Welsh Journals

by the coast line with the mouth of the Teifi. What sort of a headland is Pen Cemais? Is it high or low? How does it look from the sea ? To leave this question of the name, may point out that the Mabinogion give no indication that Cemais was not a part of Dyfed: indirectly I think that of Pwyll does the contrary. The poet Cynddelw—his name is to be pronounced as a dissyllable with the accent on the first (Myv., vol. i, p. 228) to Dyfed as bro seithbeu that is the country of Dyfed's seven is the mutated form of what we write 'pan'—it might be put into French as 'cher pays'—in our patriotic song 'Hen Wlad fy Nhadau,' sometimes Badu in Morgannwg, as the Pentrefwr can testify. Now the 'seithbeu' or 'septem pagi' of Cynddelw can only have meant the 'Seith Cantref Dyued' mentioned more than once in the Mabinogion of and the seven original cantrefs of Dyved, before Pwyll's son, Pryderi, had added to them. The lists of the cantrefs of Wales, together with the commots composing them, vary very much in different manu- scripts, and it would be a very useful piece of work if they were to be carefully studied and explained by a trained historian. The seven here in question, as given from the Rrd Book of Hergest in the Oxford edition of the are the following: Emlyn, Kernels, Pennbrwe, Pebideawe, and One would like to know how Emlyn and the Upper Cantref, and perhaps more, were filched away from Dyfed; but l'expect that is a question already dealt with in Owen's Pembrokeshire. I understand that portions of my native county of Cardigan have also been absorbed by Carmarthenshire. That octopus seems to han> been equal to anything, except keeping hold of Gower. "The poet Ab Gwilym calls Dyfed generally Bro yr Hud or Gwlad yr Hud, that is to say, the realm of enchantment, glamour and illusion, the story of which, reaching the French romancers. became the theme known as the Enchantments of Britain. Put I think Mr. Evans is warranted in laying his finger Cemais as the part to which the glamour adhered most thickly that seems to follow from the stories reproduced in my Celtic Folklore, though I did not perceive it myself. In fact, I did not see the wood for the trees but the wood is in this case of some importance, for it helps one to understand the story, if one may suppose the whole or most of Cemais to have once been more or less of a forest. Such a forest would serve also to shelter men who landed from the sea in such creeks as Aber Ceibwr. Possibly Llwyd may have been one of them; at any rate, am inclined to identify him with Liath mac Celtchar of Cualu, the