Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/80

 72 literature as the son of one Seithyn Saidi, King of Dyfed. Saidi is obscure : a Mab Saidi, 'Saidi's Son', is mentioned in the Story of Kulhwch and Olwen : see the Red Book Mabinogion, pp. 106, 110; and as to Seithyn, or Seithin, a person so called is alluded to in an obscure passage in the Book of Taliessin : see Skene's Four Ancient Books of Wales, ii, 21O. I now shift to the coast of Brittany, as to which I learn from a short paper by the late M. Le Men, in the Revue Archéologique, xxiii, 52, that the Ile de Sein is called in Breton Enez-Sun, in which Sun is a dialectic shortening of Sizun, which is also met with as Seidhun. That being so, one can have but little hesitation in regarding Sizun as nearly related to our Seithyn. That is not all : the tradition reminds one of the Welsh legend : M. Le Men not only referred to the Vie du P. Maunoir by Boschet (Paris, 1697), but added that, in his own time, the road ending on the Pointe du Raz opposite the Isle of Sein "passe pour être l'ancien chemin qui conduisait à la ville d'Is (Kaer-a-Is, la ville de la partie basse)." It is my own experience that nobody can go about much in Brittany without hearing over and over again about the submerged city of Is. When pondering over the collective significance of these stories, I had my attention directed to quite another order of facts by a naturalist who informed me that a well-known botanist ranks as Iberian a certain percentage — a very considerable percentage, I understood him to say — of the flora of our south-western peninsulas, such as Cornwall and Kerry. The question suggests itself at once : Can our British and Breton legends of submergence have come down to us from so remote a past as the time when the land extended unbroken from the north of Spain to the south of Ireland ? I cannot say that such a view seems to me admissible, but the question may prove worth putting. To return to magic wells, I have to confess that I cannot decide what may be precisely the meaning of the notion of a well with a woman set carefully to see that the door