Note 3 — Chapter XII · Race in Folklore and Myth

The physical theory of love for an unknown lady at the first mention of her name, and the allusion to the Celtic tonsure, will have doubtless caught the reader’s attention, but I only wish to speak of the words which the translator has rendered, ‘I declare to thee, that it is thy destiny not to be suited with a wife until thou obtain Olwen.’ More closely rendered, the original might be translated thus: ‘I swear thee a destiny that thy side touch not a wife till thou obtain Olwen.’ The word in the Welsh for destiny is tynghet (for an earlier tuncet), and the corresponding Irish word is attested as tocad. Both these words have a tendency, like ‘fate,’ to be used mostly in peiorem partem. Formerly, however, they might be freely used in an auspicious sense likewise, as for instance in the woman’s name Tunccetace, on an early inscribed stone in Pembrokeshire. If her name had been rendered into Latin she would have probably been called Fortunata, as a namesake of good fortune. I render the Welsh mi a tynghaf dynghet itt3 into English, ‘I swear thee a destiny’; but, more literally still, one might possibly render it ‘I swear thee a swearing,’ that is, ‘I swear thee an oath,’ meaning ‘I swear for thee an oath which will bind thee.’ The stepmother, it is true, is not represented going through the form of words, for what she said appears to have been a regular formula, just like that of putting a person in Medieval Irish story under gessa or bonds of magic; but an oath or form of imprecation was once doubtless a dark reality behind this formula. In the southern part of my native county of Cardigan, the phrase in question has been in use within the last thirty years, and the practice which it denotes is still so well known as to be the subject of local stories. A friend of mine, who is not yet fifty, vividly remembers listening to an uncle of his relating how narrowly he once escaped having the oath forced on him. He was in the hilly portion of the parish of Ỻanwenog, coming home across country in the dead of a midsummer’s night, when leaping over a fence he unexpectedly came down close to a man actively engaged in sheep-stealing. The uncle instantly took to his heels, while the thief pursued him with a knife. If the thief had caught him, it is understood that he would have held his knife at his throat and forced on him an oath of secrecy. I have not been able to ascertain the wording of the oath, but all I can learn goes to show that it was dreaded only less than death itself. In fact, there are stories current of men who failed to recover from the effects of the oath, but lingered and died in a comparatively short time. Since I got the foregoing story I have made inquiries of others in South Cardiganshire, and especially of a medical friend of mine, who speaks chiefly as to his native parish of Ỻangynỻo. I found that the idea is perfectly familiar to him and my other informants; but, strange to say, from nobody could I gather that the illness is considered to result necessarily from the violent administration of the tynghed to the victim, or from the latter’s disregarding the secrecy of it by disclosing to his friends the name of the criminal. In fact, I cannot discover that any such secrecy is emphasized so long as the criminal is not publicly brought before a court of justice. Rather is it that the tynghed effects blindly the ruin of the sworn man’s health, regardless of his conduct. At any rate, that is the interpretation which I am forced to put on what I have been told.