there for three nights, when he found in a youth named Goreu a Theseus to liberate him.[1] One cannot, it seems to me, help seeing, in Manawyᵭan's ghastly bone-prison the Welsh counterpart of the ill-famed labyrinth made in Crete in the reign of Minos, and used for the reception of the boys and girls destined by him for the death-monster abiding in its recesses.
You will have observed that it is very hard to keep the Celtic congeners of Cronus and Minos from encroaching on one another. Greek analogy, however, helps us a little: thus, as compared with Nemed, Partholon, who slew his own parents, is more exactly Cronus than the former could be said to be. On the other hand, both Nevyᵭ and Manawyᵭan are comparable to both Cronus and Minos. Perhaps one or even both of these two last names originally belonged to the god or demon of darkness and the other world, whither Cronus, driven from Olympus, retired to reign. At any rate, it is probable that the struggle between him and Zeus, though raised to the dignity of an article of the theogonic faith of the Greeks, was in its origin a nature myth representing the commonplace contest between darkness and light, as in the case of Fergus and Conchobar.
- ↑ R. B. Mab. pp. 104, 306; Guest, ij. 256; Triads, i. 50 = ij. 49. The earliest reference to Oeth and Annoeth is one in the Stanzas of the Graves in the Black Bk. of Carmarthen (Skene, ij. 31), where the Household of Oeth and Annoeth are ascribed 'the long graves in Gwanas.' But the passage raises a number of questions which cannot be discussed here; suffice it to say that its Gwanas ought to be somewhere in Gower, a far more likely locality also for the Prison of Oeth than where the Iolo MSS. fix it, in the neighbourhood of Margam in the same county of Glamorgan.
