Here the hunt came up with him, and drove him into the water, and in this unfamiliar element he was outmatched. Osla Big-Knife[[451]], Manawyddan son of Llyr, Kacmwri, the servant of Arthur, and Gwyngelli caught him by his four feet and plunged his head under water, while the two chief huntsmen, Mabon son of Modron, and Kyledyr Willt, came, one on each side of him, and took the scissors and the razor. Before they could get the comb, however, he shook himself free, and struck out for Cornwall, leaving Osla and Kacmwri half-drowned in the Severn.

And all this trouble, we are told, was mere play compared with the trouble they had with him in Cornwall before they could get the comb. But, at last, they secured it, and drove the boar out over the deep sea. He passed out of sight, with two of the magic hounds in pursuit of him, and none of them have ever been heard of since.

The sight of these treasures, paraded before Hawthorn, chief of giants, was, of course, his death-warrant. All who wished him ill came to gloat over his downfall. But they should have been put to shame by the giant, whose end had, at least, a certain dignity. “My daughter”, he said to Kulhwch, “is yours, but you need not thank me for it, but Arthur, who has accomplished all this. By my free will you should never have had her, for with her I lose my life.”

Thereupon they cut off his head, and put it upon a pole; and that night the undutiful Olwen became Kulhwch’s bride.

CHAPTER XXIII
THE GODS AS KING ARTHUR’S KNIGHTS

It is not, however, by such fragments of legend that Arthur is best known to English readers. Not Arthur the god, but Arthur the “blameless king”, who founded the Table Round, from which he sent forth his knights “to ride abroad redressing human wrongs”,[[452]] is the figure which the name conjures up. Nor is it even from Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur that this conception comes to most of us, but from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. But Tennyson has so modernized the ancient tradition that it retains little of the old Arthur but the name. He tells us himself that his poem had but very slight relation to—

... “that gray king, whose name, a ghost,

Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak,

And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him