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 ILyn Cwm ILwch 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 gives1 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.

Hitherto we have the afanc described mostly from a hostile point of view: let us change our position, which some of the stories already given enable us to do. Take for instance the first of the whole series, where it describes, p. 7, the Fan Fach youth's despair when the lake damsel, whose love he had gained, suddenly dived to fetch her father and her sister. The Oxford Mabinogion, p. 224, and Guest's, i. 343.

There emerged, it says, out of the lake two most beautiful ladies, accompanied by a hoary-headed man of noble mien and extraordinary stature, but having otherwise all the force and strength of youth. This hoary-headed man of noble mien owned herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, a number of which were allowed to come out of the lake to form his daughter's dowry, as the narrative goes on to show. In the story of ILyn Du'r Arđu, p. 32, he has a consort who appears with him to join in giving the parental sanction to the marriage which their daughter was about to make with the Snowdon shepherd. In neither of these stories has this extraordinary figure any name given him, and it appears prima facie probable that the term afanc is rather one of abuse in harmony with the unlovely description of him supplied by the other stories. But neither in them does the term yr afanc suit the monster meant, for there can be no doubt that in the word afanc we have the etymological equivalent of the Irish word abacc, 'a dwarf'; and till further light is shed on these words one may assume that at one time afanc also meant a dwarf or pigmy in Welsh. In modern Welsh it has been regarded as meaning a beaver, but as that was too small an animal to suit the popular stories, the word has been also gravely treated as meaning a crocodile1: this is in the teeth of the unanimous treatment of him as anthropomorphic in the legends in point. If one is to abide by the meaning dwarf or pigmy, one is bound to regard afanc as one of the terms originally applied to the fairies in their more unlovely aspects: compare the use of crimbil, p. 263. Here may also be mentioned pegor, 'a dwarf

1 See Afanc in the Geiriadur of Silvan Evans, who cites instances in

or pigmy,' which occurs in the Book of Taliessin, poem

vii. (p. 135):

Gogon py pegor

yssyd ydan vor.

Gogwn eu heissor

pabb yny oscord.

I know what (sort of) pigmy

There is beneath the sea.

I know their kind,

Each in his troop.

Also the following lines in the twelfth-century manuscript of the Black Book of Carmarthen: see Evans' autotype facsimile, fo. 9:

Ar gnjuer pegor
y ssit y dan mor.
Ar gnyuer edeinauc
aoruc kyuoethauc.
Ac vei. vei. paup.

tri trychant tauaud
Nyellynt ve traethaud.

kyuoetheu [y] trindaud

And every dwarf

There is beneath the sea,

And every winged thing

The Mighty One hath made,

And were there to each

Thrice three hundred tongues

They could not relate

The powers of the Trinity.

I should rather suppose, then, that the pigmies in the water-world were believed to consist of many grades or classes, and to be innumerable like the Luchorpáin of Irish legend, which were likewise regarded as diminutive. With the Luchorpáin were also associated1 Fomori or Fomoraig (modern Irish spelling Fomhoraigh), and Goborchinn, 'Horse-heads.' The etymology of the word Fomori has been indicated at p. 286 above, but Irish legendary history has long associated it with muir, 'sea,' genitive mara, Welsh mor, and it has gone so far as to see in them, as there suggested, not submarine but transmarine enemies and invaders of Ireland. So the singular fomor, now written fomhor, is treated in O'Reilly's Irish Dictionary as meaning 'a pirate, a sea robber, a giant,' while in Highland Gaelic, where it is written fomhair or famhair, it is regularly used as the word for giant. The Manx Gaelic corresponding to Irish fomor and its derivative fomorach, is foawr, 'a giant,' and foawragh, 'gigantic,' but also 'a pirate.'

See the Revue Celtique, i. 257, and my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 92-3.

I remember hearing, however, years ago, a mention made of the Fomhoraigh, which, without conveying any definite allusion to their stature, associated them with subterranean places:- An undergraduate from the neighbourhood of Killorglin, in Kerry, happened to relate in my hearing, how, when he was exploring some underground ráths near his home, he was warned by his father's workmen to beware of the Fomhoraigh. But on the borders of the counties of Mayo and Sligo I have found the word used as in the Scottish Highlands, namely, in the sense of giants, while Dr. Douglas Hyde and others inform me that the Giant's Causeway is called in Irish Clochán na bh-Fomhorach.

The Goborchinns or Horse-heads have also an interest, not only in connexion with the Fomori, as when we read of a king of the latter called Eocha Eachcheann 1, or Eochy Horse-head, but also as a link between the Welsh afanc and the Highland water-horse, of whom Campbell has a good deal to say in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands. See more especially iv. 337, where he remarks among other things, that 'the water-horse assumes many shapes; he often appears as a man,' he adds, 'and sometimes as a large bird.' A page or two earlier he gives a story which illustrates the statement, at the same time that it vividly reminds one of that part of the Conwy legend which (p. 130) represents the afanc resting his head on the lap of the damsel forming one of the dramatis personæ. Here follows Campbell's own story, omitting all about a marvellous bull, however, that was in the end to checkmate the water-horse :

'A long time after these things a servant girl went with the farmer's herd of cattle to graze them at the side of a loch, and she sat herself down near the bank. There, in a little while, what should she see walking 1 The Four Masters, A. M. 3520. F f

RHYS