One of the inscriptions began with D. M. Nodonti, ‘to the great god Nudons,’ and a little bronze crescent intended for the diadem of the god or of one of his priests gives a representation of him as a crowned, beardless personage driving a chariot with four horses; and on either side of him is a naked figure supposed to represent the winds, and beyond them on each of the two sides is a triton with the fore feet of a horse. The god holds the reins in his left hand, and his right uplifted grasps what may be a sceptre or possibly a whip, while the whole equipment of the god recalls in some measure the Chariot of the Sun. Another piece of the bronze ornament shows another triton with an anchor in one of his hands, and opposite him a fisherman in the act of hooking a fine salmon. Other things, such as oars and shell trumpets, together with mosaic representations of marine animals in the floor of the temple, compel us to assimilate Nudons more closely with Neptune than any other god of classical mythology.
The name of the god, as given in the inscriptions, varies between Nudons and Nodens, the cases actually occurring being the dative Nodonti, Nodenti, and Nudente, and the genitive Nodentis, so I should regard ō or ū as optional in the first syllable, and o as preferable, perhaps, to e in the second, for there is no room for reasonably doubting that we have here to do with the same name as Irish Nuadu, genitive Nuadat, conspicuous in the legendary history of Ireland. Now the Nuadu who naturally occurs to one first, was Nuadu Argetlám or Nuadu of the Silver Hand, from argat, ‘silver, argentum,’ and lám, ‘hand.’ Irish literature explains how he came to have a hand made of silver, and we can identify with him on Welsh ground a Ỻuđ Ỻawereint; for put back as it were into earlier Brythonic, this would be Lūdo(ns) Lām’-argenti̯os: that is to say, a reversal takes place in the order of the elements forming the epithet out of ereint (for older ergeint), ‘silvern, argenteus,’ and ỻaw, for earlier lāma, ‘hand.’ Then comes the alliterative instinct into play, forcing Nūdo(ns) Lāmargenti̯o(s) to become Lūdo(ns) Lāmargenti̯o(s), whence the later form, Ỻuđ Ỻawereint, derives regularly[40]. Thus we have in Welsh the name Ỻûđ, fashioned into that form under the influence of the epithet, whereas elsewhere it is Nûđ, which occurs as a man’s name in the pedigrees, while an intermediate form was probably Nūdos or Nūdo, of which a genitive NVDI occurs in a post-Roman inscription found near Yarrow Kirk in Selkirkshire. It is worthy of note that the modification of Nūdo into Lūdo must have taken place comparatively early—not improbably while the language was still Goidelic—as we seem to have a survival of the name in that of Lydney itself.
It is very possible that we have Lūdo, Ỻuđ, also in Porthluđ; which Geoffrey of Monmouth gives, iii. 20, as the Welsh for Ludesgata or Ludgate, in London, which gate, according to him, was called after an ancient king of Britain named Lud. He seems to have been using an ancient tradition, and there would be nothing improbable in the conjecture that Geoffrey’s Lud was our Ỻuđ, and that the great water divinity of that name had another sanctuary on the hill by the Thames, somewhere near the present site of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and occupying a post as it were prophetic of Britain’s rule of the water-ways in later times.
Perhaps as one seems to find traces of Nudons from the estuary of the Thames to that of the Severn and thence to Ireland, one may conclude that the god was one of the divinities worshipped by the Goidels. With regard to the Brythonic Celts, there is nothing to suggest that he belonged also to them except in the sense of his having been probably adopted by them from the Goidels. It might be further suggested that the Goidels themselves had in the first instance adopted him from the pre-Celtic natives, but in that case a goddess would have been rather more probable[41]. In fact in the case of the Severn we seem to have a trace of such a goddess in the Sabrina, Old Welsh Habren, now Hafren, so called after a princess whom Geoffrey, ii. 5, represents drowned in the river: she may have been the pre-Celtic goddess of the Severn, and the name corresponding to Welsh Hafren occurs in Ireland in the form of Sabrann, an old name of the river Lee that flows through Cork. Similarly one now reads sometimes of Father Thames after the fashion of classic phraseology, and in the Celtic period Nudons may have been closely identified with that river, but the ancient name Tămēsa or Tămēsis[42] was decidedly feminine, and it was, most likely, that of the river divinity from times when the pre-Celtic natives held exclusive possession of these islands. On the whole it appears safer to regard Nudons as belonging to a race that had developed on a larger scale the idea of a patriarchal or kingly ruler holding sway over a comparatively wide area. So Nudons may here be treated as ruled out of the discussion as to the origin of the fairies, to which a few paragraphs are now to be devoted.
Speaking of the rank and file of the fairies in rather a promiscuous fashion, one may say that we have found manifold proof of their close connexion with the water-world. Not only have we found them supposed to haunt places bordering on rivers, to live beneath the lakes, or to inhabit certain green isles capable of playing hide-and-seek with the ancient mariner, and perhaps not so very ancient either; but other considerations have been suggested as also pointing unmistakably to the same conclusion. Take for instance the indirect evidence afforded by the method of proceeding to recover an infant stolen by the fairies. One account runs thus: The mother who had lost her baby was to go with a wizard and carry with her to a river the child left her in exchange. The wizard would say, Crap ar y wrach, ‘Grip the hag,’ and the woman would reply, Rhy hwyr, gyfraglach, ‘Too late, you urchin[43].’ Before she uttered those words she had dropped the urchin into the river, and she would then return to her house. By that time the kidnapped child would be found to have come back home[44]. The words here used have not been quite forgotten in Carnarvonshire, but no distinct meaning seems to be attached to them now; at any rate I have failed to find anybody who could explain them. I should however guess that the wizard addressed his words to the fairy urchin with the intention, presumably, that the fairies in the river should at the same time hear and note what was about to be done. Another, and a somewhat more intelligible version, is given in the Gwyliedyđ for 1837, p. 185, by a contributor who publishes it from a manuscript which Lewis Morris began to write in 1724 and finished apparently in 1729. He was a native of Anglesey, and it is probably to that county the story belongs, which he gives to illustrate one of the phonological aspects of certain kinds of Welsh. That account differs from the one just cited in that it introduces no wizard, but postulates two fairy urchins between whom the dialogue occurs, which is not unusual in our changeling stories: see p. 62. After this explanation I translate Morris’ words thus:—
‘But to return to the question of the words approaching to the nature of the thing intended, there is an old story current among us concerning a woman whose children had been exchanged by the Tylwyth Teg. Whether it is truth or falsehood does not much matter, yet it shows what the men of that age thought concerning the sound of words, and how they fancied that the language of those sprites was of a ghastly and lumpy kind. The story is as follows:—The woman whose two children had been exchanged, chanced to overhear the two fairy heirs, whom she got instead of them, reasoning with one another beyond what became their age and persons. So she picked up the two sham children, one under each arm, in order to go and throw them from a bridge into a river, that they might be drowned as she fancied. But hardly had the one in his fall reached the bottom when he cried out to his comrade in the following words:—
Grippiach greppiach
Dal d’afel yn y wrach,
Hi aeth yn rhowyr ’faglach—
Mi eis i ir mwthlach[45].’