Page:Le Morte d'Arthur - Volume 1.djvu/17

of their number finding his way to the presence of Arthur and his Men, all asleep in a Snowdonian cave resplendent with untold wealth of gold and other treasure: the armed sleepers were believed to be merely awaiting the signal for their return to take an active part in the affairs of this world. In South Wales an elaborate but popular story lodges Arthur and his Knights in a cave at Craig y Ddinas, in Glamorgan,^[1] while the peasanty of South Cardiganshire, relating the same story, locate it elsewhere, and call the sleeping hero not Arthur but Owen,^[2] a name the memory of which used to be kept fresh by ballad singers, who made country fairs ring with such strains as the following:—

Yr Owen hwn yw Harri ’r Nawfed,
Sydd yn trigo ngwlad estronied.

This Owen is Henry the Ninth,
Who lives in the land of strangers.

The Owen of the Cardiganshire legend is known as Owen Lawgoch or Owen of the Red Hand, and he is represented as a man of seven feet in stature with a right hand which was all red. The whole story reminds one of him of the red beard, Frederic Barbarossa. I mention this lest anyone should suppose such stories had anything originally to do with the historical Arthur. Some light is shed on their genesis by a passage in the writings of an ancient author who lived in the first century of our era, namely Plutarch. In his work De Defectu Oraculorum, xviij., he uses words to the following effect^[3]—the Italics are mine:—

“Demetrius further said, that of the islands around Britain many lie scattered about uninhabited, of which some are named after deities and heroes. He told us also, that, being sent by the emperor with the object of reconnoitring and inspecting, he went to the island which lay nearest to those uninhabited, and found it occupied by few inhabitants, who were, however, sacrosanct and inviolable in the eyes of the Britons. Soon after his arrival a great disturbance of the atmosphere took place, accompanied by many portents, by the winds bursting forth into hurricanes, and by fiery bolts falling. When it was over, the

1. The story is given in the Brython for 1858, p. 162.
2. Ibid. p. 179. The editor, who was, I believe, no other than the Rev. Canon Silvan Evans, adds in a note that this sort of story might be found current also in Cumberland.
3. For the original see the Didot edition of Plutarch, vol. iii. p. 511 (De Defectu Oraculorum, xviij.); it is also to be found printed in my Arthurian legend, p. 367.