Note 65 — Chapter IX · Place-name Stories

To return to the Mabinogion: I have long been inclined to identify Ỻwyd, son of Kilcoed, with the Irish Liath, son of Celtchar, of Cualu in the present county of Wicklow. Liath, whose name means ‘grey,’ is described as the comeliest youth of noble rank among the fairies of Erin; and the only time the Welsh Ỻwyd, whose name also means ‘grey,’ appears in the Mabinogion he is ascribed, not the comeliest figure, it is true, or the greatest personal beauty, but the most imposing disguise of a bishop attended by his suite: he was a great magician. The name of his father, Kil-coet, seems to me merely an inexact popular rendering of Celtchar, the name of Liath’s father: at any rate one fails here to detect the touch of the skilled translator or literary redactor.65 But the Mabinogi of Manawyđan, in which Ỻwyd figures, is also the one in which Pryderi king of Dyfed’s wife is called Kicua or Cigfa, a name which has no claim to be regarded as Brythonic. It occurs early, however, in the legendary history of Ireland: the Four Masters, under the year A.M. 2520, mention a Ciocbha as wife of a son of Parthalon; and the name seems to be related to that of a man called Cioccal, A.M. 2530. Lastly, Manawyđan, from whom the Mabinogi takes its name, is called mab Ỻyr, ‘son of Ỻyr,’ in Welsh, and Manannán mac Lir in Irish. Similarly with his brother Brân, and his sister Branwen, except that she has not been identified in Irish story. But in Irish literature the genitive Lir, as in mac Lir, ‘son of Ler,’ is so common, and the nominative so rare, that Lir came to be treated in late Irish as the nominative too; but a genitive of the form Lir suggests a nominative-accusative Ler, and as a matter of fact it occurs, for instance, in the couplet:—