Page:Paton - Studies in the fairy mythology of Arthurian romance (1903).djvu/18

 The Fairy Queen 3

" The man leaps from them out of the coracle. As soon as he touched the earth of Ireland, forthwith he was a heap of ashes, as though he had been in the earth for many hundred years." (§§ 62-65.)

Another early story belonging to the same class of narrative as that of Bran is the Echtra Condla (The Adventures of Connld)} a narrative that is found in the Lebor na h-Uidre (The Book of the Dun Cow), an Irish manuscript the compiler of which is said to have died in 1106, and which contains tradition much older than the eleventh century.^

One day as Connla of the Ruddy Hair was standing on Uisnech with his father, Cond the Hundred-Fighter, he saw a beautiful maiden, clad in unfamiliar garb, drawing near. She was visible only to Connla, and for him alone had she come to tell him that she loved him and to summon him to her dwelling in the lands of the living, where neither death nor sin were known, and where Connla's youth would never wither, a land that was justly called the Plain of Delight.

Cond in grave anxiety at hearing such enticing words addressed to his son, bade his druid cast a spell upon the stranger who was trying to take Connla from him. But the maiden, as she turned to leave, gave an apple to Connla. For a month he refused food and drink, and tasted nothing but his apple, which however often he partook of it never grew smaller, but always remained a perfect fruit. More and more he longed for the maiden's presence. At the end of the month he saw her coming toward him, and once more he heard her singing to him, bidding him sail with her in her boat of glass over the seas to the Plain of Delight, where none but women dwell. Connla instantly leaped into the boat with the maiden, and sailed away from his kindred. Never more did they have tidings from him,

A being of the same type as the maidens from Emain and the Plain of Delight makes her appearance in Welsh literature in the Mabinogi of Pwyll, Prince of Dyved^ one of the genuine Mabinogion, which in its material probably antedates the twelfth century.*

Pwyll, Prince of Dyved, was a lord of prowess and renown. One day as he sat with some of his followers on a certain enchanted mound, he saw an

1 Ed. Windlsch, Irische Grammatik, Leipzig, 1879, pp. 118 ff. Translated into English by MacSwiney, Gaelic Journal, II, 307 ; into German by Zimmer, Zs. f. d. Alt, XXXIII (1889), 262 ff.; into French by D'Arbois de Jubainville, Ep. Celt., I, 385 ff. For a summary see Meyer and Nutt, I, 145 ff.

2 See Zimmer, Zs. f. vergl. Sfrachf., XXVIII (1887), 417 ; Silva Gadelica, II, ix ; Meyer and Nutt, I, 144, 147-149. ' Mabinogion, III, 46 ff.


 * See Meyer and Nutt, II, 18 ; Nutt, Folk Lore Record, V (1882), 1.