Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/181

Rh all its associations, should be applied to the world into which they went. Inevitably the idea of a place of gloom and of departed spirits attaches to the use of this word. Nay, imagination travels farther, and almost unconsciously the native conception of the Spoiling of Annwuyn becomes associated with the mediaeval Christian doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell. M. d'Arbois and Professor Rhys speak always of the place as one of gloom and terror, a prison-house in which the ghosts of men are detained, ruled, and presided over by "Dark Divinities." But the earliest description we have in Welsh literature of Annwuyn is utterly unlike such an idea of it; it has, on the contrary, all the characteristics of Magh Mell, the Irish Elysium fields. We are, in fact, in great difficulty for want of a word to express the Celtic conception. The title of "Happy Other-world," which Mr. Nutt uses in his Voyage of Bran, and which has been generally adopted, seems too vague and indefinite to express to the mind the brilliant Irish conception of Magh Mell. Yet, even in choosing a title for this essay, I was forced to adopt the very word "Hades" which I think to be so misleading, because no other more satisfactory word seemed to suggest itself. The Welsh word Annwuyn or Annwfn is equally unsuited to express the earliest idea of the British Celt. For Annwfn means "very deep," an "abyss" (dwfu=deep), and nothing could be more unlike the cheerful descriptions given of the place in Welsh literature than such a title. Professor Morris Jones thinks, and I have no doubt rightly, that the word has replaced, under later influences, some more ancient name now lost to us, and has become identified in the Christian consciousness with the place of the dead.

The earliest description we have in Welsh literature of Annwfn, to which I referred above, is found in the Mabinogi of Pwyll, Prince of Dyved. Pwyll, who is out hunting one day, meets a chieftain named Arawn, who