of captives[1] will be found to figure also in the Arthurian romances in various forms, as, for example, in the account of Arthur's intervention between Gwyn and Gwythur; and it forms a feature of the story which begins with Diarmait's visit to the Land beneath the Billow, and which was brought under your notice in the first lecture (p. 187). That narrative ends with an account of both Finn (as Culture Hero) and Dermait (as Sun Hero) sailing towards the west to recover their friends that had been carried away by a fairy giant on the sharp-ridged back of his monster steed. The realms of Faery and the other world generally had a variety of names in Irish legend; but the isle in which Finn and Diarmait found their friends, is called the Land of Promise; and another of the names belonging to the same mythic geography was that of Lochlann, which, like the Welsh Llychlyn, before it came to mean the home of the Norsemen, denoted a mysterious country in the lochs or the sea. I mention this, because I wish to close this group of tales with another about Diarmait: it relates how he attacked a giant who was the guardian of the berries of a certain divine rowan or quicken-tree which grew in the midst of a wood, wherein no one durst hunt, called Dubhros, or Black Forest, in the country of the Hy Fiachrach, in the present county of Sligo; but though the scene is laid this time within Erinn itself, the giant was of Lochlann, and his name was Searbhan, which may be interpreted to mean the Bitter or Sour One. The story is to
- ↑ I hope to return to this in my treatment of the Arthurian Legend: for the present it will suffice to refer to M. Gaston Paris' allusion to the captives, in the Romania, xij. 476-7, 479.
