The narrator of the Dream of Maxon remarks, in connection with the mention of Elen ordering the roads to be made from one town to another, that they were therefore called the roads of Elen Lüyᵭawg: this is still the case, as it is not unusual to find a mountain track in Wales termed Fforᵭ Elen, 'Elen's Road,' or Sarn Elen,[1] 'Elen's Causeway;' and there is a certain poetic propriety in associating the primitive paths and roads of the country with this vagrant goddess of dawn and dusk. Similarly, Nennius' account of the British auxiliaries of Maximus has a mythic tone about it, which is worth noticing. 'The seventh emperor,' he says, 'who reigned in Britain was Maximianus,[2] the man who went with all the soldiers of the Brythons from Britain, and killed Gratian king of the Romans; and he held the government of the whole of Europe, and would not allow the soldiers who had gone with him to return to Britain to their wives, their children and their possessions; but he gave them numerous tracts of country from the lake on the top of Mons Jovis as far as the city which is called
- ↑ Our charlatans pretend, of course, that it is Helen and not Elen. At Carnarvon the Helen mania is so acute, that a place not far off, called Coed Alun ever since the 14th century (R. B. Mab. p. 63), runs the risk of having its name permanently transmogrified into Coed Helen.
- ↑ See Nennius and Gildas, § 27 (p. 44), where our Maxen is called Maximianus, while Maximus is the name given his predecessor. There is considerable confusion as to these names, and the shortened form Maxen points, though somewhat irregularly, to a Maxentius as its starting-point; but in the Nennian Genealogy I have just referred to, I read the MS. abbreviation as Maxim, which points unmistakably to a Maximus. But neither Maxen nor Maxim, be it noticed, is to be treated as a genuine Welsh form: both come from pedants and are faulty in point of phonology.
