professes to have been in Caer Sidi and the Glass Fortress, he not only boasts having taken part in the harrying of Hades; but it is a familiar country to him, and he has witnessed how its inhabitants, whom neither plague nor death can reach, quaff a drink sweeter than wine from a copious fountain with which that submarine isle is blest.[1] He knows every dwarf beneath the ocean, and has observed the rank assigned to each.[2] This is not all: so truly is he a bard, that he is recognized as such even in the mythic mother-country of all bardism and knowledge; and that recognition takes the tangible form of a bardic or professorial chair reserved for him in Caer Sidi, and for his successors in his profession for ever.[3] But he had other chairs, one of which was called the Chair of Kerridwen of uncertain location; and the triad is completed by one belonging to him called the Chair of Teyrnon, which is possibly to be looked for also in the direction of Caer Sidi and the realm beneath the waves of ocean, for Teyrnon was one of the lieges of Pwyỻ Head of Hades, according to the account in the Mabinogi called after his name.[4] The Chairs of Kerridwen and Teyrnon are the subjects of two poems in the Book of Taliessin.[5]
Let us now examine the Taliessin legend from another point of view, and begin with the name. This has pro-
