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. 9b : Ar gnjuer pegor tri trychant tauaud 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.' 1 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', 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 persona. 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. towards her but a man, who asked her to fasg his hair [Welsh teua]. She said she was willing enough to do him that service, and so he laid his head on her knee, and she began to array his locks, as Neapolitan damsels also do by their swains. But soon she got a great fright, for growing amongst the man's hair, she found a great quantity of liobhagach an locha, a certain slimy green weed1 that abounds in such lochs, fresh, salt, and brackish. The girl knew that if she screamed there was an end of her, so she kept her terror to herself, and worked away till the man fell asleep as he was with his head on her knee. Then she untied her apron strings, and slid the apron quietly on to the ground with its burden upon it, and then she took her feet home as fast as it was in her heart. Now when she was getting near the houses, she gave a glance behind her, and there she saw her caraid (friend) coming after her in the likeness of a horse.' The equine form belongs also more or less constantly to the kelpie of the Lowlands of Scotland and of the Isle of Man, where we have him in the glashtyn, whose amorous propensities are represented as more repulsive than what appears in Welsh or Irish legend: see p. 289 above, and the Lioar Manninagh for 1897, p. 139. Perhaps in Man and the Highlands the horsy nature of this being has been reinforced by the influence of the Norse Nykr, a Northern Proteus or old Nick, who takes many forms, but with a decided preference for that of 'a gray water-horse': see Vigfusson's Icelandic-English Dictionary. But the idea of associating the equine form with the water divinity is by no means confined to the Irish and the Northern nations: witness the Greek 1 In another version Campbell had found it to be sand and nothing else. * As to this incident of a girl and a supernatural, Campbell says that he had heard it in the Isle of Man also, and elsewhere. legend of the horse being of Poseidon's own creation, and the beast whose form he sometimes assumed. It is in this sort of a notion of a water-horse one is probably to look for the key to the riddle of such conceptions as that of March ab Meirchion, the king with horse's ears, and the corresponding Irish figure of Labraid Lorc1. In both of these the brute peculiarities are reduced almost to a minimum: both are human in form save their ears alone. The name Labraid Lorc is distinct enough from the Welsh March, but under this latter name one detects traces of him with the horse's ears in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany 2. We have also probably the same name in the Morc of Irish legend: at any rate Morc, Marc, or Margg, seems to be the same name as the Welsh March, which is no other word than march, 'a steed or charger.' Now the Irish Morc is not stated to have had horse's ears, but he and another called Conaing are represented in the legendary history of early Erin as the naval leaders of the Fomori, a sort of position which would seem to fit the Brythonic March also were he to be treated in earnest as an historical character. But short of that another treatment may be suspected of having been actually dealt out to him, namely, that of resolving the water-horse into a horse and his master. Of this we seem to have two instances in the course of the story of the formation of Lough Neagh in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 39-41: There was once a good king named Maired reigning over Munster, and he had two sons, Eochaid and Rib. 1 See the Revue Celtique, ii. 197. He was also called Labraid Longsech, and Labraid Longsech Lorc. The explanation of Labraid Lorc is possibly that it was originally Labraid Morc, and that the fondness for alliteration brought it into line as Labraid Lorc: compare Lût Laweraint in Welsh for Nûđ Laweraint. This is not disproved by the fact that Labraid Lord's grandfather is said to have been called Loegaire Lorc: Loegaire Lorc and Labraid Lorc are rather to be regarded perhaps as duplicates of the same original. 2 See my Arthurian Legend, p. 70; also Hibbert Lectures, p. 590. He married a wife named Ebliu (genitive Eblinde), who fell in love with her stepson, Eochaid. The two brothers make up their minds to leave their father and to take Ebliu with them, together with all that was theirs, including in all a thousand men. They proceed northwards, but their druids persuade them that they cannot settle down in the same district, so Rib goes westwards to a plain known as Tir Cluchi Midir acus Maic Óic, 'the Play-ground of Mider and the Mac Óc,' so called after the two great fairy chiefs of Ireland. Mider visits Rib's camp and kills their horses, then he gives them a big horse of his own ready harnessed with a packsaddle. They had to put all their baggage on the big horse's back and go away, but after a while the nag lay down and a well of water formed there, which eventually burst forth, drowning them all: this is Loch Ri, 'Rib's Loch, or Lough Ree,' on the Shannon. Eochaid, the other brother, went with his party to the banks of the Boyne near the Brug, where the fairy chief Mac Óc or Mac ind Óc had his residence: he destroyed Eochaid's horses the first night, and the next day he threatened to destroy the men themselves unless they went away. Thereupon Eochaid said that they could not travel without horses, so the Mac Óc gave them a big horse, on whose back they placed all they had. The Mac Óc warned them not to unload the nag on the way, and not to let him halt lest he should be their death. However, when they had reached the middle of Ulster, they thoughtlessly took all their property off the horse's back, and nobody bethought him of turning the animal's head back in the direction from which they had come so he also made a well1. Over that well The original has in these passages respectively siblais a fual corbo thipra, 'minxit urinam suam so that it was a spring'; ar na siblad a fúal ar na bad fochond báis doib, 'ne mingat urinam suam lest it should be the cause of |