who was a royal champion at the age of nine;[1] for at the age of seven Amorgen was, according to one of Cormac's versions, no bigger than a man's fist; and it contrasts equally with the story of Taliessin and Móen, who were endowed with the power of speech from the hour of their birth. Goddesses of the class of Arianrhod and Duben had children of two kinds, representing darkness and light respectively; and Amorgen should be the counterpart of Dylan and Corc. In fact, the story of his being taken to the sea west of Kerry compares curiously with Corc taken out of Erinn to an islet on the same coast. Whether he underwent, while in the west, any change corresponding to that of Corc cleansed of the taint of his incestuous origin, we are not told; nor do we know how or when he got rid of the indescribable hideousness of his person. The more usual versions of the myth would suggest two boys, one a hideous creature like Amorgen, and the other his brother, chubby and xanthous; for it is not to be believed that the story gave any warrant for the change of the one character into the other.
Some help to get over the difficulty will be found in a view which the Irish sometimes took of the poet's art, namely, when they treated it as a personification at first repellent, but radiant at a later stage and fair to behold. Thus an Irish poet called Senchán was, at the moment of his embarking once on a time for the Isle of Man, asked free passage by a youth to whom the poet's retinue gave a wide berth as soon as his request was granted. It turned out that on all occasions when Senchán was likely to be hard put to in matters of skill in his own art, the
- ↑ O'Curry's Magh Lena, pp. 68—71.
