hour of triumph after an interval of subjection, and the popular imagination pictured them stalking abroad with more than ordinary insolence and aggressiveness; and, if it comes to giving individuality and form to the deformity of darkness, to describe it as a sow, black or grisly, with neither ears nor tail, is not perhaps very readily surpassed as an instance of imaginative aptitude.[1]
Outside Celtic we have parallels in the Norse smith Völundr (p. 381) and the German Wieland, but with the deformity reduced within the narrow limits of lameness. So also in the case of the Greek god Hephæstus, who was, however, the father of the dragon form of Erichthonius, one of the early kings of Athens. Hephæstus and Athene were closely associated in the ugly story of his origin and in the pious cult of which they were both the objects in Attica. On the Celtic side, the latter association recalls the Irish mythic magician Mog Ruith and his daughter Tlachtga (p. 211), whose name is connected, indirectly, it is true, with the annual distribution of fire to the hearths of Erinn at Samhain or the first of November. For at Athens that was the time of the Chalceia, an ancient feast in honour of Hephæstus and Athene, the exact date being the ἕνη καὶ νέα of the month of Pyanepsion, that is approximately the last day of October. This feast was preceded, immediately preceded, as it is supposed, by the Apaturia, which was the meeting-time of the phratriæ or the tribes, both at Athens and in most of the Ionian commu-
- ↑ With the Welsh instances already mentioned should also be ranged the 'grimly boar all black in a cloud' seen by Arthur in a dream, and interpreted to refer to the Spanish giant (p. 334) he was to overcome: see Malory, i. 173-4, and Geoffrey, x. 3.
