| Let us return to the more anthropomorphic figure of the afanc, and
take as his more favoured representative the virile personage described
emerging from the Fan Fach Lake to give his sanction to the marriage of
his daughter with the Mydfai shepherd. It is probable that a divinity
of the same order belonged to every other lake of any considerable
dimensions in the country. But it will be remembered that in the case
of the story of Llyn Du'r Arddu two parents appeared with the lake
maiden-her father and her mother-and we may suppose that they were
divinities of the waterworld. The same thing also may be inferred from
the late Triad, iii. 13, which speaks of the bursting of the lake of
Llion, causing all the lands to be inundated so that all the human race
was drowned except Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who escaped in a mastless ship:
it was from them that the island of Prydain was repeopled. A similar
Triad, iii 97, but evidently of a different origin, has already been
mentioned as speaking of the Ship of Nefycl Naf Neifion, that carried
in it a male and female of every kind when the lake of Uon burst. This
later Triad evidently supplies what had been forgotten in the previous
one, namely, a pair of each kind of animal life, and not of mankind
alone. But from the names Dwyfan and Dwyfach I infer that the writer of
Triad iii. 13 has developed his universal deluge on the basis of the
scriptural account of it, for those names belonged in all probability
to wells and rivers: in other terms, they were the names of water
divinities. At any rate there seems to be some evidence that two
springs, whose waters flow into Bala Lake, were at one time called
Dwyfan and Dwyfach, these names being borne both by the springs
themselves and the rivers flowing from them. The Dwyfan and the Dwyfach
were regarded as uniting in the lake, while the water on its issuing
from the lake is called Dyfrdwy. Now Dyfrdwy stands for an older
Dyfr-dwyf, which in Old Welsh was Dubr duiu, 'the water of the
divinity.' One of the names of that divinity was Donwy, standing for an
early form Danuvios or Danuvia, according as it was masculine or
feminine. In either case it was practically the same name as that of
the Danube or Danuvios, derived from a word which is represented in
Irish by the adjective dána, 'audax, fortis, intrepidus.' The Dee has
in Welsh poetry still another name, Aerfen, which seems to mean a
martial goddess or the spirit of the battlefield, which is corroborated
and explained by Giraldus Cambrensis who represents the river as the
accredited arbiter of the fort unes of the wars in its country between
the Welsh and the English. The name Dyfrdonwy occurs in a poem by
ILywarch Brydyd y Moch, a poet who flourished towards the end of the
twelfth century, |
The dwy, dwyf, duiu, of the river's Welsh name represent an early
form deva or deiva, whence the Romans called their station on its banks
Deva, possibly as a shortening of ad Devam; but that Deva should have
simply and directly meant the river is rendered probable by the fact
that Ptolemy elsewhere gives it as the name of the northern Dee, which
enters the sea near Aberdeen. From the same stem were formed the names
Dwyf-an and Dwyf-ach, which are treated in the Triads as masculine and
feminine respectively. In its course the Welsh Dee receives a river
Ceirw not far above Corwen, and that river flows through farms called
Ar-ddwyfan and H endre' Ar-ddwyfan, and adjoining Arddwyfan is another
farm called Foty Arddwyfan, 'Shielings of Arddwyfan,' while Hendre'
Arddwyfan means the old stead or winter abode of Arddwyfan. Arddwyfan
itself would seem to mean 'On Dwyfan,' and Hendre' Arddwyfan, which may
be supposed the original homestead, stands near a burn which flows into
the Ceirw. That burn I should suppose to have been the Dwyfan, and
perhaps the name extended to the Ceirw itself; but Dwyfan is not now
known as the name of any stream in the neighbourhood. Elsewhere we have
two rivers called Dwyfor or Dwyfawr and Dwyfach, which unite a little
below the village of Llan Ystumdwy; and from there to the sea, the
stream is called Dwyfor, the mouth of which is between Criccieth and
Afon Wen in Carnarvonshire. Ystumdwy, commonly corrupted into Stindwy,
seems to mean Ystum-dwy,'the bend of the Dwy'; so that here also we
have Dwyfach and Dwy, as in the case of the Dee. Possibly Dwyfor was
previously called simply Dwy or even Dwyfan; but it is now explained as
Dwy-fawr, 'great Dwy,' which was most likely suggested by Dwyfach, as
this latter explains itself to the country people as Dwy-fach, 'little
Dwy! However, it is but right to say that in Llywelyn ab
Gruffydd's grant of lands to the monks of Aber Conwy they seem to be
called Dwyuech and Dwyuaur. John Rhŷs Celtic Folklore |