ii. 196, on an allusion to a well which, when uncovered, was about to

drown the whole locality but for a miracle performed by St. Patrick to arrest the flow of its waters. A similar story of a well bursting and forming Lough Reagh, in County Galway, will be found told in verse in the Book of Leinster; fo. 202b: see also fo. 170a, and the editor's notes, pp. 45, 53.

[173] See Evans' autotype edition of the Black Book of Carmarthen, fos. 53b, 54a, also 32a: the punctuation is that of the MS. In the seventh triplet kedaul is written keadaul, which seems to mean kadaul corrected into kedaul; but the a is not deleted, so other readings are possible.

[174] In the Iolo MSS., p. 89, finaun wenestir is made into Ffynon-Wenestr and said to be one of the ornamental epithets of the sea; but I am convinced that it should be rather treated as ffynnon fenestr with wenestir or fenestr mutated from menestr, which meant a servant, attendant, cup-bearer: for one or two instances see Pughe's Dictionary. The word is probably, as suggested by M. Loth in his Mots Latins, p. 186. the old French menestre, 'cup-bearer,' borrowed. Compare the mention of Nechtán's men having access to the secret well in Sid Nechtáin, p. 390 below, and note that they were his three menestres or cup-bearers.

[175] See the Cymmrodor, viii. 88 (No. xxix), where a Marereda is mentioned as a daughter of Madog son of Meredyd brother to Rhys Gryg.

[176] There is another reading which would make them into Segantii, and render it irrelevant--to say the least of it--to mention them here.

[177] See the Mabinogion, p. 35: the passage has been mistranslated in Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, iii. 117.

[178] See my Arthurian Legend, pp. 263-4.

[179] I do not profess to see my way through the difficulties which the probable etymological connexion between the names Setantii, Setanta, Seithyn, and Seithennin implies. But parts of the following string of guesses may be found to hold good:--Seithyn is probably more correct than Seithin, as it rhymes with cristin = Cristyn (in Cristynogaeth: see Silvan Evans' Geiriadur, s. v., and Skene's Four Ancient Books, ii. 210); and it might be assumed to be from the same stem as Seizun; but, supposing it to represent an earlier Seithynt, it would equate phonologically with Setanta, better Setinte, of which the genitive Setinti actually occurs, as a river name, in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 125b: see my Hibbert Lectures, p. 455, and see also the Revue Celtique, xi. 457. It would mean some such an early form Setntio-s, and Seithenhin, another derivative from the same stem, Setntino-s. But the retention of n before t in Setinte proves it not to be unconnected with Seithyn, but borrowed from some Brythonic dialect when the latter was pronounced Seithntio-s. If this be anywhere nearly right one has to assume that the manuscripts of Ptolemy giving the genitive plural as Setantiôn or Segantiôn should have read Sektantiôn, unless one should rather conjecture Segtantiôn with cht represented by gt as in Ogams in Pembrokeshire: witness Ogtene and Maqui Quegte. This conjecture as to the original reading would suggest that the name was derived from the seventh numeral sechtn, just as that of the Galloway people of the Novantæ seems to be from the ninth numeral. Ptolemy's next entry to the Harbour of the Setantii is the estuary of the Belisama, supposed to be the Mersey; and next comes the estuary of the Seteia or Segeia, supposed to be the Dee. Now the country of the Setantii, when they had a country, may have reached from their harbour near the mouth of the Ribble to the Seteia or the Dee without the name Seteia or Segeia having anything to do with their own, except that it may have influenced the latter in the manuscripts of Ptolemy's text. Then we possibly have a representative of Seteia or Segeia in the Saidi or Seidi, sometimes appended to Seithyn's name. In that case Seithyn Saidi, in the late Triad iii. 37, would mean Seithyn of Seteia, or the Dee. A Mab Saidi occurs in the Kulhwch story (Mabinogion, p. 106), also Cas, son of Saidi (ib. 110); and in Rhonabwy's Dream Kadyrieith, son of Saidi (ib. 160); but the latter vocable is Seidi in Triad ii. 26 (ib. 303). It is to be borne in mind that Ptolemy does not represent the Setantii as a people in his time: he only mentions a harbour called after the Setantii. So it looks as if they then belonged to the past--that in fact they were, as I should put it, a Goidelic people who had been conquered and partly expelled by Brythonic tribes, to wit, by the Brigantes, and also by the Cornavii in case the Setantii had once extended southwards to the Dee. This naturally leads one to think that some of them escaped to places on the coast, such as Dyfed, and that some made for the opposite coast of Ireland, and that, by the time when the Cúchulainn stories came to be edited as we have them, the people in question were known to the redactors of those stories only by the Brythonic form of their name, which underlies that of Setanta Beg, or the Little Setantian. Those of them who found a home on the coast of Cardigan Bay may have brought with them a version of the inundation story with Seithennin, son of Seithyn, as the principal figure in it. So in due time he had to be attached to some royal family, and in the Iolo MSS., pp. 141-2, he is made to descend from a certain Plaws Hen, king of Dyfed, while the saints named as his descendants seem to have belonged chiefly to Gwyned and Powys.

[180] See the Professor's Address on the Place of a University in the History of Wales, delivered at Bangor at the opening ceremony of the Session of 1899-1900 (Bangor, 1900), p. 6. The reference to Giraldus is to his Itin. Kambriæ, i. 13 (p. 100), and the Expugnatio Hibernica, i. 36 (p. 284).

[181] Instead of 'she followed it' one would have expected 'it followed her'; but the style is very loose and rough.

[182] As a 'Cardy' I have here two grievances, one against my Northwalian fellow countrymen, that they insist on writing Rheidiol out of sheer weakness for the semivowel i; and the other against the compilers of school books on geography, who give the lake away to the Wye or the Severn. I am told that this does not matter, as our geographers are notoriously accurate about Natal and other distant lands; so I ought to rest satisfied.

[183] Professor Meyer has given a number of extracts concerning her in his notes to his edition of The Vision of Mac Conglinne (London, 1892), pp. 131-4, 208-10, and recently he has published The Song of the Old Woman of Beare in the Otia Merseiana (London, 1899), pp. 119-28, from the Trinity College codex, H. 3, 18, where we are told, among other things, that her name was Digdi, and that she belonged to Corcaguiny. The name Béara, or Bérre, would seem to suggest identification with that of Bera, daughter of Eibhear, king of Spain, and wife of Eoghan Taidhleach, in the late story of The Courtship of Moméra, edited by O'Curry in his Battle of Magh Leana (Dublin, 1855); but the other name Digdi would seem to stand in the way. However none of the literature in point has yet been discovered in any really old manuscript, and it may be that the place-name Berre, in Caillech Bérri, has usurped the place of the personal name Béra, whose antiquity in some such a form as Béra or Méra is proved by its honorific form Mo-mera: see O'Curry's volume, p. 166, and his Introduction, p. xx.