that is to say, Wondrous Head-dragon or Leader. This comparison is all the more relevant as Uthr Ben represents himself in the Taliessin poem as bard, harper, piper, crowder—in a word, seven-score professionals all in one, an idea to be faintly traced in the Mabinogi of Branwen, when it makes Brân, on his expedition to Ireland, wade across with the musicians of his court on his shoulders (p. 269), and when it afterwards represents Brân's head, detached from his body, keeping his men company for many years.[1] Outside Celtic literature one may compare the Norse story of Mim's head conversing with Woden and telling him many secrets,[2] but especially that of Woden's visit to the dead sibyl to inquire about the future of his son Balder.[3] On that occasion Woden rode to the spot "where he knew the Sibyl's barrow stood. He fell to chanting the mighty spells that move the Dead, till she rose all unwilling, and her corpse spoke: 'What mortal is it, whom I know not, that hath put me to this weary journey? I have been snowed on with the snow, I have been beaten with the rain, I have been drenched with the dew, long have I been dead.'"
We cannot here enter fully into the question of the assimilation of a divinity of death to a corpse,[4] but enough has been said to explain how Amorgen's story has a parallel in that of the Spiritus Poematis, and on the Welsh side we have Amorgen's counterpart in Avagᵭu, though the preparation for the latter' s intellectual endowment is interrupted in the story of Gwion. We gather,
