Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/135

Rh probably meant, at least in the first instance, Týr himself. It occurs also in the case of Woden, when he is called Farma-týr and Hanga-týr, or the God of the Gallows, and Gauta-týr, or the God of the Gauts; and in that of Thor when he is termed Reiᵭi-týr, or the Car-god; nor is tívar, 'gods,' to be left out of the reckoning. The Welsh duw means any god, except when used in the monotheistic Christian sense, and there is every reason to believe that it and its earlier forms, unlike Týr, Zeus or Dyaus, never acquired the force of a proper name, even to the same extent as the Norse equivalent; and this is just as if Greek Christians had consecrated the word to Christian uses instead of. In their language, however, that could not be, since the former had become the name of a special pagan deity, and ceased ages before the Christian era to be an appellative or generic name; but in the Celtic languages, where this was not the case, Christianity was free to appropriate such a word as duw for its own uses.

From the remarks already made, it will have been seen that we must cast about us for other means, than the mere name, to discover the insular Celt's god who should be identified with Zeus. Now in Irish and Welsh literature, the great figures of Celtic mythology usually assume the character of kings of Britain and of the sister-island respectively, and most of the myths of the modern Celts are to be found manipulated so as to form the