Note 16 — Chapter VII · Triumphs of the Water-world

For instances, the reader may turn back to pp. 154 or 191, but there are plenty more in the foregoing chapters; and he may also consult Howells’ Cambrian Superstitions, pp. 123–8, 141–2, 146. In one case, p. 123, he gives an instance of the contrary kind of imagination: the shepherd who joined a fairy party on Frenni Fach was convinced, when his senses and his memory returned, that, ‘although he thought he had been absent so many years, he had been only so many minutes.’ The story has the ordinary setting; but can it be of popular origin? The Frenni Fach is a part of the mountain known as the Frenni Fawr, in the north-east of Pembrokeshire; the names mean respectively the Little Breni, and the Great Breni. The obsolete word breni meant, in Old Welsh, the prow of a ship; local habit tends, however, to the solecism of Brenin Fawr, with brenin, ‘king,’ qualified by an adjective mutated feminine; but people at a distance who call it Frenni Fawr, pronounce the former vocable with nn. Lastly, Y Vrevi Vaỽr occurs in Maxen’s Dream in the Red Book (Oxford Mab. p. 89); but in the White Book (in the Peniarth collection), col. 187, the proper name is written Freni: for this information I have to thank Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans. ↑