Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 17, 1906.djvu/154

142 Sea. Manxmen, he might have added, speak of him always by the more primitive title mac y Lear, 'son of the Sea.' Mounted on his two-wheeled chariot he drove across the foaming waves, when he was minded to visit Erin. Or else he came riding on horseback ; for he possessed a magic horse, which was swifter than the spring wind and travelled with equal speed by land or sea, not to mention a magic coracle, which propelled and guided itself. By merely shaking his mantle he could raise a storm, and still it again by his druid spells. Lastly, his island home, dimly descried on the horizon, was regarded as a Celtic Elysium or Paradise, and he himself as a Celtic Hades. His Welsh analogue Manawyddan mab Llyr was likewise lord of the Otherworld. In that capacity perhaps he constructed a ghastly prison in Gower, the bone-fortress of Oeth and Anoeth, shaped like a bee-hive and built of human bones bonded with mortar: in this he immured those whom he caught trespassing on his domains.

Manannan is said to have been the first king of the