Eochaid had a house built, and a lid put on the well, which he set a woman to guard. In the sequel she neglected it, and the well burst forth and formed Lough Neagh, as already mentioned, p. 382 above. What became of the big horses in these stories one is not told, but most likely they were originally represented as vanishing in a spring of water where each of them stood. Compare the account of Undine at her unfaithful husband's funeral. In the procession she mys teriously appeared as a snow-white figure deeply veiled, but when one rose from kneeling at the grave, where she had knelt nought was to be seen save a little silver spring of limpid water bubbling out of the turf and trickling on to surround the new grave:-Da man sich aber wieder erhob, war die weisse Fremde verschwunden; an der Stelle, wo sie geknieet hatte, quoll ein silberhelles Brünnlein aus dem Rasen; das rieselte und rieselte fort, bis es den Grabhügel des Ritters fast ganz umzogen hatte; dann rann es fürder und ergoss sich in einen Weiher, der zur Seite des Gottesackers lag. The late and grotesque story of the Gilla Decair may be mentioned next: he was one of the Fomorach, and had a wonderful kind of horse on whose back most of Finn's chief warriors were induced to mount. Then the Gilla Decair and his horse hurried towards Corkaguiny, in Kerry, and took to the sea, for he and his horse travelled equally well on sea and land. Thus Finn's men, unable to dismount, were carried prisoners to an island not named, on which Dermot in quest of them afterwards landed, and from which, after great perils, he made his way to Tír fo Thuinn, 'Terra sub Unda,' and brought his friends back to Erin'. Now the number death to them'; and silis, 'minxit,' fo. 39b. For a translation of the whole story see Dr. O'Grady's Silva Gadelica, pp. 265-9; also Joyce's Old Celtic Romances, pp. 97–105. 1 See the story in Dr. O'Grady's Silva Gadelica, pp. 292-311. of Finn's men taken away by force by the Gilla Decair was fifteen, fourteen on the back of his horse and one clutching to the animal's tail, and the Welsh Triads, i. 93= ii. 11, seem to re-echo some similar story, but they give the number of persons not as fifteen but just one half, and describe the horse as Du (y) Moroed, 'the Black of (the) Seas,' steed of Elidyr Mwynfawr, that carried seven human beings and a half from Pen ILech Elidyr in the North to Pen ILech Elidyr in Môn, 'Anglesey.' It is explained that Du carried seven on his back, and that one who swam with his hands on that horse's crupper was reckoned the half man in this case. Du Moroed is in the story of Kulhwch and Olwen called Du March Moro, 'Black the Steed of Moro,' the horse ridden in the hunt of Twrch Trwyth by Gwyn ab Nud, king of the other world; and he appears as a knight with his name unmistakably rendered into Brun de Morois in the romance of Durmart le Galois, who carries away Arthur's queen on his horse to his castle in Morois1. Lastly, here also might be mentioned the incident in the story of Peredur or Perceval, which relates how to that knight, when he was in the middle of a forest much distressed for the want of a horse, a lady brought a fine steed as black as a blackberry. He mounted and he found his beast marvellously swift, but on his making straight for a vast river the knight made the sign of the cross, whereupon he was left on the ground, and his horse plunged into the water, which his touch seemed to set ablaze. The horse is interpreted to have been the devil 2, and this is a fair specimen of the way in which Celtic paganism is treated by the 1 See Stengel's edition of li Romans de Durmart le Galois (Tübingen, 1873), lines 4185-340, and my Arthurian Legend, pp. 68-9. * See Williams' Seint Greal, pp. 60-1, 474-5; Nutt's Holy Grail, p. 44; and my Arthurian Legend, pp. 69-70. Grail writers when they feel in the humour to assume an edifying attitude. If one is right in setting Môn, 'Anglesey,' over against the anonymous isle to which the Gilla Decair hurries Finn's men away, Anglesey would have to be treated as having once been considered one of the Islands of the Dead and the home of Other-world inhabitants. We have a trace of this in a couplet in a poem by the medieval poet, Dafyd ab Gwilym, who makes Blodeuwed the Owl give a bit of her history as follows: Daughter to a lord, son of Meirchion, Merch i arglwyd, ail Meirchion, Wyfi, myn Dewi! o Fon'. This, it will be seen, connects March ab Meirchion, as it were 'Steed son of Steeding,' with the Isle of Anglesey. Add to this that the Irish for Anglesey or Mona was Moin Conaing, 'Conaing's Swamp,' so called apparently after Conaing associated with Morc, a name which is practically March in Welsh. Both were leaders of the Fomori in Irish tales: see my Arthurian Legend, p. 356. On the great place given to islands in Celtic legend and myth it is needless here to expatiate: witness 1 Bardoniaeth D. ab Gwilym, poem 183. A similar descent of Blodeuwed's appears implied in the following englyn—one of two-by Anthony Powel, who died in 1618: it is given by Taliesin ab Iolo in his essay on the Neath Valley, entitled Traethawd ar Gywreineđ, Hynafiaeth, a hen Bendefigion Glynn Net (Aberdare, 1886), p. 15:— Crug ael, carn gadarn a godwyd yn fryn, Yn hen fraenwaith bochlwyd; Main a'i tud man y tadwyd, Merch hoewen loer Meirchion lwyd. It refers, with six other englynion by other authors, to a remarkable rock called Craig y Dinas, with which Taliesin associated a cave where Arthur or Owen Lawgoch and his men are supposed, according to him, to enjoy a secular sleep, and it implies that Blodeuwed, whose end in the Mabinogi of Math was to be converted into an owl, was, according to another account, overwhelmed by Craig y Dinas. It may be Englished somewhat as follows: Heaped on a brow, a mighty cairn built like a hill, Like ancient work rough with age, grey-cheeked ; Stones that confine her where she was slain, Grey Meirchion's daughter quick and bright as the moon. Brittia, to which Procopius describes the souls of the departed being shipped from the shores of the Continent, the Isle of Avallon in the Romances, that of Gwales in the Mabinogion, Ynys Entti or Bardsey, in which Merlin and his retinue enter the Glass House1, and the island of which we read in the pages of Plutarch, that it contains Cronus held in the bonds of perennial sleep 2. Let us return to the more anthropomorphic figure of the afanc, and take as his more favoured representative the virile personage described emerging from the Fan Fach Lake to give his sanction to the marriage of his daughter with the Myđfai shepherd. It is probable that a divinity of the same order belonged to every other lake of any considerable dimensions in the country. But it will be remembered that in the case of the story of ILyn Du'r Arđu two parents appeared with the lake maiden-her father and her mother-and we may suppose that they were divinities of the waterworld. The same thing also may be inferred from the late Triad, iii. 13, which speaks of the bursting of the lake of ILion, causing all the lands to be inundated so that all the human race was drowned except Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who escaped in a mastless ship: it was from them that the island of Prydain was repeopled. A similar Triad, iii. 97, but evidently of a different origin, has already been mentioned as speaking of the Ship of Nefyd Naf Neifion, that carried in it a male and female of every kind when the lake of ILïon burst. This later Triad evidently supplies what had been forgotten in the previous one, namely, a pair of each kind of animal life, and not of mankind alone. But from the 1 This comes from the late series of Triads, iii. 10, where Merlin's nine companions are called naw beird cylfeira: cylfeird should be the plural of cylfard, which must be the same word as the Irish culbard, name of one of the bardic grades in Ireland. "For some more remarks on this subject generally, see my Arthurian Legend, chapter xv, on the Isles of the Dead.' Now names Dwyfan and Dwyfach I infer that the writer of Triad iii. 13 has developed his universal deluge on the basis of the scriptural account of it, for those names belonged in all probability to wells and rivers: in other terms, they were the names of water divinities. At any rate there seems to be some evidence that two springs, whose waters flow into Bala Lake, were at one time called Dwyfan and Dwyfach, these names being borne both by the springs themselves and the rivers flowing from them. The Dwyfan and the Dwyfach were regarded as uniting in the lake, while the water on its issuing from the lake is called Dyfrdwy. Dyfrdwy stands for an older Dyfr-dwyf, which in Old Welsh was Dubr duiu, 'the water of the divinity.' One of the names of that divinity was Donwy, standing for an early form Danuvios or Danuvia, according as it was masculine or feminine. In either case it was practically the same name as that of the Danube or Danuvios, derived from a word which is represented in Irish by the adjective dána, ' audax, fortis, intrepidus.' The Dee has in Welsh poetry still another name, Aerfen, which seems to mean a martial goddess or the spirit of the battlefield, which is corroborated and explained by Giraldus', who represents the river as the accredited arbiter of the fortunes of the wars in its country between the Welsh and the English. The name Dyfrdonwy occurs in a poem by ILywarch Brydyd y Moch, a poet who flourished towards the end of the twelfth century, as follows2: Nid kywiw a Hwfyr dwfyr dyfyr- With a coward Dyfrdonwy water ill donwy Kereist oth uebyd gwryd garwy. 1 See his Itinerarium Kambriæ, ii. p. 68, and Arthurian Legend, p. 364. agrees: From thy boyhood hast thou loved 11 (p. 139); also my Celtic Britain, * From the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, i. 302. " I regard nid kywiw as a corruption of ni chywiw from cyf-yw, an instance |