Sweeter than white wine the drink in it.”[[385]]

Little is, however, added by it to our knowledge. It reminds us that Annwn was surrounded by the sea—“the heavy blue chain” which held Gweir so firmly;—it informs us that the “bright wine” which was “the drink of the host” was kept in a well; it adds to the revelry the singing of the three organs; it makes a point that its inhabitants were freed from age and death; and, last of all, it shows us, as we might have expected, the ubiquitous Taliesin as a privileged resident of this delightful region. We have two clues as to where the country may have been situated. Lundy Island, off the coast of Devonshire, was anciently called Ynys Wair, the “Island of Gweir”, or Gwydion. The Welsh translation of the Seint Greal, an Anglo-Norman romance embodying much of the old mythology, locates its “Turning Castle”—evidently the same as Caer Sidi—in the district around and comprising Puffin Island off the coast of Anglesey.[[386]] But these are slender threads by which to tether to firm ground a realm of the imagination.

With Gwydion, too, have disappeared the whole of the characters connected with him in that portion of the Mabinogi of Mâth, Son of Mathonwy, which recounts the myth of the birth of the sun-god. Neither Mâth himself, nor Lleu Llaw Gyffes, nor Dylan, nor their mother, Arianrod, play any more part; they have vanished as completely as Gwydion. But the essence of the myth of which they were the figures remains intact. Gwydion was the father by his sister Arianrod, wife of a waning heaven-god called Nwyvre (Space), of twin sons, Lleu, a god of light, and Dylan, a god of darkness; and we find this same story woven into the very innermost texture of the legend of Arthur.[[387]] The new Arianrod, though called “Morgawse” by Sir Thomas Malory[[388]], and “Anna” by Geoffrey of Monmouth[[389]], is known to earlier Welsh myth as “Gwyar”[[390]]. She was the sister of Arthur and the wife of the sky-god, Lludd, and her name, which means “shed blood” or “gore”, reminds us of the relationship of the Morrígú, the war-goddess of the Gaels, to the heaven-god Nuada[[391]]. The new Lleu Llaw Gyffes is called Gwalchmei, that is, the “Falcon of May”[[392]], and the new Dylan is Medrawt, at once Arthur’s son and Gwalchmei’s brother, and the bitterest enemy of both[[393]].

Besides these “old friends with new faces”, Arthur brings with him into prominence a fresh Pantheon, most of whom also replace the older gods of the heavens and earth and the regions under the earth. The Zeus of Arthur’s cycle is called Myrddin, who passed into the Norman-French romances as “Merlin”. All the myths told of him bear witness to his high estate. The first name of Britain, before it was inhabited, was, we learn from a triad, Clas Myrddin, that is, “Myrddin’s Enclosure”.[[394]] He is given a wife whose attributes recall those of the consorts of Nuada and Lludd. She is described as the only daughter of Coel—the British name of the Gaulish Camulus, a god of war and the sky—and was called Elen Lwyddawg, that is, “Elen, Leader of Hosts”. Her memory is still preserved in Wales in connection with ancient roadways; such names as Ffordd Elen (“Elen’s Road”) and Sarn Elen (“Elen’s Causeway”) seem to show that the paths on which armies marched were ascribed or dedicated to her.[[395]] As Myrddin’s wife, she is credited with having founded the town of Carmarthen (Caer Myrddin), as well as the “highest fortress in Arvon”, which must have been the site near Beddgelert still called Dinas Emrys, the “Town of Emrys”, one of Myrddin’s epithets or names.[[396]]

Professor Rhys is inclined to credit Myrddin, or, rather, the British Zeus under whatever name, with having been the god especially worshipped at Stonehenge.[[397]] Certainly this impressive temple, ever unroofed and open to the sun and wind and rain of heaven, would seem peculiarly appropriate to a British supreme god of light and sky. Neither are we quite without documentary evidence which will allow us to connect it with him. Geoffrey of Monmouth[[398]], whose historical fictions usually conceal mythological facts, relates that the stones which compose it were erected by Merlin. Before that, they had stood in Ireland, upon a hill which Geoffrey calls “Mount Killaraus”, and which can be identified as the same spot known to Irish legend as the “Hill of Uisnech”, and, still earlier, connected with Balor. According to British tradition, the primeval giants who first colonized Ireland had brought them from their original home on “the farthest coast of Africa”, on account of their miraculous virtues; for any water in which they were bathed became a sovereign remedy either for sickness or for wounds. By the order of Aurelius, a half-real, half-mythical king of Britain, Merlin brought them thence to England, to be set up on Salisbury Plain as a monument to the British chieftains treacherously slain by Hengist and his Saxons. With this scrap of native information about Stonehenge we may compare the only other piece we have—the account of the classic Diodorus, who called it a temple of Apollo.[[399]] At first, these two statements seem to conflict. But it is far from unlikely that the earlier Celtic settlers in Britain made little or no religious distinction between sky and sun. The sun-god, as a separate personage, seems to have been the conception of a comparatively late age. Celtic mythology allows us to be present, as it were, at the births both of the Gaelic Lugh Lamhfada and the British Lleu Llaw Gyffes.

Even the well-known story of Myrddin’s, or Merlin’s final imprisonment in a tomb of airy enchantment—“a tour withouten walles, or withoute eny closure”—reads marvellously like a myth of the sun “with all his fires and travelling glories round him”.[[400]] Encircled, shielded, and made splendid by his atmosphere of living light, the Lord of Heaven moves slowly towards the west, to disappear at last into the sea (as one local version of the myth puts it), or on to a far-off island (as another says), or into a dark forest (the choice of a third).[[401]] When the myth became finally fixed, it was Bardsey Island, off the extreme westernmost point of Caernarvonshire, that was selected as his last abode. Into it he went with nine attendant bards, taking with him the “Thirteen Treasures of Britain”, thenceforth lost to men. Bardsey Island no doubt derives its name from this story; and what is probably an allusion to it is found in a first-century Greek writer called Plutarch, who describes a grammarian called Demetrius as having visited Britain, and brought home an account of his travels. He mentioned several uninhabited and sacred islands off our coasts which he said were named after gods and heroes, but there was one especially in which Cronos was imprisoned with his attendant deities, and Briareus keeping watch over him as he slept; “for sleep was the bond forged for him”.[[402]] Doubtless this disinherited deity, whom the Greek, after his fashion, called “Cronos”, was the British heaven- and sun-god, after he had descended into the prison of the west.

Among other new-comers is Kai, who, as Sir Kay the Seneschal, fills so large a part in the later romances. Purged of his worst offences, and reduced to a surly butler to Arthur, he is but a shadow of the earlier Kai who murdered Arthur’s son Llacheu[[403]], and can only be acquitted, through the obscurity of the poem that relates the incident, of having also carried off, or having tried to carry off, Arthur’s wife, Gwynhwyvar.[[404]] He is thought to have been a personification of fire,[[405]] upon the strength of a description given of him in the mythical romance of “Kulhwch and Olwen”. “Very subtle”, it says, “was Kai. When it pleased him he could render himself as tall as the highest tree in the forest. And he had another peculiarity—so great was the heat of his nature, that, when it rained hardest, whatever he carried remained dry for a handbreadth above and a handbreadth below his hand; and when his companions were coldest, it was to them as fuel with which to light their fire.”

Another personage who owes his prominence in the Arthurian story to his importance in Celtic myth was March son of Meirchion, whose swine Arthur attempted to steal, as Gwydion had done those of Pryderi. In the romances, he has become the cowardly and treacherous Mark, king, according to some stories, of Cornwall, but according to others, of the whole of Britain, and known to all as the husband of the Fair Isoult, and the uncle of Sir Tristrem. But as a deformed deity of the underworld[[406]] he can be found in Gaelic as well as in British myth. He cannot be considered as originally different from Morc, a king of the Fomors at the time when from their Glass Castle they so fatally oppressed the Children of Nemed.[[407]] The Fomors were distinguished by their animal features, and March had the same peculiarity.[[408]] When Sir Thomas Malory relates how, to please Arthur and Sir Launcelot, Sir Dinadan made a song about Mark, “which was the worst lay that ever harper sang with harp or any other instruments,”[[409]] he does not tell us wherein the sting of the lampoon lay. It no doubt reminded King Mark of the unpleasant fact that he had—not like his Phrygian counterpart, ass’s but—horse’s ears. He was, in fact, a Celtic Midas, a distinction which he shared with one of the mythical kings of early Ireland.[[410]]

Neither can we pass over Urien, a deity of the underworld akin to, or perhaps the same as, Brân.[[411]] Like that son of Llyr, he was at once a god of battle and of minstrelsy;[[412]] he was adored by the bards as their patron;[[413]] his badge was the raven (bran, in Welsh);[[414]] while, to make his identification complete, there is an extant poem which tells how Urien, wounded, ordered his own head to be cut off by his attendants.[[415]] His wife was Modron,[[416]] known as the mother of Mabon, the sun-god to whom inscriptions exist as Maponos. Another of the children of Urien and Modron is Owain, which was perhaps only another name for Mabon.[[417]] Taliesin calls him “chief of the glittering west”,[[418]] and he is as certainly a sun-god as his father Urien, “lord of the evening”,[[419]] was a ruler of the dark underworld.

It is by reason of the pre-eminence of Arthur that we find gathered round him so many gods, all probably various tribal personifications of the same few mythological ideas. The Celts, both of the Gaelic and the British branches, were split up into numerous petty tribes, each with its own local deities embodying the same essential conceptions under different names. There was the god of the underworld, gigantic in figure, patron alike of warrior and minstrel, teacher of the arts of eloquence and literature, and owner of boundless wealth, whom some of the British tribes worshipped as Brân, others as Urien, others as Pwyll, or March, or Mâth, or Arawn, or Ogyrvran. There was the lord of an elysium—Hades in its aspect of a paradise of the departed rather than of the primeval subterranean realm where all thing’s originated—whom the Britons of Wales called Gwyn, or Gwynwas; the Britons of Cornwall, Melwas; and the Britons of Somerset, Avallon, or Avallach. Under this last title, his realm is called Ynys Avallon, “Avallon’s Island”, or, as we know the word, Avilion. It was said to be in the “Land of Summer”, which, in the earliest myth, signified Hades; and it was only in later days that the mystic Isle of Avilion became fixed to earth as Glastonbury, and the Elysian “Land of Summer” as Somerset.[[420]] There was a mighty ruler of heaven, a “god of battles”, worshipped on high places, in whose hands was “the stern arbitrament of war”; some knew him as Lludd, others as Myrddin, or as Emrys. There was a gentler deity, friendly to man, to help whom he fought or cajoled the powers of the underworld; Gwydion he was called, and Arthur. Last, perhaps, to be imagined in concrete shape, there was a long-armed, sharp-speared sun-god who aided the culture-god in his work, and was known as Lleu, or Gwalchmei, or Mabon, or Owain, or Peredur, and no doubt by many another name; and with him is usually found a brother representing not light, but darkness. This expression of a single idea by different names may be also observed in Gaelic myth, though not quite so clearly. In the hurtling of clan against clan, many such divinities perished altogether out of memory, or survived only as names, to make up, in Ireland, the vast, shadowy population claiming to be Tuatha Dé Danann, and, in Britain, the long list of Arthur’s followers. Others—gods of stronger communities—would increase their fame as their worshippers increased their territory, until, as happened in Greece, the chief deities of many tribes came together to form a national Pantheon.