Figs. 128 and 129.—Iberian. From Akerman.
Fig. 130.—Gaulish. From Akerman.
Incompetent comprehension would condemn Figs. 124 to 129, particularly the draughtsmanship of the head: it is hardly credible, yet, says Akerman, the small winged elf in these coins “apparently escaped the observation of M. de Saulcy”. They emanated from the Tarragonian town of Ana or Ona, and are somewhat suggestive of the mythic tale that Minerva sprang from the head of Jove: the horses on the Gaulish coin illustrated in Fig. 130, which is attributed either to Verdun or Vermandois, are inscribed Vero Iove and that Jou was the White Horse is, to some extent, implied by our elementary words Gee and Geho. According to Hazlitt “the exclamation Geho! Geho! which carmen use to their horses is not peculiar to this country, as I have heard it used in France”:[298] it is probable that the Jehu who drove furiously was a memory of the solar charioteer; it is further probable that the story of Io, the divinely fair daughter of Inachus, who was said to have been pursued over the world by a malignant gadfly, originated in the lumpish imagination of some one who had in front of him just such elfin emblems as the pixy horse now under consideration. That in reality the gadfly was a good mouche is implied by the term gad: the inscription Kio on Fig. 74 (p. 253) reads Great Io or Great Eye, and in connection with the remarkable optic of the White Horse at Uffington may be connoted the place-name Horse Eye near Bexhill. The curious place-name Beckjay in Shropshire is suggestive of Big Jew or Joy: the blue-crested monarch of the woods we call a jay (Spanish, gayo, “of doubtful origin”) was probably the bird of Jay or Joy—just as picus or the crested woodpecker was admittedly Jupiter’s bird—and the Jaye’s Park in Surrey, which is in the immediate neighbourhood of Godstone, Gadbrooke, and Kitlands, was seemingly associated at some period with Good Jay or Joy.
We speak ironically to-day of our “Jehus,” and the word hack still survives: in Chaucer’s time English carters encouraged their horses with the exclamation Heck![299] the Irish for horse was ech, and the inscription beneath the effigy on Fig. 131, a Tarragonian coin, reads, according to Akerman, Ekk. That the hack was connected in idea with the oak is somewhat implied by a horse ornament in my possession, the eye or centre of which is represented by an oak corn or acorn. In the North of England the elves seem to have been known as hags, for fairy rings are there known as hag tracks. The word hackney is identical with Boudicca’s tribe the Ikeni, and it is believed that Cæsar’s reference to the Cenimagni or Cenomagni refers to the Ikeni: whence it is probable that the Ikeni, like the Cantii, were worshippers of Invicta, the Great Hackney, the Ceni Magna or Hackney Magna.
The water horse which figures overleaf may be connoted with the Scotch kelpie, which is radically ek Elpi or Elfi: the kelpie or water horse of Scotch fairy lore is a ghastly spook, just as Alpa in Scandinavia is a ghoul and Ephialtes in Albany or Scotland is a nightmare: but there must almost certainly have been a White Kelpie, for the Greeks held a national horse race which they termed the Calpe, and Calpe is the name of the mountain which forms the European side of the Pillars of Hercules. From the surnames Killbye and Gilbey one may perhaps deduce a tribe who were followers of ’K Alpe the Great All Feeder: that the kelpie was regarded as the fourfold feeder is obvious from the four most unnatural teats depicted on the Pixtil coin of Fig. 133.
Fig. 131.—Iberian. From Akerman.