Cantguic and as far as Cruc Ochidient, that is to say, the Western Mound. These are the Armoric Brythons, and they have never returned hither to this day.' The Cumulus Occidentalis alluded to sounds mythic enough to figure in the same sort of stories as the forest of Brécilien or the isle of Sein; not to mention that the choice of Brittany as the seat of the discharged auxiliaries may have been from the first dictated, at least in part, by mythology. For the Welsh for Brittany is Llydaw,[1] a name which may have originally meant an abode of the dead, a light in which almost any land situated on the other shore would seem to have appeared to the Celts of antiquity.
Be that as it may, I have tried to reinstate Emrys or Myrᵭin Emrys in the place usurped by Maxen. From this it would follow, among other things, that he was the conqueror of this country from the chthonian divinity Beli the Great, which derives unexpected confirmation from a hitherto unexplained Triad, i. 1, which states that Britain's first name, before it was inhabited, was Clas Myrᵭin, or Merlin's Close. In this Triad, which must be the echo of an ancient notion, the pellucid walls confining Merlin become, by a touch of the pencil of the mythic muse, co-extensive with the utmost limits of our island home. Here may be compared Erinn when called the Island of Fál, which suggests the possibility that the double meaning of 'wall' and 'light' attaching to its Welsh equivalent gwawl (pp. 123-4) has helped to give the Merlin myth the form in which we know it. But let
- ↑ One of the tarns on Snowdon, several of which have very uncanny associations, is called Llyn Llydaw, or the Lake of Llydaw. What can the meaning of the name have been?
