the highest and lowest powers of shining, or the uttermost poles of our imagination in that respect. The other Celts use a different word, which is common to them with many other Aryan nations: in Welsh it is haul, 'sun,' formerly heul, O. Cornish houl, heuul, Breton héol: the Gothic word was sauil, and the O. Norse sól, whence the modern Danish and Swedish is sōl also; to these must be added the Lithuanian sáule (for saulja) and the Latin sōl. Of these words the Latin is masculine, the Gothic neuter, and the Scandinavian ones feminine: in fact, one of the Eddic poets speaks of more than one female sun, as follows:[1] 'The Sun [Sól] shall bear a daughter ere the Wolf destroy her; that maid shall ride, when the powers have passed away, along the paths of her mother.'
It may be remarked next that the word used in the Brythonic languages is masculine, exclusively masculine if one follow the dictionaries; but I have no doubt that it was formerly feminine in them all, though I can only prove it with regard to Welsh,[2] in which the sun is still sometimes spoken of in that gender: I have heard it now
- ↑ Corpus Poet. Bor. (Grimnis-Mál), i. 68.
- ↑ That haul, 'sun,' was at one time feminine in the literary language is proved beyond doubt by a passage in Brut y Tywysogion, and contained in manuscripts dating as late as the end of the fourteenth century. In the Rolls edition (London, 1860) it reads—"Yny ulỽydyn honno duỽ Calan Mei y symudaỽd yr heul y ỻiỽ, ac y dywaỽt rei not erni diffyc." If heul had been masculine, we should have liỽ and arnaỽ for lliỽ and erni. A reference to the event occurs also in the Myvyrian, iij. 577. The entry is under the year 1185, and it is à propos of an eclipse of the sun. Add to this a curious passage too long to quote, which occurs in the Red Book, col. 516, lines 11—19. Lastly, D. ab Gwilym addresses a poem to the sun as a she, in the course of which he invokes her as Ymmerodres Tês, or the Empress of Warm Weather.
