[12] See Choice Notes, p. 92, and Gerald Griffin’s Poetical and Dramatic Works, p. 106. [↑]
[13] Failing to see this, various writers have tried to claim the honour of owning the bells for Aberteifi, ‘Cardigan,’ or for Abertawe, ‘Swansea’; but no arguments worthy of consideration have been urged on behalf of either place: see Cyfaiỻ yr Aelwyd for 1892, p. 184. [↑]
[14] For some of the data as to the reckoning of the pedigrees and branching of a family, see the first volume of Aneurin Owen’s Ancient Laws—Gwyneđ, III. i. 12–5 (pp. 222–7); Dyfed, II. i. 17–29 (pp. 408–11); Gwent, II. viii. 1–7 (pp. 700–3); also The Welsh People, pp. 230–1. [↑]
[15] See the Book of the Dun Cow, fol. 99a & seq. [↑]
[16] For instances, the reader may turn back to pp. 154 or 191, but there are plenty more in the foregoing chapters; and he may also consult Howells’ Cambrian Superstitions, pp. 123–8, 141–2, 146. In one case, p. 123, he gives an instance of the contrary kind of imagination: the shepherd who joined a fairy party on Frenni Fach was convinced, when his senses and his memory returned, that, ‘although he thought he had been absent so many years, he had been only so many minutes.’ The story has the ordinary setting; but can it be of popular origin? The Frenni Fach is a part of the mountain known as the Frenni Fawr, in the north-east of Pembrokeshire; the names mean respectively the Little Breni, and the Great Breni. The obsolete word breni meant, in Old Welsh, the prow of a ship; local habit tends, however, to the solecism of Brenin Fawr, with brenin, ‘king,’ qualified by an adjective mutated feminine; but people at a distance who call it Frenni Fawr, pronounce the former vocable with nn. Lastly, Y Vrevi Vaỽr occurs in Maxen’s Dream in the Red Book (Oxford Mab. p. 89); but in the White Book (in the Peniarth collection), col. 187, the proper name is written Freni: for this information I have to thank Mr. Gwenogvryn Evans. [↑]
[17] It is right to say that another account is given in the Rennes Dindṡenchas, published by Stokes in the Revue Celtique, xvi. 164, namely, that Laiglinne with fifty warriors ‘came to the well of Dera son of Scera. A wave burst over them and drowned Laiglinne with his fifty warriors, and thereof a lake was made. Hence we say Loch Laiglinni, Laiglinne’s Lake.’ [↑]
[18] The Oxford Mabinogion, p. 224, and Guest’s, i. 343. [↑]
[19] See Afanc in the Geiriadur of Silvan Evans, who cites instances in point. [↑]
[20] See the Revue Celtique, i. 257, and my Hibbert Lectures, pp. 92–3. [↑]