as the Book of Taliessin. Those poems represent a school of Welsh bardism, but we know in reality nothing about their authorship; and the personality of Taliessin is as mythic as that of Gwydion and Merlin, both of whom have also been treated as the authors of Welsh verse. The name, however, of Taliessin, viewed in this light, has an interest far surpassing even that of Merlin; this will be best understood with the aid of what we read in the so-called History of Taliessin.[1] There we make the acquaintance of Kerridwen, wife of Tegid the Bald, whose patrimony was where Llyn Tegid or Bala Lake now lies. Besides other children, including a daughter who was the handsomest woman of her time, they had a son Avagᵭu, who was the ugliest man in the world; so Kerridwen, thinking that he had no chance of being tolerated among gentlemen unless he had some noble excellence or science, undertook, with the aid of the books of Fferyỻ, as Vergil the magician is called in Welsh, to boil for his benefit a cauldron of poesy and science, that he might gain reputation for his knowledge and skill with respect to future events. She placed a blind fellow called Mordav and a certain Gwion the Little in charge of the cauldron, while she went forth to gather herbs of virtue according to the hours of the stars and the directions of astronomy. The cauldron was to boil on without interruption for a whole year; but before the time was up, three precious drops from the cauldron fell on one of Gwion's fingers, and on account of the scalding sensation he put it in his mouth, when he suddenly knew everything, and above all things that
- ↑ Guest's Mab. iij. 321-6, 356-61; Stephen's Literature of the Kymry2, p. 425.
