the same name, we have next to try to ascertain its original meaning. It is unfortunate that Irish literature is not known to shed any light on this point, excepting that one vocabulary[1] gives it as meaning a hero; that, however, looks too much like a mere guess based on the stories about Lug. So we have to fall back on Welsh, which supplies related forms in the words lleu-ad, 'a luminary, a moon;' lleu-fer (also lleu-er), 'a luminary, a light;' llew-ych, 'a light, or lighting;' llewych-u, 'to shine.' Nay, lleu itself occurs as an appellative meaning light, as, for example, in the Book of Aneurin,[2] a manuscript supposed to be of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century, where we meet with the term lleu babir, used of rush-lights or the light derived from the rushes used for lighting, which are in modern Welsh called pabwyr.[3] The term lleu babir also occurs in a poem[4] ascribed to Kynᵭelw, a poet of the twelfth century; but the fact that we have to go so far back for instances of the word lleu, and then only to find it in the single combination lleu babir, only serves to show that it
- ↑ O'Davoren in Stokes' Three Irish Glossaries, p. 103. O'Reilly's Dictionary gives Logh the meanings of 'God, fire, ethereal spirits, a loosing, dissolving, untying.'
- ↑ Skene, ij. 66.
- ↑ The rush is peeled almost completely and then dipped in tallow, and this forms a common means of lighting rustic homes in Wales.
- ↑ See the Red Book, cols. 1165-9 ; the poem has been published by me in the Montgomeryshire Collections issued by the Powys-land Club, Vol. xi. p. 171-8: see more especially pp. 171, 177.
the same way that English has made 'sorrow,' 'tallow,' 'morrow,' out of older forms corresponding to the German sorg, talg and morg-en. For more about the phonology of the change in question, see my Lect. on Welsh Phil.2 pp. 66, 67, 412.
