Note 44 — Chapter IX · Place-name Stories

For the last four words Stokes suggests ‘O pigling of a white sow’; but perhaps the most natural rendering of the words would be ‘O white porker of a sow!’—which does not recommend itself greatly on the score of sense, I must admit. The word occurs, also, in Breton as gwiz or gwéz, ‘truie, femelle du porc,’ and as gwys or guis in Old Cornish, while in Irish it was feis. Nevertheless, the editor of the Twrch Trwyth story did not know it; but it would be in no way surprising that a Welshman, who knew his language fairly well, should be baffled by such a word in case it was not in use in his own district in his own time. This, however, barely touches the fringe of the question. The range of the hunt, as already given, was mostly within the boundaries, so to say, of the portion of South Wales where we find Goidelic inscriptions in the Ogam character of the fifth or sixth century; and I am persuaded that the Goidelic language must have lived down to the sixth or seventh century in the south and in the north of Wales44, a tract of Mid-Wales being then, probably, the only district which can be assumed to have been completely Brythonic in point of speech. In this very story, probably, such a name as Garth Grugyn is but slightly modified from a Goidelic Gort Grucaind, ‘the enclosure of Grucand45 or Grugan’: compare Cúchulaind or Cúchulainn made in Welsh into Cocholyn. But the capital instance in the story of Twrch Trwyth as has already been indicated is that of Amanw, which I detect also as Ammann (probably to be read Ammanu), in the Book of Ỻan Dâv (or Liber Landavensis), p. 199: it is there borne by a lay witness to a grant of land called Tir Dimuner, which would appear to have been in what is now Monmouthshire. Interpreted as standing for in Banbh, ‘the Boar,’ it would make a man’s name of the same class as Ibleid, found elsewhere in the same manuscript (pp. 178, 184), meaning evidently i Bleiđ, now y Blaiđ, ‘the Wolf.’ But observe that the latter was Welsh and the former Goidelic, which makes all the difference for our story. The Goidel relating the story would say that a boar, banbh, was killed on the mountain or hill of in Banbh or of ‘the Boar’; and his Goidelic hearer could not fail to associate the place-name with the appellative. But a Brython could hardly understand what the words in Banbh meant, and certainly not after he had transformed them into Ammanw, with the nb assimilated into mm, and the accent shifted to the first syllable. It is needless to say that my remarks have no meaning unless Goidelic was the original language of the tale.