Labraid Luath Lam ar Claideb[66].
A man of many feats beyond sea,
Labraid swift of Hand on Sword is he.
So it seems probable that the Welsh Ỻyr[67] is no other word than the Goidelic genitive Lir, retained in use with its pronunciation modified according to the habits of the Welsh language; and in that case[68] it forms comprehensive evidence, that the stories about the Ỻyr family in Welsh legend were Goidelic before they put on a Brythonic garb.
As to the Mabinogion generally, one may say that they are devoted to the fortunes chiefly of three powerful houses or groups, the children of Dôn, the children of Ỻyr, and Pwyỻ’s family. This last is brought into contact with the Ỻyr group, which takes practically the position of superiority. Pwyỻ’s family belonged chiefly to Dyfed; but the power and influence of the sons of Ỻyr had a far wider range: we find them in Anglesey, at Harlech, in Gwales or the Isle of Grasholm off Pembrokeshire, at Aber Henvelen somewhere south of the Severn Sea, and in Ireland. But the expedition to Ireland under Brân, usually called Bendigeituran, ‘Brân[69] the Blessed,’ proved so disastrous that the Ỻyr group, as a whole, disappears, making way for the children of Dôn. These last came into collision with Pwyỻ’s son, Pryderi, in whose country Manawyđan, son of Ỻyr, had ended his days. Pryderi, in consequence of Gwydion’s deceit (pp. 69, 501, 525), makes war on Math and the children of Dôn: he falls in it, and his army gives hostages to Math. Thus after the disappearance of the sons of Ỻyr, the children of Dôn are found in power in their stead in North Wales[70], and that state of things corresponds closely enough to the relation between the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Lir family in Irish legend. There Lir and his family are reckoned in the number of the Tuatha Dé Danann, but within that community Lir was so powerful that it was considered but natural that he should resent a rival candidate being elected king in preference to him. So the Tuatha Dé took pains to conciliate Lir, as did also their king, who gave his daughter to Lir to wife, and when she died he gave him another of his daughters[71]; and with the treatment of her stepchildren by that deceased wife’s sister begins one of the three Sorrowful Tales of Erin, known to English readers as the Fate of the Children of Lir. But the reader should observe the relative position: the Tuatha Dé remain in power, while the children of Lir belong to the past, which is also the sequence in the Mabinogion. Possibly this is not to be considered as having any significance, but it is to be borne in mind that the Lir-Ỻyr group is strikingly elemental in its patronymic Lir, Ỻyr. The nominative, as already stated, was ler, ‘sea,’ and so Cormac renders mac Lir by filius maris. How far we may venture to consider the sea to have been personified in this context, and how early, it is impossible to say. In any case it is deserving of notice that one group of Goidels to this day do not say mac Lir, ‘son of Lir,’ filium maris, but always ‘son of the lir’: I allude to the Gaels of the Isle of Man, in whose language Manannán mac Lir is always Mannanan mac y Lir, or as they spell it, Lear; that is to say ‘Mannanan, son of the ler.’ Manxmen have been used to consider Manannan their eponymous hero, and first king of their island: they call him more familiarly Mannanan beg mac y Lear, ‘Little Mannanan, son of the ler’. This we may, though no Manxman of the present day attaches any meaning to the word lir or lear, interpreted as ‘Little Mannanan, son of the Sea.’ The wanderings at large of the children of Lir before being eclipsed by the Danann-Dôn group, remind one of the story of the labours of Hercules, where it relates that hero’s adventures on his return from robbing Geryon of his cattle. Pomponius Mela, ii. 5 (p. 50), makes Hercules on that journey fight in the neighbourhood of Aries with two sons of Poseidon or Neptune, whom he calls (in the accusative) Albiona and Bergyon. To us, with our more adequate knowledge of geography, the locality and the men cannot appear the most congruous, but there can hardly be any mistake as to the two personal names being echoes of those of Albion and Iverion, Britain and Ireland.
The whole cycle of the Mabinogion must have appeared strange to the story-teller and the poet of medieval Wales, and far removed from the world in which they lived. We have possibly a trace of this feeling in the epithet hên, ‘old, ancient,’ given to Math in a poem in the Red Book of Hergest, where we meet with the line[72]:—
Gan uath hen gan gouannon.
With Math the ancient, with Gofannon.
Similarly in the confused list of heroes which the story-teller of the Kulhwch (Mabinogion, p. 108) was able to put together, we seem to have Gofannon, Math’s relative, referred to under the designation of Gouynyon Hen, ‘Gofynion the Ancient.’ To these might be added others, such as Gwrbothu Hên, mentioned above, p. 531, and from another source Ỻeu Hen[73], ‘Ỻew the Ancient.’ So strange, probably, and so obscure did some of the contents of the stories themselves seem to the story-tellers, that they may be now and then suspected of having effaced some of the features which it would have interested us to find preserved. This state of things brings back to my mind words of Matthew Arnold’s, to which I had the pleasure of listening more years ago than I care to remember. He was lecturing at Oxford on Celtic literature, and observing ‘how evidently the mediæval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant,’ Matthew Arnold went on to say, ‘building his hut on the site of Halicarnassus or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely—stones “not of this building,” but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical. In the mediæval stories of no Latin or Teutonic people does this strike one as in those of the Welsh.’ This becomes intelligible only on the theory of the stories having been in Goidelic before they put on a Welsh dress.
When saying that the Mabinogion and some of the stories contained in the Kulhwch, such as the Hunting of Twrch Trwyth, were Goidelic before they became Brythonic, I wish to be understood to use the word Goidelic in a qualified sense. For till the Brythons came, the Goidels were, I take it, the ruling race in most of the southern half of Britain, with the natives as their subjects, except in so far as that statement has to be limited by the fact, that we do not know how far they and the natives had been amalgamating together. In any case, the hostile advent of another race, the Brythons, would probably tend to hasten the process of amalgamation. That being so, the stories which I have loosely called Goidelic may have been largely aboriginal in point of origin, and by that I mean native, pre-Celtic and non-Aryan. It comes to this, then: we cannot say for certain whose creation Brân, for instance, should be considered to have been—that of Goidels or of non-Aryan natives. He sat, as the Mabinogi of Branwen describes him, on the rock of Harlech, a figure too colossal for any house to contain or any ship to carry. This would seem to challenge comparison with Cernunnos, the squatting god of ancient Gaul, around whom the other gods appear as mere striplings, as proved by the monumental representations in point. In these[74] he sometimes appears antlered like a stag; sometimes he is provided either with three normal heads or with one head furnished with three faces; and sometimes he is reduced to a head provided with no body, which reminds one of Brân, who, when he had been rid of his body in consequence of a poisoned wound inflicted on him in his foot in the slaughter of the Meal-bag Pavilion, was reduced to the Urđawl Ben, ‘Venerable or Dignified Head,’ mentioned in the Mabinogi of Branwen[75]. The Mabinogi goes on to relate how Brân’s companions began to enjoy, subject to certain conditions, his ‘Venerable Head’s’ society, which involved banquets of a fabulous duration and of a nature not readily to be surpassed by those around the Holy Grail. In fact here we have beyond all doubt one of the heathen originals of which the Grail is a Christian version. But the multiplicity of faces or heads of the Gaulish divinity find their analogues in a direction hitherto unnoticed as far as I know, namely, among the Letto-Slavic peoples of the Baltic sea-board. Thus the image of Svatovit in the island of Rügen is said to have had four faces[76]; and the life of Otto of Bamberg relates[77] how that high-handed evangelist proceeded to convert the ancient Prussians to Christianity. Among other things we are told how he found at Stettin an idol called Triglaus, a word referring to the three heads for which the god was remarkable. The saint took possession of the image and hewed away the body, reserving for himself the three heads, which are represented adhering together, forming one piece. This he sent as a trophy to Rome, and in Rome it may be still. Were it perchance to be found, it might be expected to show a close resemblance to the tricephal of the Gaulish altar found at Beaune in Burgundy.