hosts as well as giants, and his court is the resort of all valorous persons.  But he is at last wounded by his wife’s seducer, and carried to the Isle of Avallon to be cured of his wounds, and nothing more is ever heard of him.[432] Some of these incidents occur also in the stories of Fionn and Mongan, and those of the mysterious begetting of a wonder child and his final disappearance into fairyland are local forms of a tale common to all branches of the Celts.[433] This was fitted to the history of the local god or hero Arthur, giving rise to the local saga, to which was afterwards added events from the life of the historic Arthur.  This complex saga must then have acquired a wider fame long before the romantic cycle took its place, as is suggested by the purely Welsh tales of Kulhwych and the Dream of Rhonabwy, in the former of which the personages (gods) of the Mabinogion figure in Arthur’s train, though he is far from being the Arthur of the romances.  Sporadic references to Arthur occur also in Welsh literature, and to the earlier saga belongs the Arthur who spoils Elysium of its cauldron in a Taliesin poem.[434] In the Triads there is a mingling of the historic, the saga, and the later romance Arthur, but probably as a result of the growing popularity of the saga Arthur he is added to many Triads as a more remarkable person than the three whom they describe.[435] Arthurian place-names over the Brythonic area are more probably the result of the popularity of the saga than that of the later romantic cycle, a parallel instance being found in the extent of Ossianic place-names over the Goidelic area as a result of the spread of the Fionn saga.

The character of the romance Arthur—­the flower of knighthood and a great warrior—­and the blending of the historic war-leader Arthur with the mythic Arthur, suggest that the latter was the ideal hero of certain Brythonic groups, as Fionn and Cuchulainn of certain Goidelic groups.  He may have been the object of a cult as these heroes perhaps were, or he may have been a god more and more idealised as a hero.  If the earlier form of his name was Artor, “a ploughman,” but perhaps with a wider significance, and having an equivalent in Artaius, a Gaulish god equated with Mercury,[436] he may have been a god of agriculture who became a war-god.  But he was also regarded as a culture-hero, stealing a cauldron and also swine from the gods’ land, the last incident euhemerised into the tale of an unsuccessful theft from March, son of Meirchion,[437] while, like other culture-heroes, he is a bard.  To his story was easily fitted that of the wonder-child, who, having finally disappeared into Elysium (later located at Glastonbury), would reappear one day, like Fionn, as the Saviour of his people.  The local Arthur finally attained a fame far exceeding that of any Brythonic god or hero.