Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/625

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
VI. GODS, DEMONS AND HEROES.
609

nated, comes to Britain as a foreign oppression, just as Morc is said in Irish legend to bring his fleet from Africa (p. 584), the land peopled by the descendants of Ham, the reputed father of the whole brood, according to the story as modified to join on to the Bible. But Welsh literature has preserved no clear and sweeping distinction between the spirits of the pagan world, corresponding to the Irish division into Tuatha Dé on the one hand, and Fomori and Fir Bolg on the other. This Irish classification, otherwise expressed, assumes a quasi-historical aspect: the Ultonian cycle of stories substitute the Ultonians under Conchobar for the Tuatha Dé under Nuada, and the Men of Erinn, that is to say, of Leinster, Munster and Connaught, for Fomori and Fir Bolg, whilst Lug, the great warrior of the Tuatha Dé, has his counterpart among the Ultonians in Lug's later self, Cúchulainn. The ranging of the Ultonians or the Men of Ulster against the Men of the rest of Erinn, looks like an anticipation of the history of Ireland in later times; but that is accidental, since the district chiefly associated with the Ultonian heroes of Irish epic tales consists of a tract of country extending from beyond Armagh towards

    of the adjective evil or bad in the widest sense, but the verb mallu means to be spoiled, said of such a thing as dough when it fails to rise after it has been leavened. Further, as ll not unfrequently stands for an older llt, we have also a form mallt in the term mwci mallt, 'the evil one or the evil goblin,' and in that of Mallt y Nos, 'the Night Mallt,' a sort of she-demon associated with the cold malarious fogs that lie on marshy lands during the hours of the night. Lastly, the compound term madfall, a newt or blindworm, which literally seems to mean 'the good Mall,' in the sense presumably of the harmless Mall, would seem indirectly to prove that Y Fall, as the personification of evil, was supposed to take the form of a reptile.

2 R