Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/145

Rh Loth or Lot of the romances, which make the person so called king of Lodonesia or the Lothians, of the Orkneys and of Lochlann. In all these he is more or less associated with the sea; and even the Welsh tale, bearing his name in its form of Llûᵭ, gives him a fleet. But on the whole the Welsh have been in the habit of regarding him rather as a great and thriving king of their ancestors, as one who delivered his subjects from three or more dire scourges to which they were subject, and as the hero whom Geoffrey makes the builder of the walls of London. The association of Llûᵭ, or 'King Lud' as he has come to be called in English, with London, is apparently founded on a certain amount of fact: one of the Welsh names for London is Caer Lûᵭ or Lud's Fort, and if this is open to the suspicion of having been suggested first by Geoffrey, that can hardly be supposed possible in the case of the English name of Ludgate Hill. The probability is, that as a temple on a hill near the Severn associated him with that river in the west, so a still more ambitious temple on a hill connected him with the Thames in the east; and as an aggressive creed can hardly signalize its conquests more effectually than by appropriating the fanes of the retreating faith, no site could be guessed with more probability to have been sacred to the Celtic Zeus than the eminence on which the dome of St. Paul's now rears its magnificent form.

The Irish Nuada was the same sort of god as his Welsh namesake: he was king of the Tuatha Dé Danann and their leader in war. When the Boyne is called the forearm of Nuada's wife, that queen would seem to be a personification of the land of Erinn; but it is not clear whether Nuada, as her consort, is to be regarded as god