Note 18 — Chapter VII · Triumphs of the Water-world

It is interesting to note the fact, that Celtic folklore connects the underground divinities intimately with water; for one may briefly say that they have access wherever water can take them. With this qualification the belief may be said to have lingered lately in Wales, for instance, in connexion with Ỻyn Barfog, near Aberdovey. ‘It is believed to be very perilous,’ Mr. Pughe says, p. 142 above, ‘to let the waters out of the lake’; and not long before he wrote, in 1853, an aged inhabitant of the district informed him ‘that she recollected this being done during a period of long drought, in order to procure motive power for Ỻyn Pair Mill, and that long-continued heavy rains followed.’ Then we have the story related to Mr. Reynolds as to Ỻyn y Fan Fach, how there emerged from the water a huge hairy fellow of hideous aspect, who stormed at the disturbers of his peace, and uttered the threat that unless they left him alone in his own place he would drown a whole town. Thus the power of the water spirit is represented as equal to producing excessive wet weather and destructive floods. He is in all probability not to be dissociated from the afanc in the Conwy story which has already been given (pp. 130–3). Now the local belief is that the reason why the afanc had to be dragged out of the river was that he caused floods in the river and made it impossible for people to cross on their way to market at Ỻanrwst. Some such a local legend has been generalized into a sort of universal flood story in the late Triad, iii. 97, as follows:—‘Three masterpieces of the Isle of Prydain: the Ship of Nefyđ Naf Neifion, that carried in her male and female of every kind when the Lake of Ỻïon burst; and Hu the Mighty’s Ychen Bannog dragging the afanc of the lake to land, so that the lake burst no more; and the Stones of Gwyđon Ganhebon, on which one read all the arts and sciences of the world.’ A story similar to the Conwy one, but no longer to be got so complete, as far as I know, seems to have been current in various parts of the Principality, especially around Ỻyn Syfađon and on the banks of the Anglesey pool called Ỻyn yr Wyth Eidion, ‘the Pool of the Eight Oxen,’ for so many is Hu represented here as requiring in dealing with the Anglesey afanc. According to Mr. Pughe of Aberdovey, the same feat was performed at Ỻyn Barfog, not, however, by Hu and his oxen, but by Arthur and his horse. To be more exact the task may be here considered as done by Arthur superseding Hu: see p. 142 above. That, however, is of no consequence here, and I return to the afanc: the Fan Fach legend told to Mr. Reynolds makes the lake ruler huge and hairy, hideous and rough-spoken, but he expresses himself in human speech, in fact in two lines of doggerel: see p. 19 above. On the other hand, the Ỻyn Cwm Ỻwch story, which puts the same doggerel, p. 21, into the mouth of the threatening figure in red who sits in a chair on the face of that lake, suggests nothing abnormal about his personal appearance. Then as to the Conwy afanc, he is very heavy, it is true, but he also speaks the language of the country. He is lured, be it noticed, out of his home in the lake by the attractions of a young woman, who lets him rest his head in her lap and fall asleep. When he wakes to find himself in chains he takes a cruel revenge on her. But with infinite toil and labour he is dragged beyond the Conwy watershed into one of the highest tarns on Snowdon; for there is here no question of killing him, but only of removing him where he cannot harm the people of the Conwy Valley. It is true that the story of Peredur represents that knight cutting an afanc’s head off, but so much the worse for the compiler of that romance, as we have doubtless in the afanc some kind of a deathless being. However, the description which the Peredur story gives18 of him is interesting: he lives in a cave at the door of which is a stone pillar: he sees everybody that comes without anybody seeing him; and from behind the pillar he kills all comers with a poisoned spear.