3. A better answer, perhaps, is that the fairies were not always in a position to harm him who offended them. This may well have been the belief as regards any one who had at his command the dreaded potency of magic. Take for instance the Irish story of a king of Erin called Eochaid Airem, who, with the aid of his magician or druid Dalán, defied the fairies, and dug into the heart of their underground station, until, in fact, he got possession of his queen, who had been carried thither by a fairy chief named Mider. Eochaid, assisted by his druid and the powerful Ogams which the latter wrote on rods of yew, was too formidable for the fairies, and their wrath was not executed till the time of Eochaid’s unoffending grandson, Conaire Mór, who fell a victim to it, as related in the epic story of Bruden Dáderga, so called from the palace where Conaire was slain[15].

4. Lastly, it may be said that the fairies being supposed deathless, there would be no reason why they should hurry; and even in case the delay meant a century or two, that makes no perceptible approach to the extravagant scale of time common enough in our fairy tales, when, for instance, they make a man who has whiled ages away in fairyland, deem it only so many minutes[16].

Whatever the causes may have been which gave our stories their form in regard of the delay in the fairy revenge, it is clear that Welsh folklore could not allow this delay to extend beyond the sixth generation with its cousinship of nine ancestries, if, as I gather, it counted kinship no further. Had one projected it on the seventh or the eighth generation, both of which are contemplated in the Laws, it would not be folklore. It would more likely be the lore of the landed gentry and of the powerful families whose pedigrees and ramifications of kinship were minutely known to the professional men on whom it was incumbent to keep themselves, and those on whom they depended, well informed in such matters.

It remains for me to consider the non-ethical motive of the other stories, such as those which ascribe negligence and the consequent inundation to the woman who has the charge of the door or lid of the threatening well. Her negligence is not the cause of the catastrophe, but it leaves the way open for it. What then can have been regarded the cause? One may gather something to the point from the Irish story where the divinity of the well is offended because a woman has gazed into its depths, and here probably, as already suggested (p. 392), we come across an ancient tabu directed against women, which may have applied only to certain wells of peculiarly sacred character. It serves, however, to suggest that the divinities of the water-world were not disinclined to seize every opportunity of extending their domain on the earth’s surface; and I am persuaded that this was once a universal creed of some race or other in possession of these islands. Besides the Irish legends already mentioned (pp. 382, 384) of the formation of Lough Neagh, Lough Ree, and others, witness the legendary annals of early Ireland, which, by the side of battles, the clearing of forests, and the construction of causeways, mention the bursting forth of lakes and rivers; that is to say, the formation or the coming into existence, or else the serious expansion, of certain of the actual waters of the country. For the present purpose the details given by The Four Masters are sufficient, and I have hurriedly counted their instances as follows:—

Anno Mundi2532,number of thelakesformed,2.
Anno,,Mundi,,2533,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,1.
Anno,,Mundi,,2535,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,2.
Anno,,Mundi,,2545,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,1.
Anno,,Mundi,,2546,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,1.
Anno,,Mundi,,2859,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,2.
Anno,,Mundi,,2860,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,2.
Anno,,Mundi,,3503,number,,of,,the,,riversformed,,21.
Anno,,Mundi,,3506,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,9.
Anno,,Mundi,,3510,number,,of,,the,,riversformed,,5.
Anno,,Mundi,,3520,number,,of,,the,,riversformed,,9.
Anno,,Mundi,,3581,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,9.
Anno,,Mundi,,3656,number,,of,,the,,riversformed,,3.
Anno,,Mundi,,3751,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,1.
Anno,,Mundi,,3751,,,number,,of,,the,,riversformed,,3.
Anno,,Mundi,,3790,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,4.
Anno,,Mundi,,4169,number,,of,,the,,riversformed,,5.
Anno,,Mundi,,4694,number,,of,,the,,lakesformed,,1.

This makes an aggregate of thirty-five lakes and forty-six rivers, that is to say a total of eighty-one eruptions. But I ought, perhaps, to explain that under the head of lakes I have included not only separate pieces of water, but also six inlets of the sea, such as Strangford Lough and the like. Still more to the point is it to mention that of the lakes two are said to have burst forth at the digging of graves. Thus, A.M. 2535, The Four Masters have the following: ‘Laighlinne, son of Parthalon, died in this year. When his grave was dug, Loch Laighlinne sprang forth in Ui Mac Uais, and from him it is named[17].’ O’Donovan, the editor and translator of The Four Masters, supposes it to be somewhere to the south-west of Tara, in Meath. Similarly, A.M. 4694, they say of a certain Melghe Molbthach, ‘When his grave was digging, Loch Melghe burst forth over the land in Cairbre, so that it was named from him.’ This is said to be now called Lough Melvin, on the confines of the counties of Donegal, Leitrim, and Fermanagh. These two instances are mentioned by The Four Masters; and here is one given by Stokes in the Rennes Dindṡenchas: see the Revue Celtique, xv. 428–9. It has to do with Loch Garman, as Wexford Harbour was called in Irish, and it runs thus: ‘Loch Garman, whence is it? Easy to say. Garman Glas, son of Dega, was buried there, and when his grave was dug then the lake burst throughout the land. Whence Loch Garman.’ It matters not here that there are alternative accounts of the name.

The meaning of all this seems to be that cutting the green sward or disturbing the earth beneath was believed in certain cases to give offence to some underground divinity or other connected with the world of waters. That divinity avenged the annoyance or offence given him by causing water to burst forth and form a lake forthwith. The nearness of such divinities to the surface seems not a little remarkable, and it is shown not only in the folklore which has been preserved for us by The Four Masters, but also by the usual kind of story about a neglected well door. These remarks suggest the question whether it was not one of the notions which determined surface burials, that is, burials in which no cutting of the ground took place, the cists or chambers and the bodies placed in them being covered over by the heaping on of earth or stones brought from a more or less convenient distance. It might perhaps be said that all this only implied individuals of a character to desecrate the ground and call forth the displeasure of the divinities concerned; and for that suggestion folklore parallels, it is true, could be adduced. But it is hardly adequate: the facts seem to indicate a more general objection on the part of the powers in point; and they remind one rather of the clause said to be inserted in mining leases in China with the object, if one may trust the newspapers, of preventing shafts from being sunk below a certain depth, for fear of offending the susceptibilities of the demons or dragons ruling underground.

It is interesting to note the fact, that Celtic folklore connects the underground divinities intimately with water; for one may briefly say that they have access wherever water can take them. With this qualification the belief may be said to have lingered lately in Wales, for instance, in connexion with Ỻyn Barfog, near Aberdovey. ‘It is believed to be very perilous,’ Mr. Pughe says, p. 142 above, ‘to let the waters out of the lake’; and not long before he wrote, in 1853, an aged inhabitant of the district informed him ‘that she recollected this being done during a period of long drought, in order to procure motive power for Ỻyn Pair Mill, and that long-continued heavy rains followed.’ Then we have the story related to Mr. Reynolds as to Ỻyn y Fan Fach, how there emerged from the water a huge hairy fellow of hideous aspect, who stormed at the disturbers of his peace, and uttered the threat that unless they left him alone in his own place he would drown a whole town. Thus the power of the water spirit is represented as equal to producing excessive wet weather and destructive floods. He is in all probability not to be dissociated from the afanc in the Conwy story which has already been given (pp. 130–3). Now the local belief is that the reason why the afanc had to be dragged out of the river was that he caused floods in the river and made it impossible for people to cross on their way to market at Ỻanrwst. Some such a local legend has been generalized into a sort of universal flood story in the late Triad, iii. 97, as follows:—‘Three masterpieces of the Isle of Prydain: the Ship of Nefyđ Naf Neifion, that carried in her male and female of every kind when the Lake of Ỻïon burst; and Hu the Mighty’s Ychen Bannog dragging the afanc of the lake to land, so that the lake burst no more; and the Stones of Gwyđon Ganhebon, on which one read all the arts and sciences of the world.’ A story similar to the Conwy one, but no longer to be got so complete, as far as I know, seems to have been current in various parts of the Principality, especially around Ỻyn Syfađon and on the banks of the Anglesey pool called Ỻyn yr Wyth Eidion, ‘the Pool of the Eight Oxen,’ for so many is Hu represented here as requiring in dealing with the Anglesey afanc. According to Mr. Pughe of Aberdovey, the same feat was performed at Ỻyn Barfog, not, however, by Hu and his oxen, but by Arthur and his horse. To be more exact the task may be here considered as done by Arthur superseding Hu: see p. 142 above. That, however, is of no consequence here, and I return to the afanc: the Fan Fach legend told to Mr. Reynolds makes the lake ruler huge and hairy, hideous and rough-spoken, but he expresses himself in human speech, in fact in two lines of doggerel: see p. 19 above. On the other hand, the Ỻyn Cwm Ỻwch story, which puts the same doggerel, p. 21, into the mouth of the threatening figure in red who sits in a chair on the face of that lake, suggests nothing abnormal about his personal appearance. Then as to the Conwy afanc, he is very heavy, it is true, but he also speaks the language of the country. He is lured, be it noticed, out of his home in the lake by the attractions of a young woman, who lets him rest his head in her lap and fall asleep. When he wakes to find himself in chains he takes a cruel revenge on her. But with infinite toil and labour he is dragged beyond the Conwy watershed into one of the highest tarns on Snowdon; for there is here no question of killing him, but only of removing him where he cannot harm the people of the Conwy Valley. It is true that the story of Peredur represents that knight cutting an afanc’s head off, but so much the worse for the compiler of that romance, as we have doubtless in the afanc some kind of a deathless being. However, the description which the Peredur story gives[18] of him is interesting: he lives in a cave at the door of which is a stone pillar: he sees everybody that comes without anybody seeing him; and from behind the pillar he kills all comers with a poisoned spear.

Hitherto we have the afanc described mostly from a hostile point of view: let us change our position, which some of the stories already given enable us to do. Take for instance the first of the whole series, where it describes, p. 7, the Fan Fach youth’s despair when the lake damsel, whose love he had gained, suddenly dived to fetch her father and her sister. There emerged, it says, out of the lake two most beautiful ladies, accompanied by a hoary-headed man of noble mien and extraordinary stature, but having otherwise all the force and strength of youth. This hoary-headed man of noble mien owned herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, a number of which were allowed to come out of the lake to form his daughter’s dowry, as the narrative goes on to show. In the story of Ỻyn Du’r Arđu, p. 32, he has a consort who appears with him to join in giving the parental sanction to the marriage which their daughter was about to make with the Snowdon shepherd. In neither of these stories has this extraordinary figure any name given him, and it appears prima facie probable that the term afanc is rather one of abuse in harmony with the unlovely description of him supplied by the other stories. But neither in them does the term yr afanc suit the monster meant, for there can be no doubt that in the word afanc we have the etymological equivalent of the Irish word abacc, ‘a dwarf’; and till further light is shed on these words one may assume that at one time afanc also meant a dwarf or pigmy in Welsh. In modern Welsh it has been regarded as meaning a beaver, but as that was too small an animal to suit the popular stories, the word has been also gravely treated as meaning a crocodile[19]: this is in the teeth of the unanimous treatment of him as anthropomorphic in the legends in point. If one is to abide by the meaning dwarf or pigmy, one is bound to regard afanc as one of the terms originally applied to the fairies in their more unlovely aspects: compare the use of crimbil, p. 263. Here may also be mentioned pegor, ‘a dwarf or pigmy,’ which occurs in the Book of Taliessin, poem vii. (p. 135):—

Gogỽn py pegor