the country folk began to grow weary of waiting for his return. In other words, most of our cave legends have combined together two sets of popular belief originally distinct, the one referring to a hero gone to the world of the fairies and expected some day to return, and the other to a hero or god enjoying an enchanted sleep with his retinue all around him. In some of our legends, however, such as that of ILanciau Eryri, the process of combining the two sets of story has been left to this day incomplete.

CHAPTER IX

PLACE-NAME STORIES

The Dindsenchas is a collection of stories (senchasa), in Middle-Irish prose and verse, about the names of noteworthy places (dind) in Ireland-plains, mountains, ridges, cairns, lakes, rivers, fords, estuaries, islands, and so forth. . . . But its value to students of Irish folklore, romance (sometimes called history), and topography has long been recognized by competent authorities, such as Petrie, O'Donovan, and Mr. Alfred Nutt.

WHITLEY STOKES.

In the previous chapters some folklore has been produced in which we have swine figuring: see more especially that concerned with the Hwch Du Gwta, pp. 224-6 above. Now I wish to bring before the reader certain other groups of swine legends not vouched for by oral tradition so much as found in manuscripts more or less ancient. The first three to be mentioned occur in one of the Triads1. I give the substance of it in the three best known versions, pre

1 They are produced here in their order as printed at the beginning of the second volume of the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, and the series or versions are indicated as i, ii, iii. Version ii will be found printed in the third volume of the Cymmrodor, pp. 52-61, also in the Oxford Mabinogion, pp. 297-308, from the Red Book of Hergest of the fourteenth century. The letter (a, b, c) added is intended to indicate the order of the three parts of the Triad, for it is not the same in all the series. Let me here remark in a general way that the former fondness of the Welsh for Triads was not peculiar to them. The Irish also must have been at one time addicted to this grouping. Witness the Triad of Cleverest Countings, in the Book of the Dun Cow, fol. 58a, and the Triad of the Blemishes of the Women of Ulster, ib. 43.

mising that the Triad is entitled that of the Three Stout Swineherds of the Isle of Prydain :

i. 30:-Drystan1 son of Tallwch who guarded the swine of March son of Meirchion while the swineherd went to bid Essyllt come to meet him: at the same time Arthur sought to have one sow by fraud or force, and failed.

ii. 56-Drystan son of Tallwch with the swine of March ab Meirchion while the swineherd went on a message to Essyllt. Arthur and March and Cai and Bedwyr came all four to him, but obtained from Drystan not even as much as a single porker, whether by force, by fraud, or by theft.

iii. Ior:-The third was Trystan son of Tallwch, who guarded the swine of March son of Meirchion while the swineherd had gone on a message to Essyllt to bid her appoint a meeting with Trystan. Now Arthur and Marcheff and Cai and Bedwyr undertook to go and make an attempt on him, but they proved unable to get possession of as much as one porker either as a gift or as a purchase, whether by fraud, by force, or by theft.

In this story the well-known love of Drystan and Essyllt is taken for granted; but the whole setting is so peculiar and so unlike that of the story of Tristan and Iselt or Iseut in the romances, that there is no reason to suppose it in any way derived from the latter.

The next portion of the Triad runs thus:

i. 30:-And Pryderi son of Pwyll of Annwvyn who guarded the swine of Pendaran of Dyfed in the Glen of the Cuch in Emlyn.

ii. 56-Pryderi son of Pwyll Head of Annwn with the swine of Pendaran of Dyfed his foster father. The

'As to the names Drystan (also Trystan) and Essylt, see the footnote on P. 480 above.

swine were the seven brought away by Pwyll Head of Annwn and given by him to Pendaran of Dyfed his foster father; and the Glen of the Cuch was the place where they were kept. The reason why Pryderi is called a mighty swineherd is that no one could prevail over him either by fraud or by force 1.

iii. 101a:-The first was Pryderi son of Pwyll of Pendaran in Dyfed 2, who guarded his father's swine while he was in Annwn, and it was in the Glen of the Cuch that he guarded them.

The history of the pigs is given, so to say, in the Mabinogion. Pwyll had been able to strike up a friendship and even an alliance with Arawn king of Annwvyn3 or Annwn, which now means Hades or the other world; and they kept up their friendship partly by exchanging presents of horses, greyhounds, falcons, and any other things calculated to give gratification to the receiver of them. Among other gifts which Pryderi appears to have received from the king of Annwn were hobeu or moch, 'pigs, swine,' which had never before been heard of in the island of Prydain. The news about this new race of animals, and that they formed sweeter food than oxen, was not long before it reached Gwyned; and we shall presently see that there was another story which

1 This was meant to explain the unusual term g6rdueichyat, also written g6rdueichat, g6rueichyat, and gwrddfeichiad. This last comes in the modern spelling of iii. 101, where this clause is not put in the middle of the Triad but at the end.

The editor of this version seems to have supposed Pendaran to have been a place in Dyfed! But his ignorance leaves us no evidence that he had a different story before him.

This word is found written in Mod. Welsh Annwfn, but it has been mostly superseded by the curtailed form Annwn, which appears twice in the Mabinogi of Math. These words have been studied by M. Gaidoz in Meyer and Stern's Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, i. 29-34, where he equates Annwfn with the Breton anauon, which is a plural used collectively for the souls of the departed, the other world. His view, however, of these interesting words has since been mentioned in the same Zeitschrift, iii. 184–5, and opposed in the Annales de Bretagne, xi. 488.

flatly contradicts this part of the Triad, namely to the effect that Gwydion, nephew of Math king of Gwyned and a great magician, came to Pryderi's court at Rhuðlan, near Dolau Bach or Highmead on the Teifi in what is now the county of Cardigan, and obtained some of the swine by deceiving the king. But, to pass by that for the present, I may say that Dyfed seems to have been famous for rearing swine; and at the present day one affects to believe in the neighbouring districts that the chief industry in Dyfed, more especially in South Cardiganshire, consists in the rearing of parsons, carpenters, and pigs. Perhaps it is also worth mentioning that the people of the southern portion of Dyfed are nicknamed by the men of Glamorgan to this day Moch Sir Benfro, 'the Pigs of Pembrokeshire.'

But why so much importance attached to pigs? I cannot well give a better answer than the reader can himself supply if he will only consider what rôle the pig plays in the domestic economy of modern Ireland. But, to judge from old Irish literature, it was even more so in ancient times, as pigs' meat was so highly appreciated, that under some one or other of its various names it usually takes its place at the head of all flesh meats in Irish stories. This seems the case, for instance, in the medieval story called the Vision of MacConglinne1; and, to go further back, to the Feast of Bricriu for instance, one finds it decidedly the case with the Champion's Portion at that stormy banquet. Then one may mention the story of the fatal feast on MacDátho's great swine 3, where that beast would have apparently sufficed for the braves both of Connaught

Edited by Professor Kuno Meyer (London, 1892): see for instance pp. 76-8.

2 See Windisch's Irische Texte, p. 256, and now the Irish Text Society's Fled Brierend, edited with a translation by George Henderson, pp. 8, 9. * Windisch, ibid. pp. 99–105.