his cader or seat, one would descend in the morning a bard or a madman; while on Snowdon the place to pass the night with a view to the same result was the hollow underneath the huge block called the Black Stone of the Arᵭu, near the Black Tarn of the Arᵭu. It is sometimes assumed that the exposure chiefly constituted the ordeal, but that view is untenable in the case of the latter sheltered position; while the dismal tarn of the Arᵭu was formerly believed to be haunted by a race of fairies,[1] and the word Arᵭu,'[2] 'black,' found elsewhere applied to the terrene god, suggests that the hardship consisted in passing a night in the society of him and his fairies. These last, regarded from the popular point of view, may be said to delight chiefly in music and dancing, while instances are also mentioned of their expressing themselves in verse and of their joining to sing stanzas of poetry in a sort of chorus.[3] But in Irish literature, poetry is even more explicitly associated with them, as, for example, in a curious story published by O'Curry,[4] to the following effect: "Finn observed a favourite warrior of his company, named Gael O'Neamhain, coming towards him, and when he had come to Finn's presence, he asked him where he had come from. Cael answered that he had come from Brugh in the north (that is the fairy mansion of Brugh, on the Boyne).
- ↑ Rhys in the Cymmrodor, iv. 180.
- ↑ Book of Taliessin, poem xlviij. (Skene, ij. 203).
- ↑ Rhys in the Cymmrodor, v. 127.
- ↑ MS. Mat. pp. 308-9: the poem referred to is translated at pp. 309-11, and the Irish text and the rest of the story, from the Book of Lismore, foL 206. b. a, is given at pp. 594-7.
