Sea."'[1] Manxmen, he might have added, speak of him always by the more primitive title mac y Lear, 'son of the Sea.'[2] Mounted on his two-wheeled chariot he drove across the foaming waves, when he was minded to visit Erin.[3] Or else he came riding on horseback[4]; for he possessed a magic horse, which was swifter than the spring wind and travelled with equal speed by land or sea,[5] not to mention a magic coracle, which propelled and guided itself.[6] By merely shaking his mantle he could raise a storm,[7] and still it again by his druid spells.[8] Lastly, his island home, dimly descried on the horizon, was regarded as a Celtic Elysium or Paradise, and he himself as a Celtic Hades.[9] His Welsh analogue Manawyddan mab Llyr was likewise lord of the Otherworld.[10] In that capacity perhaps he constructed a ghastly prison in Gower, the bone-fortress of Oeth and Anoeth, shaped like a bee-hive and built of human bones bonded with mortar: in this he immured those whom he caught trespassing on his domains.[11]
Manannan is said to have been the first king of the
- ↑ Cormac's Glossary trans. by J. O'Donovan ed. by Whitley Stokes p. 114. Cp. the Cóir Anmann 156 in Stokes and Windisch Irische Texte iii. 357.
- ↑ Rhŷs Celtic Folklore ii. 549.
- ↑ Squire Mythology of the British Islands p. 134 f.
- ↑ A. H. Leahy Heroic Romances of Ireland London 1905 i. 84.
- ↑ Squire Mythology of the British Islands pp. 60, 89, 98.
- ↑ Id. ib.
- ↑ Id. ib. p. 129.
- ↑ Id. ib. p. 237.
- ↑ Id. ib. p. 133 ff.
- ↑ Id. ib. p. 270.
- ↑ Rhŷs The Hibbert Lectures 1886 ed. 3 London 1898 p. 667 f., Arthurian Legend p. 347, Celtic Folklore ii. 619 n. 1.
the mist.' If these traditions were reliable, we should have every right to regard Manannan as solar (cp. Classical Review xviii. 326 f.): but they may have sprung from the armorial bearings introduced into the island as late as the thirteenth century by Alexander iii. of Scotland, and ultimately derived from the Sicilian triskeles (Count Goblet d'Alviella The Migration of Symbols London 1894 p. 21 n. 1, A. C. Haddon Evolution in Art London 1895 p. 214).
