self, intending that he should ever be nameless. Gwydion went his way, declaring that the boy should have a name nevertheless; so one day some time afterwards, he took the lad with him for a walk on the sea-shore. There, by dint of magic, in which he was an adept, he converted some sedges and sea-weeds into a ship fully rigged out with sails and everything requisite for a vessel; and by another effort of his art he transformed himself and the lad into cordwainers. They moored beneath the walls of Arianrhod's castle, where it was soon announced to the lady that there lay hard by a vessel, with a man and a boy on board busily engaged in fashioning shoes of the most exquisite Cordovan leather anybody had ever seen. She sent to have a pair made for her; but when the shoes came to be tried on, they proved too large, so that others were ordered. These latter were as much too small; so the cordwainer would work no more for her without measuring her foot himself. She came down to the vessel; and when she had got on board and expressed her surprise that he could not make a shoe according to measure, a wren lighted on the ship, and the lad took his aim and so cleverly hit it that Arianrhod laughed aloud and exclaimed, that it was with a steady hand[1]
- ↑ This is a guess at the meaning required by the context; but the real signification of the adjective gyffes or (in its dictionary form) cyffes has not been ascertained: it must be analysed cyf-hes, otherwise one cannot account for the ff, and in that case the syllable hes may possibly be a word of the same origin as hyd, 'length,' and the whole word cyffes might be conjectured to have had the meaning of 'long.' We should then interpret Llaw-gyffes to mean Longi-manus, as in the case of Llew's Goidelic counterpart, Lug Lám-fada. It is scarcely necessary to add that ỻew, 'lion,' is entirely out of place here, as the older form of the name was Lleu, the etymological equivalent of Lug and the
