But Etain would not go to him, before Eochaid was willing to resign her. And the king would not, yet allowed Mider to embrace her before him. Mider took his weapons into his left hand, and Etain with his right, and bore her away through the skylight. The guards outside beheld two swans flying, and they flew towards the elf-mound of Femun, which is called the Mound of the Fair-haired Women.
For nine years Eochaid waged war against Mider, digging into the elf-mounds, until he hit upon the fairy-mansion; whereupon Mider sent to the side of the palace sixty women, all exactly like Etain. And first the king carried away the
wrong woman, but when he returned to sack Bri Leith, Etain made herself known to him, and he bore her back to the palace at Tara.
It is reasonable to suppose, then, that some Armorican bard, hearing the classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, remembered the Celtic legend of Eochaid and Etain, and grafted the one on the other. Hades became Bri Leith, or the vaguely-defined beautiful unknown country; but the classical names displaced the Celtic. The confusion, however, did not at once cease. In one of the MSS. of Sir Orfeo it is said that Orfeo's father
"Was comen of king Pluto,
And his moder of king Juno"
—confusion worse confounded. Moreover, as we have already seen, even Chaucer called the fairy-king Pluto and the queen Proserpina.
Again, to hark back to the other romances, we have found the word fay attached to the name of King Arthur's sister Morgan. Nothing is more remarkably certain than the close and constant association in mediaeval lore of the fairies and the fairy-world with the Arthurian cycle of romance;[[74]] King Arthur's sister was Morgan le Fay, whose son by Ogier was Merlin; and the romance of Huon of Bordeaux, which relates these facts, though strictly belonging to the Charlemagne
cycle, contains the account of Oberon's bequest of his realm to King Arthur. Chaucer, whatever other doubts he may have had, was convinced on this point:—[[75]]
"In th' olde daiès of the King Arthoure,