[3] This was meant to explain the unusual term gỽrdueichyat, also written gỽrdueichat, gỽrueichyat, and gwrddfeichiad. This last comes in the modern spelling of iii. 101, where this clause is not put in the middle of the Triad but at the end. [↑]
[4] The editor of this version seems to have supposed Pendaran to have been a place in Dyfed! But his ignorance leaves us no evidence that he had a different story before him. [↑]
[5] This word is found written in Mod. Welsh Annwfn, but it has been mostly superseded by the curtailed form Annwn, which appears twice in the Mabinogi of Math. These words have been studied by M. Gaidoz in Meyer and Stern’s Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie, i. 29–34, where he equates Annwfn with the Breton anauon, which is a plural used collectively for the souls of the departed, the other world. His view, however, of these interesting words has since been mentioned in the same Zeitschrift, iii. 184–5, and opposed in the Annales de Bretagne, xi. 488. [↑]
[6] Edited by Professor Kuno Meyer (London, 1892): see for instance pp. 76–8. [↑]
[7] See Windisch’s Irische Texte, p. 256, and now the Irish Text Society’s Fled Bricrend, edited with a translation by George Henderson, pp. 8, 9. [↑]
[8] Windisch, ibid. pp. 99–105. [↑]
[9] See the Oxford Mabinogion, p. 196, and Guest’s trans., i. 302, where the Welsh words a golỽython o gic meluoch are rendered ‘and collops of the flesh of the wild boar,’ which can hardly be correct; for the mel in mel-uoch, or mel-foch in the modern spelling, is the equivalent of the Irish melg, ‘milk.’ So the word must refer either to a pig that had been fed on cows’ milk or else a sucking pig. The former is the more probable meaning, but one is not helped to decide by the fact, that the word is still sometimes used in books by writers who imagine that they have here the word mel, ‘honey,’ and that the compound means pigs whose flesh is as sweet as honey: see Dr. Pughe’s Dictionary, where melfoch is rendered ‘honey swine,’ whatever that may mean. [↑]
[10] Windisch’s Irische Texte, p. 133, where laith lemnacht = Welsh ỻaeth ỻefrith, ‘sweet milk.’ [↑]
[11] Coỻfrewi was probably, like Gwenfrewi, a woman’s name: this is a point of some importance when taken in connexion with what was said at p. 326 above as to Gwydion and Coỻ’s magic. [↑]
[12] This reminds one of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Henvinus, whom he makes into dux Cornubiæ and father of Cunedagius or Cuneđa: see ii. 12, 15. Probably Geoffrey’s connecting such names as those of Cuneđa and Dyfnwal Moelmud (ii. 17) with Cornwall is due to the fact, that the name of the Dumnonia of the North had been forgotten long before that of the Dumnonia to be identified with Devon and Cornwall. [↑]