Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/512

496 which cannot be regarded as an objection in a nature myth of the kind in question here. However, I am disposed, on the whole, to suppose the gloaming or dusk to suit our tales better—that light which, for some time after the sun himself has sunk out of sight, continues to illumine the skies in these latitudes, and to tip the mountains and the clouds with colours which are now and then of indescribable beauty. Out of that blaze of departing light the Sun is obscurely born during the hours of darkness to begin his career anew; but before he has made love to the rosy-fingered Morn, he has lost his mother. This hypothesis would help us to assign a possible meaning to Cúchulainn's mother's name by referring it to her as the dawn, or better, perhaps, as the gloaming. The story of her escape from Emain to the fairy house to give birth to her son during the night, which was so arranged by Lug that the infant should be brought up by the nobles of the Ultonian court, need not be further gone into as a parallel to the mad wanderings of Goleuᵭyᵭ and the bringing home of her son by the swineherd to his master's court; and I wish to dwell only on her name as suggesting how to explain that of the goddess Dechtere. The Welsh word dyᵭ, 'day,' which enters into the composition of Kulhwch's mother's name, is not to be found in that of Dechtere; but her name has a partial resemblance to the English word in its old form of dæg: the kindred German word tag still retains the guttural. This brings one to a group of well-known words which incline me to consider the name Dechtere