Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/188

 1 50 Mythological Section. swearing", that is, " I swear thee an oath", meaning " I swear for thee an oath which will bind thee''. The stepmother, it is true, is not represented going through the form of words, for what she said appears to have been a regular formula, just like that of put- ting a person in Irish story under geasa or bonds of magic ; but an oath or form of imprecation was doubtless a dark reality be- hind the formula. In the southern part of my native county of Cardigan the phrase to which I have directed your attention has been in use within the last thirty years, and the practice which it denotes is still so well known as to be the subject of local stories. A friend of mine who is under forty vividly remembers listening to an uncle of his relating how narrowly he once escaped having the oath forced on him. He was in the hilly portion of the parish of Llanwenog, coming home across country in the dead of a mid- summer's night, when leaping over a fence he came down un- expectedly close to a man actively engaged in sheep-stealing. My friend's uncle instantly took to his heels, while the thief pur- sued him with a knife. If the thief had caught him, it is under- stood that he would hold his knife at his throat and force on him an oath of secrecy. I have not been able to ascertain the word- ing of the oath, but all I can learn goes to show that it was dreaded only less than death itself In fact there are stories current which relate how a man now and then failed to recover from the shock occasioned him by the oath, but lingered and died in a comparatively short time. The phrase tyngu tynghed} intelligible in modern Wales, serves to help us to understand the Latin word fatum. In fact it seems to suggest that the latter was originally a part of a formula which would have sounded somewhat like a//ir«//a/a7«/flr/, "to say one a saying". This is all the more to the point, as it is well known how closely Latin and Celtic are related to one another, and how every advance in the study of those languages goes to add emphasis to that relation- ship. From the kinship of the languages one may expect to a It will be noticed that tiiere is a discrepancy between the gutturals of these two words : tyngu " to swear"(0. Ir. tongu " 1 swear") has »^, while tynghed and its Irish equivalent imply an nc. 1 do not know how to explain this, though I cannot doubt the fact of the words being cognate. A somewhat similar difference, however, occurs in Welsh dwyn " to bear, carry, steal", and dwg " carries, bears"; see the Revue Celtiqiie, vi, 18, i^.