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the pre-Celtic goddess of the Severn, and the name corresponding to Welsh Hafren occurs in Ireland in the form of Sabrann, an old name of the river Lee that flows through Cork. Similarly one now reads sometimes of Father Thames after the fashion of classic phraseology, and in the Celtic period Nudons may have been closely identified with that river, but the ancient name Tămēsa or Tămēsis1 was decidedly feminine, and it was, most likely, that of the river divinity from times when the pre-Celtic natives held exclusive possession of these islands. On the whole it appears safer to regard Nudons as belonging to a race that had developed on a larger scale the idea of a patriarchal or kingly ruler holding sway over a comparatively wide area. So Nudons may here be treated as ruled out of the discussion as to the origin of the fairies, to which a few paragraphs are now to be devoted.

Speaking of the rank and file of the fairies in rather a promiscuous fashion, one may say that we have found manifold proof of their close connexion with the waterworld. Not only have we found them supposed to haunt places bordering on rivers, to live beneath the lakes, or to inhabit certain green isles capable of playing hide-and-seek with the ancient mariner, and perhaps not so very ancient either; but other considerations have been suggested as also pointing unmistakably to the same conclusion. Take for instance the indirect evidence

1 Why our dictionary makers have taken into their heads to treat it as Tamesis I know not. The Welsh is Tafwys with a diphthong regularly representing an earlier long e or ei in the second syllable. There is, as far as I know, no reason to suppose Tafwys an invention, rather than a genuine vocable of the same origin as the name of the Glamorganshire river Taff, in Welsh Taf, which is also the name of the river emptying itself at Laugharne, in Carmarthenshire. Tafwys, however, does not appear to occur in any old Welsh document; but no such weakness attaches to the testimony of the French Tamise, which could hardly come from Taměsis: compare also the place-name Tamise near the Scheldt in East Flanders; this, however, may be of a wholly different origin.

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afforded by the method of proceeding to recover an infant stolen by the fairies. One account runs thus: The mother who had lost her baby was to go with a wizard and carry with her to a river the child left her in exchange. The wizard would say, Crap ar y wrach, 'Grip the hag,' and the woman would reply, Rhy hwyr, gyfraglach, 'Too late, you urchin1. Before she uttered those words she had dropped the urchin into the river, and she would then return to her house. By that time the kidnapped child would be found to have come back home 2. The words here used have not been quite forgotten in Carnarvonshire, but no distinct meaning seems to be attached to them now; at any rate I have failed to find anybody who could explain them. I should however guess that the wizard addressed his words to the fairy urchin with the intention, presumably, that the fairies in the river should at the same time hear and note what was about to be done. Another, and a somewhat more intelligible version, is given in the Gwyliedyd for 1837, p. 185, by a contributor who publishes it from a manuscript which Lewis Morris began to write in 1724 and finished apparently in 1729. He was a native of Anglesey, and it is probably to that county the story belongs, which he gives to illustrate one of the phonological aspects of certain kinds of Welsh. That account differs from the one just cited in that it introduces no

1 A more difficult version has been sent me by Dewi Glan Ffrydlas, of Bethesda Caffed y wrach, 'Let him seize the hag'; Methu'r cryfaglach, 'You have failed, urchin.' But he has not been able to get any explanation of the words at the Penrhyn Quarries. Cryfaglach is also the form in Mur y Cryfaglach, the Urchin's Wall,' in Jenkins' Bed Gelert, p. 249. He informs me that this is the name of an old ruin on an elevated spot some twenty or thirty yards from a swift brook, and not far in a south-south-easterly direction from Sir Edward Watkin's chalet.

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2 For this I am indebted to Mr. Wm. Davies (p. 147 above), who tells me that he copied the original from Chwedlau a Thradodiadau Gwyned, 'Gwyneđ Tales and Traditions,' published in a periodical, which I have not been able to consult, called Y Gordofigion, for the year 1873.

wizard, but postulates two fairy urchins between whom the dialogue occurs, which is not unusual in our changeling stories: see p. 62. After this explanation I translate Morris' words thus:

'But to return to the question of the words approaching to the nature of the thing intended, there is an old story current among us concerning a woman whose children had been exchanged by the Tylwyth Teg. Whether it is truth or falsehood does not much matter, yet it shows what the men of that age thought concerning the sound of words, and how they fancied that the language of those sprites was of a ghastly and lumpy kind. The story is as follows:-The woman whose two children had been exchanged, chanced to overhear the two fair heirs, whom she got instead of them, reasoning with one another beyond what became their age and persons. So she picked up the two sham children, one under each arm, in order to go and throw them from a bridge into a river, that they might be drowned as she fancied. But hardly had the one in his fall reached the bottom when he cried out to his comrade in the following words :

Grippiach greppiach

Dal d'afel yn y wrach,

Hi aeth yn rhowyr 'faglach-
Mi eis i ir muthlach

Grippiach Greppiach,
Keep thy hold on the hag.
It got too late, thou urchin-
I fell into the . . .

In spite of the obscurity of these words, it is quite clear that it was thought the most natural thing in the world to return the fairies to the river, and no sooner were

The meaning of the word mwthlach is doubtful, as it is now current in Gwyned only in the sense of a soft, doughy, or puffy person who is all of a heap, so to say. Pughe gives mwythlan and mwythlen with similar significations. But mwthlach would seem to have had some such a meaning in the doggerel as that of rough ground or a place covered with a scrubby, tangled growth. It is possibly the same word as the Irish mothlach, rough, bushy, ragged, shaggy'; see the Vision of Laisrén, edited by Professor K. Meyer, in the Otia Merseiana, pp. 114, 117.

they dropped there than the right infants were found to have been sent home.

The same thing may be learned also from the story of the Curse of Pantannas, pp. 187-8 above; for when the time of the fairies' revenge is approaching, the merry party gathered together at Pantannas are frightened by a piercing voice rising from a black and cauldron-like pool in the river; and after a while they hear it a second time rising above the noise of the river as it cascades over the shoulder of a neighbouring rock. Shortly afterwards an ugly, diminutive woman appears on the table near the window, and had it not been for the rudeness of one of those present she would have disclosed the future to them, but, as it was, she said very little in a vague way and went away offended; but as long as she was there the voice from the river was silent. Here we have the Welsh counterpart of the ben side, pronounced banshee in Anglo-Irish, and meaning a fairy woman who is supposed to appear to certain Irish families before deaths or other misfortunes about to befall them. It is doubtless to some such fairy persons the voices belong, which threaten vengeance on the heir of Pantannas and on the wicked prince and his descendants previous to the cataclysm which brings a lake into the place of a doomed city: witness such cases as those of ILynclys, Syfađon, and Kenfig.

The last mentioned deserves some further scrutiny; and I take this opportunity of referring the reader back to pp. 403-4, in order to direct his attention to the fact that the voice so closely identifies itself with the wronged family that it speaks in the first person, as it cries, 'Vengeance is come on him who murdered my father of the ninth generation!' Now it is worthy of remark that the same personifying is also characteristic of the Cyhiraeth'.

1 The account here given of the Cyhiraeth is taken partly from Choice

This spectral female used to be oftener heard than seen; but her blood-freezing shriek was as a rule to be heard when she came to a cross-road or to water, in which she splashed with her hands. At the same time she would make the most doleful noise and exclaim, in case the frightened hearer happened to be a wife, Fy ngwr, fy ngwr! 'my husband, my husband!' If it was the man the exclamation would be, Fy ngwraig, fy ngwraig! 'my wife, my wife!' Or in either case it might be, Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach! 'my child, my child, my little child!' These cries meant the approaching death of the hearer's husband, wife, or child, as the case might be; but if the scream was inarticulate it was reckoned probable that the hearer himself was the person foremourned. Sometimes she was supposed to

Notes, pp. 31-2, and partly from Howells, pp. 31-4, 56-7, who appears to have got uncertain in his narrative as to the sex of the Cyhiraeth; but there is no reason whatsoever for regarding it as either male or female—the latter alone is warranted, as he might have gathered from her being called y Gyhiraeth, 'the Cyhiraeth,' never y Cyhiraeth as far as I know. In North Cardiganshire the spectre intended is known only by another name, that of Gwrach y Rhibyn, but y Gyhiraeth or yr hen Gyhiraeth is a common term of abuse applied to a lanky, cadaverous person, both there and in Gwyned; in books, however, it is found sometimes meaning a phantom funeral. The word cyhiraeth would seem to have originally meant a skeleton with cyhyrau, 'sinews,' but no flesh. However, cyhyrau, singular cyhyr, would be more correctly written with an i; for the words are pronounced—even in Gwyneđ— cyhir, cyhirau. The spelling cyhyraeth corresponds to no pronunciation I have ever heard of the word; but there is a third spelling, cyheuraeth, which corresponds to an actual cyhoereth or cyhoyreth, the colloquial pronunciation to be heard in parts of South Wales: I cannot account for this variant. Gwrach y Rhibyn means the Hag of the Rhibyn, and rhibyn usually means a row, streak, a line—ma' nhw'n mynd yn un rhibyn, ' they are going in a line.' But what exactly Gwrach y Rhibyn should connote I am unable to say. I may mention, however, on the authority of Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans, that in Mid-Cardiganshire the term Gwrach y Rhibyn means a long roll or bustle of fern tied with ropes of straw and placed along the middle of the top of a hayrick. This is to form a ridge over which and on which the thatch is worked and supported: gwrach unqualified is, I am told, used in this sense in Glamorganshire. Something about the Gwrach sprite will be found in the Brython for 1860, p. 23a, while a different account is given in Jenkins' Bed Gelert, pp. 80-1.

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