was the genius of discord, and he succeeded in bringing on a quarrel between the hosts of Britain and Erinn, and in converting the spacious edifice into a slaughter-house, whence only seven of Brân's men escaped alive. The whole, it may be observed in passing, is the Celtic counterpart of the great carnage in the Nibelungen Lied; and the description of the waters[1] separating this country from Ireland suggests that the original story spoke of Hades rather than Erinn.
As to Brân himself, he rescued his sister, but received a poisoned arrow in his foot, whereupon he ordered the seven survivors of his army to cut off his head and to take it with them to their country. He told them that they would sit long at dinner at Harlech, and find the society of his Head as pleasant as it had ever been to them when it was on his body. From Harlech they would proceed, he said, to Gwales, the island now called Gresholm,[2] far off the coast of Pembrokeshire, and remain there feasting in the society of his Head so long as they did not open a certain door looking towards Cornwall. Once, however, they opened that door, it would be time for them to set out for London, and there in the White Hill to bury it with its face towards France; so long as the Head remained undisturbed in that position, this country would have nothing to fear from foreign invasion.
- ↑ The story-teller experienced some difficulty in describing them: he makes Brân's ships sail across them; then he says they were but two rivers, called Lli and Archan; and he dismisses them with the significant remark that it is since then "the Sea has multiplied his realms:" see R. B. Mab. p. 35; Guest, iij. 117, where the passage is egregiously mistranslated.
- ↑ See Lewis Morris' Celtic Remains, edited for the Cambrian Arch. Association by the Rev. D. Silvan Evans (London, 1878), p. 436.
