[21] This name means the Bridge of the Blessed Ford, but how the ford came to be so called I know not. The word bendigaid, ‘blessed,’ comes from the Latin verb benedico, ‘I bless,’ and should, but for the objection to nđ in book Welsh, be benđigaid, which, in fact, it is approximately in the northern part of the county, where it is colloquially sounded Pont Rhyd Fynđiged, Fyđiged, or even Fđiged, also Pont Rhyd m̥điged, which represents the result of the unmutated form Bđiged coming directly after the d of rhyd. Somewhat the same is the case with the name of the herb Dail y Fendigaid, literally ‘the Leaves of the Blessed’ (in the feminine singular without any further indication of the noun to be supplied). This name means, I find, ‘hypericum androsæmum, tutsan,’ and in North Cardiganshire we call it Dail y Fynđiged or Fđiged, but in Carnarvonshire the adjective is made to qualify dail, so that it sounds Dail Byđigad or Bđigad, ‘Blessed Leaves.’ [↑]
[22] I am far from certain what y nos, ‘the night,’ may mean in such names as this and Craig y Nos, ‘the Rock of the Night’ (p. 254 above), to which perhaps might be added such an instance as Blaen Nos, ‘the Point of (the?) Night,’ in the neighbourhood of Ỻandovery, in Carmarthenshire. Can the allusion be merely to thickly overshadowed spots where the darkness of night might be said to lurk in defiance of the light of day? I have never visited the places in point, and leading questions addressed to local authorities are too apt to elicit misleading answers: the poetic faculty is dangerously rampant in the Principality. [↑]
[23] Dâr is a Glamorgan pronunciation, metri gratiâ of what is written daear, ‘earth’: compare d’ar-fochyn in Glamorgan for a badger, literally ‘an earth pig.’ The dwarf’s answer was probably in some sort of verse, with dâr and iâr to rhyme. [↑]
[24] Applied in Glamorgan to a child that looks poorly and does not grow. [↑]
[25] In Cardiganshire a conjurer is called dyn hysbys, where hysbys (or, in older orthography, hyspys) means ‘informed’: it is the man who is informed on matters which are dark to others; but the word is also used of facts—Y mae ’r peth yn hysbys, ‘the thing is known or manifest.’ The word is divisible into hy-spys, which would be in Irish, had it existed in the language, so-scese for an early su-squesti̭a-s, the related Irish words being ad-chiu, ‘I see,’ pass. preterite ad-chess, ‘was seen,’ and the like, in which ci and ces have been equated by Zimmer with the Sanskrit verb caksh, ‘to see,’ from a root quas. The adjective cynnil applied to the dyn hyspys in Glamorgan means now, as a rule, ‘economical’ or ‘thrifty,’ but in this instance it would seem to have signified ‘shrewd,’ ‘cunning,’ or ‘clever,’ though it would probably come nearer the original meaning of the word to render it by ‘smart,’ for it is in Irish conduail, which is found applied to ingenious work, such as the ornamentation on the hilt of a sword. Another term for a wizard or conjurer is gwr cyfarwyđ, with which the reader is already familiar. Here cyfarwyđ forms a link with the kyvarỽyd of the Mabinogion, where it usually means a professional man, especially one skilled in story and history; and what constituted his knowledge was called kyvarỽydyt, which included, among other things, acquaintance with boundaries and pedigrees, but it meant most frequently perhaps story; see the (Oxford) Mabinogion, pp. 5, 61, 72, 93. All these terms should, strictly speaking, have gwr—gwr hyspys, gwr cynnil, and gwr cyfarwyđ—but for the fact that modern Welsh tends to restrict gwr to signify ‘a husband’ or ‘a married man,’ while dyn, which only signifies a mortal, is made to mean man, and provided with a feminine dynes, ‘woman,’ unknown to good Welsh literature. Thus the spoken language is in this matter nearly on a level with English and French, which have quite lost the word for vir and ἀνήρ. [↑]
[26] Rhyd y Gloch means ‘the Ford of the Bell,’ in allusion, as the story goes, to a silver bell that used in former ages to be at Ỻanwonno Church. The people of Ỻanfabon took a liking to it, and one night a band of them stole it; but as they were carrying it across the Taff the moon happened to make her appearance suddenly, and they, in their fright, taking it to be sunrise, dropped the bell in the bed of the river, so that nothing has ever been heard of it since. But for ages afterwards, and even at the present day indeed, nothing could rouse the natives of Ỻanfabon to greater fury than to hear the moon spoken of as haul Ỻanfabon, ‘the sun of Ỻanfabon.’ [↑]
[27] It was peat fires that were usual in those days even in Glamorgan. [↑]
[28] See Hartland’s Science of Fairy Tales, pp. 112–6. [↑]
[29] In no other version has Mr. Reynolds heard cwcwỻ wy iâr, but either plisgyn or cibyn wy iâr, to which I may add masgal from Mr. Craigfryn Hughes’ versions. The word cwcwỻ usually means a cowl, but perhaps it is best here to treat cwcwỻ as a distinct word derived somehow from conchylium or the French coquille, ‘a shell.’ [↑]
[30] The whole passage will be found in the Itinerarium Kambriæ, i. 8 (pp. 75–8), and Giraldus fixes the story a little before his time somewhere in the district around Swansea and Neath. With this agrees closely enough the fact that a second David, Dafyđ ab Geraỻd or David Fitzgerald, appears to have been consecrated Bishop of St. David’s in 1147, and to have died in 1176. [↑]