this was followed shortly afterwards, to everybody's astonishment, by two more poems to which he gave utterance in answer to questions as to his previous existence and as to his knowledge. On this I need scarcely make any remark, as you cannot fail to see at once how closely it corresponds to the story of Moen picked up from the sea and heard to speak thrice in the first hours of his life (p. 311). In the case of Lleu and Gwri and Cúchulainn, the precocity was one of growth generally, but here it is confined to speech and wisdom. The First of May must, according to Celtic ideas, have been the right season for the birth of the summer Sun-god; and his mother who drops him in the sea and goes her way is Kerridwen the Minerva of Welsh poets: she may probably be ranked with Arianrhod and Gefjon.
Let us now return to the story of the three stray drops from the cauldron, to which Taliessin's knowledge of all things is traced. Kerridwen had taken as husband him of Bala Lake called Tegid, in whose baldness we have probably a touch of the same kind as the croppedness of Corc and Ailill Aulom. The contents of the cauldron had been intended by Kerridwen for the intellectual endowment of Tegid's son Avagᵭu, whose name is no longer known to the Welsh except as a synonym for Hell or for the prince of darkness, in the Christian sense of the term. The legend deriving poetry and knowledge from the powers of the nether world had probably a considerable variety of forms; and the supposed fact of that derivation of the muse is the key-note to much that is characteristic of the most peculiar poems in the Book of Taliessin. For our purpose it matters little what man or how many men wrote them, or even when they were
