Bet seithenhin synhuir vann mor maurhidic a kinran. The grave of Seithennin of the feeble understanding (Is) between Kenedyr's Fort and the shore, (With that of) Môr the Grand and Kynran. The names in these lines present great difficulties: first comes that of Mererid, which is no other word than Margarita, a pearl,' borrowed; but what does it here mean? Margarita, besides meaning a pearl, was used in Welsh, e.g., under the form Marereda,' as the proper name written in English Margaret. That is probably how it is to be taken here, namely, as the name given to the negligent guardian of the magic well. It cannot very well be, however, the name occurring in the original form of the legend; but we have the parallel case of Ffynnon Grassi or Grace's Well. The woman in question plays the role of Liban in the Irish story, and one of Liban's names was Muirgen, which would in Welsh be Morien, the earliest known form of which is Morgen, 'sea-born.' I conjecture accordingly that the respectable Christian name Margarita was substituted for an original Morgen, partly because perhaps Morgen was used as the name of a man, namely, of the person known to ecclesiastical history as Pelagius, which makes an appropriate translation of Morgen or Morien. I may point out that the modern name Morgan, standing as it does for an older Morcant, is an utterly different name, although Article IX. in the Welsh version of the English Book of Common Prayer gives its sanction to the ignorance which makes the Pelagians of the original into Morganiaid. This accounts probably for what I used to hear when I was 1 See Y Cymmrodor, viii. 88, No. XXIX. where a Marereda is mentioned as a daughter of Madog ap Meredydd ap Rhys Gryg. a boy, namely, that families bearing the name of Morgan were of a mysteriously uncanny descent. What was laid to their charge I could never discover; but it was probably the sin of heresy of the ancient Morgen or Morien-the name, as some of you know, selected as his ffugenw by the Archdderwydd, or the soi-disant chief of the Druids of Wales, at the present day, whose proper surname is Morgan. But to return to the Bottom Hundred, nobody has been able to identify Caer Kenedyr, and I have nothing to say as to Mor Maurhidic, except that a person of that name is mentioned in another of the Englynion of the Graves. It runs thus (B. B., fo. 33a): Bet mor maurhidic diessic unben. post kinhen kinteic. mab peredur penwetic. The Grave of Mor the Grand, the Déisi's prince, The son of Peredur of Penweddig. It is a mere conjecture of mine that diessic is an adjective referring to the people called in Irish Déisi, who invaded Dyfed, and founded there a dynasty represented by King Triphun and his Sons at the time of St. David's birth; later, we find Elen, wife of Howel Dda, to be one of that family. The mention of Peredur of Penweddig raises other questions; but let it suffice here to say that Penweddig was a Cantred consisting of North Cardiganshire, which brings us to the vicinity of Cantre'r Gwaelod. The last name in the final triplet of the poem which I have attempted to translate is Kinran, which is quite inexplicable as a Welsh name; but I am inclined to identify it with that of one of the three who escaped the catastrophe in the Irish legend. The name there is Curnan, which was borne by the idiot of the family, who, like many later idiots, was at the same C time a prophet. For he is represented as always prophesying that the waters were going to burst forth, and advising his friends to prepare boats. So he may be set, after a fashion, over against our Seithenhin synwyr wan, 'S. of the feeble mind.' But you will perhaps ask why I do not point out an equivalent in Irish for the Welsh Seithennin. The fact is that no such equivalent occurs in the Irish story in question, nor, so far as I know, in any other. That is what I wrote when penning these notes; but it has occurred to me since then that there is an Irish name, an important Irish name, which is possibly related to Seithenhin, and that is Setanta, the first name of the Irish hero Cúchulainn. If we put this name back into what may be surmised to have been its early form, we arrive at Settntias or Settntios, while Seithennin or Seithenhinboth spellings occur in the Black Book-admits of being restored to Seithņtinos. The nt in Setanta, on the other hand, makes one suspect that it is a name of Brythonic origin in Irish; and I have been in the habit of associating it with that of the people of the Setantii,' placed by Ptolemy on the coast-land of Lancashire. The two theories are possibly compatible; but in that case one would have to consider both Setanta and Setantii as Brythonic names, handed down in forms more or less Goidelicized. Whether any legend has ever been current about a country submerged on the coast of Lancashire I cannot say, but I should be very glad to be informed of it if any such is known. I remember, however, reading somewhere as to the Plain of Muirthemhne, of which Cúchulainn, our Setanta, had special charge, that it was so called because it had once been covered by the sea: but that is just the converse of Seithennin's country being continuously sub 'There is another reading which would make them into Segantii, and render it irrelevant to mention them here. merged. The latter is beneath Cardigan Bay, while the other fringed the opposite side of the Irish Sea, consisting as it did of the level portion of county Louth. And on the whole I am not altogether indisposed to believe that we have in these names traces of an ancient legend of a wider scope than is represented by the Black Book triplets which I have essayed to translate. I think that I am right in recognizing that legend in the Mabinogi of Branwen, daughter of Llyr. There we read that, when Brân and his men crossed from Wales to Ireland, the intervening sea consisted merely of two navigable rivers called Lli and Archan. The story-teller adds words, grievously mistranslated by Lady Charlotte Guest in her Mabinogion, iii. 117, to the effect that it is only since then that the sea has multiplied his realms between Ireland and the Isle of the Mighty, as he calls this country. These are not all the questions which such stories suggest to me; for Seithennin is represented in later Welsh literature as the son of one Seithyn Saidi, King of Dyfed. Saidi is obscure a Mab Saidi, Saidi's Son,' is mentioned in the Story of Kulhwch and Olwen : see the Red Book Mabinogion, pp. 106, 110; and as to Seithyn, or Seithin, a person so called is alluded to in an obscure passage in the Book of Taliessin see Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales, ii. 210. I now shift to the coast of Brittany, as to which I learn from a short paper by the late M. Le Men, in the Revue Archéologique, xxiii. 52, that the Ile de Sein is called in Breton Enez-Sun, in which Sun is a dialectic shortening of Sizun, which is also met with as Seidhun. That being so, one can have but little hesitation in regarding Sizun as nearly related to our Seithyn. That is not all: the tradition reminds one of the Welsh legend: M. Le Men not only referred to the Vie du P. Maunoir by Boschet (Paris, 1697), but added that, in his own time, the road 66 ending on the Pointe du Raz opposite the Isle of Sein passe pour être l'ancien chemin qui conduisait à la ville. d'Is (Kaer-a-Is, la ville de la partie basse)." It is my own experience that nobody can go about much in Brittany without hearing over and over again about the submerged city of Is. When pondering over the collective significance of these stories, I had my attention directed to quite another order of facts by a naturalist who informed me that a well-known botanist ranks as Iberian a certain percentage-a very considerable percentage, I understood him to say-of the flora of our south-western peninsulas, such as Cornwall and Kerry. The question suggests itself at once: Can our British and Breton legends of submergence have come down to us from so remote a past as the time when the land extended unbroken from the north of Spain to the south of Ireland? I cannot say that such a view seems to me admissible, but the question may prove worth putting. To return to magic wells, I have to confess that I cannot decide what may be precisely the meaning of the notion of a well with a woman set carefully to see that the door of the well is kept shut. It will occur, however, to everybody to compare the well which Undine wished to have kept shut, on account of its affording a ready access from her subterranean country to the castle of her refractory knight. And in the case of the Glasfryn Lake, the walling and cover that were to keep the spring from overflowing were, according to the story, not water-tight, seeing that there were holes in one of the stones. This suggests the idea that the cover was to prevent the passage of some such full-grown fairies as those with which legend seems to have once peopled all the pools and tarns of Wales. But, in the next place, is the maiden in charge of the well to be regarded as priestess of the well? This idea of a priest |