Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/175

Rh in transparent truthfulness to the original scene in nature, with the sun as the centre of a vast expanse of light, which moves with him as he hastens towards the west. Even when at length one saw in Merlin but a magician, and in his pellucid prison but a work of magic, the answer to the question, what had become of him and it, continued to be one which the storehouse of nature-myths had supplied. Where could Merlin have gone but whither the sun goes to rest at night, into the dark sea, into an isle surrounded by the waves of the west, or into the dusk of an impenetrable forest? So it came about that legend sends Merlin to sea in his house of glass never more to be heard of, or dimly moors him in the haze of Bardsey, or else it leaves him bound by the spells of his own magic in a lonely spot in the sombre forest of Brécilien, where Breton story gives him a material prison in a tomb, at the end of the Val des Fées, hard by the babbling fountain of Baranton, so beloved of the muse of romance. For me, however, the other stories which leave Merlin in an isle off the Welsh or the Armoric coast have more interest just now, as they help more than anything else to explain, how the Zeus of the Celts could become so intimately associated with the sea as we found him to be under the names Llûᵭ, Nûᵭ, Nodens.