inferior to that of the sword. Obviously intended to be the immediate cause of restoration to life or health of the hero's kinsman, its functions have been minimised until they have been forgotten. If this is so already in the Proto-Mabinogi and in the model of the Conte du Graal, we may expect to find that elsewhere in Celtic tradition the magic vessel is of less account than sword or lance.
We should likewise misconceive the character of popular tradition if we expected to find certain attributes rigidly ascribed to the mystic vessel in this or that set of stories. The confusion we have noted in the romances may be itself derived from older traditions. Certain it is that in what may be looked upon as the oldest account of the vessel[1] in Celtic literature (although the form in which it has reached us is comparatively modern), there is a vessel of abundance associated with three other talismans, two of them being sword and lance. The Tuatha de Danann (the race of fairies and wizards which plays a part in Irish tradition analogous to that of Gwydion ap Don, Gwynn ap Nudd, and their kin in Welsh) so runs the tradition preserved by Keating in his History of Ireland (Book I, ed. by Joyce, Dublin, 1880, p. 117), had four treasures: The Lia Fail, the stone of Fate or Virtue ("now in the throne upon which is proclaimed the King of the Saxons," i.e., the stone brought by Edward I., from Scone); the sword that Lug[2] Lamhfhada (Lug the Longhanded) was wont to use; the spear the same Lug used in battle; the cauldron of the Dagda, "a company used not ever go away from it unsatisfied." Keating followed old and good sources, and although the passage I have underlined is not to be found in all MSS. of his work (e.g., it is missing in that translated by Halliday), and although the verse which he quotes, and which probably goes back to the eleventh century, whilst the traditions which
- ↑ I do not follow M. Hucher upon the (as it seems to me) very insecure ground of Gaulish numismatic art. The object which he finds figured in pre-Christian coins may be a cauldron—and it may not—and even if it is a cauldron it may have no such significance as he ascribes to it.
- ↑ Cf. as to Lug D'Arbois de Jubainville, Cycle Mythologique Irlandais; Paris, 1884, p. 178. He was revered by all Celtic races, and has left his trace in the name of several towns, chief among them Lug-dunum=Lyons. In so far as the Celts had departmental gods, he was the god of handicraft and trade; but cf. as to this Rhys, Hibb. Lect., p. 427-28.
