to be identified, probably, with Brigit, goddess of poetry: Cairbre, the first satirist in Erinn, is distinguished as son of Etan. The name Elatha or Elathan, for both forms occur, may possibly have referred to eloquence and wisdom; and in that case the personage so called may be compared with the king of Hades under his Welsh name of Arawn, which likewise referred to speech and wisdom. The Welsh Arawn is styled one of the Three counselling Knights of Arthur's Court,[1] and is possibly to be recognized under the slightly different name Alawn, given to one of the three originators of bardism.[2]
Gwydion's name must next be considered: it can only be derived from a root of the form vit, vot or vet; and of these the only one found to satisfy all the conditions is vet, which in old Welsh must become [g]wet, liable to be reduced in the later stages of the language to [g]wed,[3] as
- ↑ Triads, i. 86 = iij. 116.
- ↑ Triads, iij. 58; Iolo MSS. pp. 48, 428. The other name, Arawn, is derived from the same source as the Welsh term araith, 'an oration or speech,' a word represented in Irish by airecht or oirecht, which bears the secondary signification of an assembly: Irish public meetings appear to have never lacked oratory and declamation. See, for instance, O'Curry's Manners, &c. ij. 20, 53, and MS. Mat. pp. 383-4, where references are made to a suit pleaded before the king of Ulster in such eloquent and unintelligible language that he deprived the poets of their right to be the expounders of the laws of the realm, as they had been till then.
- ↑ In a ninth century manuscript (Skene, ij. 2) we meet with a word of this origin written guetid, pronounced gwetiᵭ, which meant either 'a say' or 'a sayer,' and in South Wales a verb gwe'yd (for gwedyd), 'to say,' is much used: take, for instance, gwed, 'dic;' gwedwch, 'dicite;' gwedais, 'dixi.' But in North Wales and generally in Welsh literature the preference is given to the same verb with the prefix dy, for an older do, the Celtic equivalent of the English to. Thus dywedyd
