one of the treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann; nor is it necessary to point out the parallelism between his slaying of Balor and Llew's transfixing his rival by a cast of his spear, which an intervening rock was not enough to stop in its fatal course.
Before proceeding further, it will be well to say something about the names Llew and Lug. The former is in point of sound the same word as the Welsh for lion; but on looking closely into the passages where the name of the Sun-god occurs, it proves to have been originally not Llew but Lleu;[1] but as mediæval spelling did not always carefully distinguish the sounds of u, w and v, it is only the assonances and rhymes that can be thoroughly decisive in this matter. A couple of such instances occur in a poem in the Book of Taliessin;[2] on the other hand, the Mabinogi of Mâth has always Llew, except in one remarkable place.[3] It will be remembered that when Gwydion suspected that he had found Llew in the form of a wounded and wretched eagle on the top of an oak-tree, he sang three verses of poetry to him, at each of which the eagle descended a little, so that at last he let himself down on Gwydion's lap, to be changed by the
- ↑ The difference of sound amounts to this: the ew in Llew is sounded like Italian eu in Europa, and somewhat like Cockney ow in 'down town;' while the eu in Lleu consists approximately of German e followed by German ü.
- ↑ Skene, ij. 158, where the instances are lleu, gynheu, and lleu, kaden. I have noted in the same volume an indecisive llev at p. 31, while passages at pp. 176, 190, 211, make for Lleu or lleu.
- ↑ But it is worthy of note that where the scribe first came across the name he began to write ỻen, though he ended by making it into ỻeỽ, that is to say, Llew. So one may infer that the MS. before him read either lleu or llev: see R. B. Mab. p. 71, and ed.'s note, p. 312.
