combined together.  He is the son of the goddess and dwells in the divine land, but he is also a culture-hero stealing from the divine land.  Perhaps the myths reflect the encroachment of the cult of a god on that of a goddess, his worshippers regarding him as her son, her worshippers reflecting their hostility to the new god in a myth of her enmity to him.  Finally, the legend of the rescue of Taliesin the poet from the waves became a myth of the divine outcast child rescued by Elphin, and proving himself a bard when normal infants are merely babbling.

The occasional and obscure references to the other members of this group throw little light on their functions, save that Morvran, “sea-crow,” is described in Kulhwych as so ugly and terrible that no one would strike him at the battle of Camlan.  He may have been a war-god, like the scald-crow goddesses of Ireland, and he is also spoken of in the Triads as an “obstructor of slaughter” or “support of battle."[429]

Ingenuity and speculation have busied themselves with trying to prove that the personages of the Arthurian cycle are the old gods of the Brythons, and the incidents of the romances fragments of the old mythology.  While some of these personages—­those already present in genuinely old Welsh tales and poems or in Geoffrey’s History—­are reminiscent of the old gods, the romantic presentment of them in the cycle itself is so largely imaginative, that nothing certain can be gained from it for the understanding of the old mythology, much less the old religion.  Incidents which are the common stock of real life as well as of romance are interpreted mythologically, and it is never quite obvious why the slaying of one hero by another should signify the conquest of a dark divinity by a solar hero, or why the capture of a heroine by one knight when she is beloved of another, should make her a dawn-goddess sharing her favours, now with the sun-god, now with a “dark” divinity.  Or, even granting the truth of this method, what light does it throw on Celtic religion?

We may postulate a local Arthur saga fusing an old Brythonic god with the historic sixth century Arthur.  From this or from Geoffrey’s handling of it sprang the great romantic cycle.  In the ninth century Nennius Arthur is the historic war-chief, possibly Count of Britain, but in the reference to his hunting the Porcus Troit (the Twrch Trwyth) the mythic Arthur momentarily appears.[430] Geoffrey’s Arthur differs from the later Arthur of romance, and he may have partially rationalised the saga, which was either of recent formation or else local and obscure, since there is no reference to Arthur in the Mabinogion—­a fact which shows that “in the legends of Gwynedd and Dyfedd he had no place whatever,"[431] and also that Arthur the god or mythic hero was also purely local.  In Geoffrey Arthur is the fruit of Igerna’s amour with Uther, to whom Merlin has given her husband’s shape.  Arthur conquers many