Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/68

 the Isle of Falga, where the Irish people get the wonderful cauldron. We find a similar expedition mentioned in a Welsh poem (Skene, ii. 181, Book of Taliesin, 256), where this cauldron is called peir pen annwvyn, and we learn that Arthur made a disastrous expedition to this region (A phan aetham ni gan Arthur namyn seith ny dyrreith o Gaer Vedwit). The Caer Sidi mentioned in the same poem is a horrible prison of Gweir, who sits there before spoils of Hades (rac preideu annwvyn), and yet the same place appears in another poem like paradise (Skene, ii. 155, B. of Tal. 16):

All these facts prove only that Annwvn and fairyland have two aspects: one of a beautiful blessed country and the other of a dangerous region. This other aspect is not infrequent in folklore; Teutonic and Slavonic folklore knows many stories dealing with expeditions to that country; the Old Babylonian has a story about Izdubar's expedition to Hades (Archiv für Religions-wissenschaft, xii. 275 f.), and the Kichés of Central America believed that Hun-Ahpu and Xbalanque came to the realms of Xibalba (Underworld) [Popol Vuh, bk. ii.].

And so, I think, it is safest to speak only about the Other World (or Other Worlds) and fairies.

It is obvious, however, that beside the old belief there might have been also other motives which might have influenced the conception of the Other World and of fairies; I mean especially ethnical motives: an alien race and a distant country might have been regarded as an