‘Another wonder there is in the district called Buaỻt: there is there a heap of stones, and one stone is placed on the top of the pile with the footmark of a dog in it. Cafaỻ, the dog of the warrior Arthur, when chasing the pig Trwyd printed the mark of his foot on it, and Arthur afterwards collected a heap of stones underneath the stone in which was the footmark of his dog, and it is called Cafaỻ’s Cairn. And men come and take the stone away in their hands for the space of a day and a night, and on the following day the stone is found on the top of its heap[55].’
Lady Charlotte Guest, in a note to the Kulhwch story in her Mabinogion, ii. 360, appears to have been astonished to find that Carn Cavaỻ, as she writes it, was no fabulous mound but an actual ‘mountain in the district of Builth, to the south of Rhayader Gwy, and within sight of that town.’ She went so far as to persuade one of her friends to visit the summit, and he begins his account of it to her with the words: ‘Carn Cavaỻ, or as it is generally pronounced Corn Cavaỻ, is a lofty and rugged mountain.’ On one of the cairns on the mountain he discovered what may have been the very stone to which the Mirabilia story refers; but the sketch with which he accompanied his communication cannot be said to be convincing, and he must have been drawing on his imagination when he spoke of this somewhat high hill as a lofty mountain. Moreover his account of its name only goes just far enough to be misleading: the name as pronounced in the neighbourhood of Rhayader is Corn Gafaỻt by Welsh-speaking people, and Corn Gavalt by monoglot Englishmen. So it is probable that at one time the pronunciation was Carn Gavaỻ[56]. But to return to the incident recorded by Nennius, one has to remark that it does not occur in the Kulhwch; nor, seeing the position of the hill, can it have been visited by Arthur or his dog in the course of the Twrch Trwyth hunt as described by the redactor of the story in its present form. This suggests the reflection not only that the Twrch story is very old, but that it was put together by selecting certain incidents out of an indefinite number, which, taken all together, would probably have formed a network covering the whole of South Wales as far north as the boundary of the portion of Mid-Wales occupied by the Brythons before the Roman occupation. In other words, the Goidels of this country had stories current among them to explain the names of the places with which they were familiar; and it is known that was the case with the Goidels of Ireland. Witness the place-name legends known in Medieval Irish as Dindṡenchas, with which the old literature of Ireland abounds. On what principle the narrator of the Kulhwch made his selection from the repertoire I cannot say; but one cannot help seeing that he takes little interest in the details, and that he shows still less insight into the etymological motif of the incidents which he mentions. However, this should be laid mainly to the charge, perhaps, of the early medieval redactor.
Among the reasons which have been suggested for the latter overlooking and effacing the play on the place-names, I have hinted that he did not always understand them, as they sometimes involved a language which may not have been his. This raises the question of translation: if the story was originally in Goidelic, what was the process by which it passed into Brythonic? Two answers suggest themselves, and the first comes to this: if the story was in writing, we may suppose a literary man to have sat down to translate it word for word from Goidelic to Brythonic, or else to adapt it in a looser fashion. In either case, one should suppose him a master of both languages, and capable of doing justice to the play on the place-names. But it is readily conceivable that the fact of his understanding both languages might lead him to miscalculate what was exactly necessary to enable a monoglot Brython to grasp his meaning clearly. Moreover, if the translator had ideas of his own as to style, he might object on principle to anything like an explanation of words being interpolated in the narrative. In short, one could see several loopholes through which a little confusion might force itself in, and prevent the monoglot reader or hearer of the translation from correctly grasping the story at all points as it was in the original. The other view, and the more natural one, as I think, is that we should postulate the interference of no special translator, but suppose the story, or rather a congeries of stories, to have been current among the natives of a certain part of South Wales, say the Loughor Valley, at a time when their language was still Goidelic, and that, as they gradually gave up Goidelic and adopted Brythonic, they retained their stories and translated the narrative, while they did not always translate the place-names occurring in that narrative. Thus, for instance, would arise the discrepancy between banw and Amanw, the latter of which to be Welsh should have been rendered y Banw, ‘the Boar.’ If this is approximately what took place, it is easy to conceive the possibility of many points of nicety being completely effaced in the course of such a rough process of transformation. In one or two small matters it happens that we can contrast the community as translator with the literary individual at work: I allude to the word Trwyth. That vocable was not translated, not metaphoned, if I may so term it, at all at the time: it passed, when it was still Trēth-i, from Goidelic into Brythonic, and continued in use without a break; for the changes whereby Trēth-i has become Trwyth have been such as other words have undergone in the course of ages, as already stated. On the other hand, the literary man who knew something of the two languages seems to have reasoned, that where a Goidelic th occurred between vowels, the correct etymological equivalent in Brythonic was t, subject to be mutated to d. So when he took the name over he metaphoned Trēth-i into Trēt-i, whence we have the Porcus Troit of Nennius, and Twrch Trwyd[57] in Welsh poetry: these Troit and Trwyd were the literary forms as contrasted with the popular Trwyth. Now, if my surmises as to Echel and Egel are near the truth, their history must be similar; that is to say, Echel would be the literary form and Ecel, Egel the popular one respectively of the Goidelic Ecell. A third parallel offers itself in the case of the personal name Arwyli, borne by one of Echel’s companions: the Arwyl of that name has its etymological equivalent in the Arwystl- of Arwystli, the name of a district comprising the eastern slopes of Plinlimmon, and represented now by the Deanery of Arwystli. So Arwystli challenges comparison with the Irish Airgialla or Airgéill, anglicized Oriel, which denotes, roughly speaking, the modern counties of Armagh, Louth, and Monaghan. For here we have the same prefix ar placed in front of one and the same vocable, which in Welsh is gwystl, ‘a hostage,’ and in Irish giall, of the same meaning and origin. The reader will at once think of the same word in German as geisel, ‘a hostage,’ Old High German gīsal. But the divergence of sound between Arwystl-i and Arwyl-i arises out of the difference of treatment of sl in Welsh and Irish. In the Brythonic district of Mid-Wales we have Arwystli with sl treated in the Brythonic way, while in Arwyli we have the combination treated in the Goidelic way, the result being left standing when the speakers of Goidelic in South Wales learnt Brythonic[58].
Careful observation may be expected to add to the number of these instructive instances. It is, however, not to be supposed that all double forms of the names in these stories are to be explained in exactly the same way. Thus, for instance, corresponding to Lug, genitive Loga, we have the two forms Ỻeu and Ỻew, of which the former alone matches the Irish. But it is to be observed that Ỻeu remains in some verses[59] in the story of Math, whereas in the prose he appears to be called Ỻew. It is not improbable that the editing which introduced Ỻew dates comparatively late, and that it was done by a man who was not familiar with the Venedotian place-names of which Ỻeu formed part, namely, Dinỻeu and Nantỻeu, now Dinỻe and Nantỻe. Similarly the two brothers, Gofannon and Amaethon, as they are called in the Mabinogi of Math and in the Kulhwch story, are found also called Gofynyon and Amathaon. The former agrees with the Irish form Goibniu, genitive Goibnenn, whereas Gofannon does not. As to Amaethon or Amathaon the Irish counterpart has, unfortunately, not been identified. Gofannon and Amaethon have the appearance of being etymologically transparent in Welsh, and they have probably been remodelled by the hand of a literary redactor. There were also two forms of the name of Manawyđan in Welsh; for by the side of that there was another, namely, Manawydan, liable to be shortened to Manawyd: both occur in old Welsh poetry[60]. But manawyd or mynawyd is the Welsh word for an awl, which is significant here, as the Mabinogi called after Manawyđan makes him become a shoemaker on two occasions, whence the Triads style him one of the Three golden Shoemakers of the Isle of Prydain: see the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 308.
What has happened in the way of linguistic change in one of our stories, the Kulhwch, may have happened in others, say in the four branches of the Mabinogi, namely, Pwyỻ, prince of Dyved; Branwen, daughter of Ỻyr; Math, son of Mathonwy; and Manawyđan, son of Ỻyr. Some time ago I endeavoured to show that the principal characters in the Mabinogi of Math, namely, the sons and daughters of Dôn, are to be identified as a group with the Tuatha Dé Danann, ‘Tribes of the Goddess Danu or Donu,’ of Irish legend. I called attention to the identity of our Welsh Dôn with the Irish Donu, genitive Donann, Gofynion or Gofannon with Goibniu, genitive Goibnenn, and of Ỻeu or Ỻew with Lug. Since then Professor Zimmer has gone further, and suggested that the Mabinogion are of Irish origin; but that I cannot quite admit. They are of Goidelic origin, but they do not come from the Irish or the Goidels of Ireland: they come rather, as I think, from this country’s Goidels, who never migrated to the sister island, but remained here eventually to adopt Brythonic speech. There is no objection, however, so far as this argument is concerned, to their being regarded as this country’s Goidels descended either from native Goidels or from early Goidelic invaders from Ireland, or else partly from the one origin and partly from the other. This last is perhaps the safest view to accept as a working hypothesis. Now Professor Zimmer fixes on that of Mathonwy, among other names, as probably the Welsh adaptation of some such an Irish name as the genitive Mathgamnai[61], now anglicized Mahony. This I am also prepared to accept in the sense that the Welsh form is a loan from a Goidelic one current some time or other in this country, and represented in Irish by Mathgamnai. The preservation of Goidelic th in Mathonwy stamps it as ranking with Trwyth, Egel, and Arwyli, as contrasted with a form etymologically more correct, of which we seem to have an echo in the Breton names Madganoe and Madgone[62].
Another name which I am inclined to regard as brought in from Goidelic is that of Gilvaethwy, son of Dôn: it would seem to involve some such a word as the Irish gilla, ‘a youth, an attendant or servant,’ and some form of the Goidelic name Maughteus or Mochta, so that the name Gilla-mochtai meant the attendant of Mochta. This last vocable appears in Irish as the name of several saints, but previously it was probably that of some pagan god of the Goidels, and its meaning was most likely the same as that of the Irish participial mochta, which Stokes explains as ‘magnified, glorified’: see his Calendar of Oengus, p. ccxiv, and compare the name Mael-mochta. Adamnan, in his Vita S. Columbæ, writes the name Maucteus in the following passage, pref. ii. p. 6:—
Nam quidam proselytus Brito, homo sanctus, sancti Patricii episcopi discipulus, Maucteus nomine, ita de nostro prophetizavit Patrono, sicuti nobis ab antiquis traditum expertis compertum habetur.
This saint, who is said to have prophesied of St. Columba and died in the year 534, is described in his Life (Aug. 19) as ortus ex Britannia[63], which, coupled with Adamnan’s Brito, probably refers him to Wales; but it is remarkable that nevertheless he bore the very un-Brythonic name of Mochta or Mauchta[64].
To return to the Mabinogion: I have long been inclined to identify Ỻwyd, son of Kilcoed, with the Irish Liath, son of Celtchar, of Cualu in the present county of Wicklow. Liath, whose name means ‘grey,’ is described as the comeliest youth of noble rank among the fairies of Erin; and the only time the Welsh Ỻwyd, whose name also means ‘grey,’ appears in the Mabinogion he is ascribed, not the comeliest figure, it is true, or the greatest personal beauty, but the most imposing disguise of a bishop attended by his suite: he was a great magician. The name of his father, Kil-coet, seems to me merely an inexact popular rendering of Celtchar, the name of Liath’s father: at any rate one fails here to detect the touch of the skilled translator or literary redactor.[65] But the Mabinogi of Manawyđan, in which Ỻwyd figures, is also the one in which Pryderi king of Dyfed’s wife is called Kicua or Cigfa, a name which has no claim to be regarded as Brythonic. It occurs early, however, in the legendary history of Ireland: the Four Masters, under the year A.M. 2520, mention a Ciocbha as wife of a son of Parthalon; and the name seems to be related to that of a man called Cioccal, A.M. 2530. Lastly, Manawyđan, from whom the Mabinogi takes its name, is called mab Ỻyr, ‘son of Ỻyr,’ in Welsh, and Manannán mac Lir in Irish. Similarly with his brother Brân, and his sister Branwen, except that she has not been identified in Irish story. But in Irish literature the genitive Lir, as in mac Lir, ‘son of Ler,’ is so common, and the nominative so rare, that Lir came to be treated in late Irish as the nominative too; but a genitive of the form Lir suggests a nominative-accusative Ler, and as a matter of fact it occurs, for instance, in the couplet:—
Fer co n-ilur gnim dar ler