of these legends also there is a horse, a kind of waterhorse, who forms the well which eventually overflows and becomes Lough Ree, and so with the still larger body of water known as Lough Neagh. In the latter case the fairy well was placed in the charge of a woman; but she one day left the cover of the well open, and the catastrophe took place-the water issued forth and overflowed the country. One of Eochaid's daughters, named Líban, however, was not drowned, but only changed into a salmon as already mentioned at p. 376 above. In my Arthurian Legend, p. 361, I have attempted to show that the name Liban may have its Welsh equivalent in that of Lion, occurring in the name of Lyn Lion, or ILïon's Lake, the bursting of which is described in the latest series of Triads, iii. 13, 97, as causing a sort of deluge. I am not certain as to the nature of the relationship between those names, but it seems evident that the stories have a common substratum, though it is to be noticed that no well, fairy or otherwise, figures in the ILyn ILïon legend, which makes the presence of the monster called the afanc the cause of the waters bursting forth. So Hu the Mighty, with his team of famous oxen, is made to drag the afanc out of the lake.

There is, however, another Welsh legend concerning a great overflow in which a well does figure: I allude to that of Cantre'r Gwaelod, or the Bottom Hundred, a fine spacious country supposed to be submerged in Cardigan Bay. Modern euhemerism treats it as defended by embankments and sluices, which, we are told, were in the charge of the prince of the country, named Seithennin, who, being one day in his cups, forgot to shut the sluices, and thus brought about the inundation, which was the end of his fertile realm. This, however, is not the old legend: that speaks of a well, and lays the blame on a woman-a pretty sure sign of antiquity, as

the reader may judge from other old stories which will readily occur to him. The Welsh legend to which I allude is embodied in a short poem in the Black Book of Carmarthen1 it consists of eight triplets, to which is added a triplet from the Englynion of the Graves. The following is the original with a tentative translation :

Diaspad mererid, ý ar van kaer hetiv. Mererid's cry from a city's height to

'See Evans' autotype edition of the Black Book of Carmarthen, fos. 53", 54", also 32: the punctuation is that of the MS. In the seventh triplet kedaul is written k'adaul, which seems to mean kadaul corrected into kedaul; but the a is not deleted, so other readings are possible.

2 In the Iolo MSS., p. 89, finaun wenestir is made into Ffynon-Wenestr and said to be one of the ornamental epithets of the sea; but I am convinced that it should be rather treated as ffynnon fenestr with wenestir or fenestr mutated from menestr, which meant a servant, attendant, cup-bearer: for one or two instances see Pughe's Dictionary. The word is probably, as suggested by M. Loth in his Mots Latins, p. 186, the old French menestre, ' cup-bearer,' borrowed. Compare the mention of Nechtán's men having access to the secret well in Sid Nechtáin, p. 390 below, and note that they were his three menestres or cup-bearers.

Diaspad mererid. am kýmhell heno y urth ujistauell.

gnaud guydi traha trangc pell.

Bet seithenhin sỳnhuir vann rug kaer kenedir a glan. mor maurhidic a kinran.

Mererid's cry drives me to-night
From my chamber away :

After insolence comes long death.

Weak-witted Seithennin's grave is it
Between Kenedyr's Fort and the shore,
With majestic Mor's and Kynran's.

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 fairy well. It cannot very well be, however, the name belonging to the ori ginal form of the legend; and we have the somewhat parallel case of Ffynnon Grassi, or Grace's Well; but what old Celtic name that of Mererid has replaced in the story, I cannot say. In the next place, 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 in the Black Book, fol. 33" :

Bet mor maurhidic diessic unben. post kinhen kinteic

mab peredur penwetic.

The grave of Mor the Grand,... prince,
Pillar of the... conflict,

Son of Peredur of Penwedig.

The last name in the final triplet of the poem which I have attempted to translate is Kinran, which is otherwise unknown 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 Curnán, which was borne by the idiot of the family,

1 See the Cymmrodor, viii. 88 (No. xxix`, where a Marereda is mentioned as a daughter of Madog son of Meredyd brother to Rhys Gryg.

who, like many later idiots, was at the same time a prophet. For he is represented as always prophesying that the waters were going to burst forth, and as advising his friends to prepare boats. So he may be set, after a fashion, over against our Seithenhin synhuir vann, 'S. of the feeble mind.' But one might perhaps ask why I do not point out an equivalent in Irish for the Welsh Seithennin, as his name is now pronounced. The fact is that no such equivalent occurs in the Irish story in question, nor exactly, 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 looks as if related to Seithenhin, and that is Setanta Beg, 'the little Setantian,' the first name of the Irish hero Cúchulainn. The nt, I may point out, makes one suspect that Setanta 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 Setantii1, placed by Ptolemy on the coast of what is now Lancashire. Whether any legend has ever been current about a country submerged on the coast of Lancashire I cannot say, but the soundings would make such a legend quite comprehensible. I remember, however, reading somewhere as to the Plain of Muirthemhne, of which Cúchulainn, our Setanta Beg, had special charge, that it was so called because it had once been submarine and become since the converse, so to say, of Seithennin's country. The latter is beneath Cardigan Bay, while the other fringed the opposite side of the sea, consisting as it did of the level portion of County Louth. On the whole, I am not altogether indisposed to believe that we have here traces of an ancient legend

There is another reading which would make them into Segantii, and render it irrelevant-to say the least of it-to mention them here.

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 ILyr. There we read that, when Brân and his men crossed from Wales to Ireland, the intervening sea consisted merely of two navigable rivers, called ILi and Archan. The storyteller adds words to the effect, that it is only since then the sea has multiplied its realms between Ireland and Ynys y Kedyrn, or the Isle of the Keiri, a name which has already been discussed: see pp. 279-83.

These are not all the questions which such stories suggest; for Seithennin is represented in later Welsh literature as the son of one Seithyn, associated with Dyfed; and the name Seithyn leads off to the coast of Brittany. For I learn from a paper by the late M. le Men, in the Revue Archéologique for 1872 (xxiii. 52), that the Île 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 would seem to be right in regarding Sizun as nearly related to our Seithyn. That is not all the tradition reminds one of the Welsh legend: M. le Men refers to the Vie du P. Maunoir by Boschet (Paris, 1697) p. 126, and adds that, in his own time, the road ending on the Pointe du Raz opposite the Île de Sein passed '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. There is no doubt that we have in these names distant echoes of an inundation story, once widely current in both Britains and perhaps also in Ireland. With regard to Wales we have an indica

1 See the Mabinogion, p. 35: the passage has been mistranslated in Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, iii. 117.