[75] We seem also to have an instance in point in Carmarthenshire, where legend represents Owen and his men sleeping in Ogof Myrdin, the name of which means Merlin's Cave, and seems to concede priority of tenancy to the great magician: see the extinct periodical Golud yr Oes (for 1863), i. 253, which I find to have been probably drawing on Eliezer Williams' English Works (London, 1840), p. 156.
[76] For the Greek text of the entire passage see the Didot edition of Plutarch, vol. iii. p. 511 (De Defectu Oraculorum, xviii); also my Arthurian Legend, pp. 367-8. It is curious to note that storms have, in a way, been associated in England with the death of her great men as recently as that of the celebrated Duke of Wellington: see Choice Notes, p. 270.
[77] See my Arthurian Legend, p. 335. I am indebted to Professor Morfill for rendering the hexameters into English verse.
[78] They are produced here in their order as printed at the beginning of the second volume of the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, and the series or versions are indicated as i, ii, iii. Version ii will be found printed in the third volume of the Cymmrodor, pp. 52-61, also in the Oxford Mabinogion, pp. 297-308, from the Red Book of Hergest of the fourteenth century. The letter (a, b, c) added is intended to indicate the order of the three parts of the Triad, for it is not the same in all the series. Let me here remark in a general way that the former fondness of the Welsh for Triads was not peculiar to them. The Irish also must have been at one time addicted to this grouping. Witness the Triad of Cleverest Countings, in the Book of the Dun Cow, fol. 58a, and the Triad of the Blemishes of the Women of Ulster, ib. 43b.
[79] As to the names Drystan (also Trystan) and Essyllt, see the footnote on p. 480 above.
[80] This was meant to explain the unusual term g6rdueichyat, also written g6rdueichat, g6rueichyat, and gwrddfeichiad. This last comes in the modern spelling of iii. 101, where this clause is not put in the middle of the Triad but at the end.
[81] The editor of this version seems to have supposed Pendaran to have been a place in Dyfed! But his ignorance leaves us no evidence that he had a different story before him.