the negative of oeth, and meant weak, feeble, frivolous: so we find its plural, anoetheu, applied in the story of Kulhwch to the strange quests on which Kulhwch had to engage himself and his friends, before he could hope to obtain Olwen to be his wife. This has its parallel in the use of the adjective gwan, ‘weak,’ in the following instance among them:—Arthur and his men were ready to set out in search of Mabon son of Modron, who was said to have been kidnapped, when only three nights old, from between his mother Modron and the wall; and though this had happened a fabulously long time before Arthur was born, nothing had ever been since heard of Mabon’s fate. Now Arthur’s men said that they would set out in search of him, but they considered that Arthur should not accompany them on feeble quests of the kind: their words were (p. 128), ny eỻi di uynet ath lu y geissaỽ peth mor uan ar rei hynn, ‘thou canst not go with thy army to seek a thing so weak as these are.’ Here we have uan as the synonym of an-oeth; but Oeth ac Anoeth probably became a phrase which was seldom analysed or understood; so we have besides Teulu Oeth ac Anoeth, a Caer Oeth ac Anoeth, or fortress of O. and A., and a Carchar Caer Oeth ac Anoeth, or the Prison of Caer O. and A., which is more shortly designated also Carchar Oeth ac Anoeth, or the Prison of O. and A. A late account of the building of that strange prison and fortress by Manawyđan is given in the Iolo MSS., pp. 185–6, 263, and it is needless to point out that Manawyđan, son of Ỻyr, was no other than the Manannán mac Lir of Irish literature, the greatest wizard among the Tuatha Dé or Tuatha Dé Danann; for the practical equivalence of those names is proved by the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 16b. For further details about Oeth and Anoeth, Silvan Evans’ Geiriadur may be consulted, s. v. Anoeth, where instances are cited of the application of those terms to tilled land and wild or uncultivated land. Here the words seem to have the secondary meanings of profitable and unprofitable lands, respectively: compare a somewhat analogous use of grym, ‘strength, force,’ in a passage relating to the mutilated horses of Matholwch—hyt nad oed rym a eỻit ar meirch, ‘so that no use was possible in the case of the horses,’ meaning that they were of no use whatever, or that they had been done for: see the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 29, and Lady Charlotte Guest’s, iii. 107, where the translation ‘and rendered them useless’ is barely strong enough. ↑