supposed other than that of the great prophet Merlin, who prophesied from his prison to the knight from Arthur's court (p. 157).
It is worthy of note that this kind of paganism died hard in the islands on the Armoric coast: in fact, it lasted, in spite of Church and State, down to the time of the Norsemen's ravages. For the Eddic poems called the Helgi Lays, which Dr. Vigfusson has shown to refer, among other localities, to the island of Guernsey,[1] allude to such sibyls as Mela mentions. In the flyting in one of these lays, one of the characters taunts another in words which have been rendered as follows:[2]
'Thou wert a sibyl in Guernsey,
Deceitful hag, setting lies together.'
They are also called 'Bearsark brides in Hlessey,' who injured the rover's boat, and were represented by him as 'hardly women.'[3] But other passages in the Helgi Lays describe them very differently as 'mysterious half-human half-supernatural Walcyries, riding through the air in groups of nine, acting as guardian-angels to sailors, who come to heal wounded wickings, and who have the knowledge of dreams, the power of stilling as well as of raising tempests.'[4] Such notions as these are distributed by the modern Celt between mermaids,[5] who have most of the characteristics of the Helgi sibyls, and witches, who, as pictured by Welsh superstition, strongly remind
