were defeated and their great captains killed. So goes the story as related by O'Curry, and no one knew Irish literature better than he, but one can no longer follow him in treating this as history. Without the aid, however, of the meagre allusions in Welsh poetry and prose, we should have been groping about in vain for the meaning of such a myth. Gwydion, as Gweir, let us say, goes to Caer Sidi beneath the waves of the sea, and Cairbre visits the court of the Fomorian king Bres, of submarine origin. The Welsh hero becomes a bard—originally the story made him probably the first bard of Welsh legend—as the result of the treatment dealt out to him there; while Cairbre gives utterance to the first satire composed in Erinn, which comes to the same thing, as the first effort of the Celtic muse was presumably of the nature of a magic spell, which, according to Irish belief, was irresistible, and productive, among other effects, of immediate blotches on the face of him against whom it was pronounced: in this instance it was the means of hurriedly driving from his throne the Fomorian, whose treatment of Cairbre is to be ascribed to jealousy rather than contempt for the poet's art; for Bres is doubtless to be identified with the personage of that name said to be the son of Brigit goddess of poetry (p. 75), and of Elathan king of the Fomori.[1] In both versions the individual efforts of the man of poetry was followed by the coming of his friends, to harry Hades, according to the Welsh account, and to overthrow the Fomori, according to the Irish one. With Cairbre, poet and satirist, is doubtless to be identified a Cairbre
- ↑ Bk. of Leinster, 187 c.
