The figures beneath each entry give reference numbers for the Bibliography
(bendith er mamigh) 'The Mothers' Blessing'. The euphemistic name for the Fairies in Wales. They steal children, elf-ride horses and visit houses. Bowls of milk were put out for them. It is significant that they are associated with the triple form of the Goddess. See: MOTHERS.
# 100 - 454
An early Irish saint; a contemporary of St Patrick (fifth century).
# 166
(b‚n ad'yer) Now the Hill of Howth near Dublin.
# 166
The Kingdom of Ban. 'Lestoire de Merlin' (part of vulgate Version) states that the town of Benwick was Bourges. Malory points out that Benwick is variously identified with Bayonne and Beaune. An identification with Saumur has also been suggested.
# 156 - 418
# 454: Perhaps the most famous of all heroes, his story is told in an eight-century poem written in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. It combines three major stories, which tell of Beowulf's battle with the monster, Grendel, whom he maimed after a wrestling match. The second story tells of his struggle with Grendel's mother - watertroll - beneath the waters of a lake; and the third tells of his combat with a dragon in which Beowulf received a fatal wound. These stories were probably part of a longer cycle of hero-tales current in Saxon countries.
# 169: Beowulf is a stirring and wonderfully readable poem, and the mirror of Anglo-Saxon society. It was composed by a court poet or a monk - a man equally at home with battle action, highly atmospheric evocation of place, and grand set-pieces in the feasting-hall. Sophisticated and humane, it is both a thrilling adventure story and a deeply serious commentary on human life. The very last words of the poem (and their position indicates the importance their poet attached to them) describe its hero in these terms:
cwaedon thaet he waere wyruld-cyninga,they said that of all kings on earth he was the kindest, the most gentle, the most just to his people, the most eager for fame.
manna mildust ond mon-thwaerust,
leodum lithost ond lof-geornost.
# 89 - 168 - 169 - 454
Father of Elaine the White and Lavaine.
# 156 - 418
This character was the champion of the False Guinevere and her partner in deception.
# 156 - 604
The name of the Green Knight. - See GREEN KNIGHT.
# 156 - 454 - 644 - 672
Author of "La Religion des Gaulois"
# 562
The son of Perceforest, he made an unfortunate marriage to Circe.
# 156
An important saint in North Wales. He was said to be the grandson of Arthur's sister Anna through her daughter Perferren. Beund's popularity survived the Reformation.
# 55 - 156 - 216
(beeast veealuch) The monster of Odail Pass on the Isle of Skye, and one of the Highland demon spirits. The distinction between demon spirits and demonic ghosts is hard to draw, and people might well have accounted for Biasd Bheulach as the ravening ghost of a murdered man, hungry for revenge.
# 100
Son of Gawain. He managed to unsheath the sword Honoree and thereby marry Biautei, daughter of the King of the Isles.
# 156 - 713
# 454: (BEE leh) The Celtic world understood an archetype roughly equivalent to the powerful lord of life and death. In British tradition he was called Bel or Belinus, but in Irish he was Bile. In some texts, he is said to come to Ireland from Spain - which is clearly intended to be the Land of the Dead. The fires of Beltaine were lit to mark his recognized feast. Very little is known of his mythos, but he, like Danu who is sometimes named as his consort, was a powerful ancestral deity to the Celtic races.
# 562: (bil-ay) One of the names of the god of Death (i.e. of the Underworld), father of Miled; equivalent, Cymric god Beli, husband of Don.
# 454 - 562
The birch tree stood for Beth, the first letter of the druIdic alphabet. It was the sacred beth of Cerridwen, representing beginnings and birth.
The whiteness of the tree's bark apparently suggested its connection with the White Goddess, who was both birthgiver and death-bringer in her Crone form as the carrion-eating white sow. Birch or beorc was also the runic letter B.
# 701 p 461
A Druidess who assists Cian to be avenged on Balor.
# 562
To resolve the paradox of the Celtic Birth Myths, they must be regarded as symbols of the transcendental meaning of birth, of what birth is from the point of view of the unseen world. From an earthly standpoint a child is conceived inadvertently during the course of its parents' conjugal relations, without the intervention of any other agency. But from the point of view of the supernatural world, the child's birth is destined, the parents are chosen, the time and place are ordained, and the earthly life of the child is 'pre-figured' before he is conceived.
The hostility of earthly powers cannot prevent his advent; his mother has no choice and, in a sense, is violated. And in every conception there is a third factor. The child may derive its biological inheritance from its earthly parents, but it is also the incarnation of a supernatural essence. This doctrine, that a spirit enters the womb at conception, is widespread among both 'primitive' and highly sophisticated peoples. 'Man and the Sun generate man,' says Aristotle; 'Call no man father upon earth,' says St Paul, and according to St Thomas Aquinas, 'The power of the soul, which is in the semen through the Spirit enclosed therein, fashions the body.' The myths are concerned with this third factor, symbolized by the mysterious begetter and by the fructifying substance which is swallowed by the mother. In some of the stories, the begetter is a supernatural being - Lugh, Manannan, a bird-man, or one of the sidhfolk. In others he is the king or a stranger from another race.
Traces of rituals of this kind in the Celtic lands have survived both in the mythological literature itself and in later tradition. It is said that King Conchobar, who was regarded as a 'terrestrial god', was entitled to the first night with the bride of every Ulsterman, 'so that he became her first husband. According to oral tradition, Balor's two deputies exercised the same right. The Fenians had the option on the women of the tribe and claimed either a ransom or the right to cohabit with even a princess the night previous to her marriage. Boswell refers in ERIU, VOL. IV, to a Scottish laird who insited that the Mercheta Mulierum mentioned in old charters did really mean the privilege of a lord to have the first night with his vassals wives, and that on the marriage of each of his own tenants a sheep was still due to him. In Ireland, there are still 'widespread traditions of the days when landlords excercised the Jus Primae Noctis over their tenants' wives, and one hears of leases which contained clauses governing the right. As Mrs Chadwick has argued in her study of Pictish and Celtic Marriage in SCOTTISH GAELIC STUDIES, there is a great deal of evidence which 'suggests the right of a king or his Fili to beget children ritualistically among married couples.
A belief in the fructifying potentialities of water has driven childless women throughout the ages to bathe and to drink at sacred wells in the hope of conceiving, and a belief in the embodiment of the supernatural essence in worms and flies seems to account for the fact that in Wales it is still said of a pregnant girl that she has swallowed an insect (pry') or a spider (corryn). Individual reincarnation is implied in most of the ancient tales, as there might be a hint of the rebirth of the begetter in the birthstories of Finn, Cormac mac Art, and Fiacha Broad-Crown, whose fathers were destined to die as soon as they had begotten their sons.
# 173 - 243 - 548 - 714
# 454: A blue-faced hag, akin to the Cailleachs Bheare and Bheur, who eat people. She is supposed to live in a cave in the Dane Hills in Leicestershire.
# 100: There was a great oak at the mouth of the cave in which she was said to hide to leap out, catch and devour stray children and lambs. The cave, which was called 'Black Annis' Bower Close', was supposed to have been dug out of the rock by her own nails. On Easter
Monday it was the custom from early times to hold a drag hunt from Annis' Bower to the Mayor of Leicester's house. The bait dragged was a dead cat drenched in aniseed. Black Annis and Gentle Annie are supposed to derive from Anu, or Dana, a Celtic mother goddess. It has also been suggested that she is MILTON'S 'blew meager hag'.
# 100 - 415 - 454
See: BOOK OF CARMARTHEN, THE BLACK
Stories of Black Dogs are to be found all over the country. They are generally dangerous, but sometimes helpful. As a rule, the black dogs are large and shaggy, about the size of a calf, with fiery eyes. If anyone speaks to them or strikes at them they have power to blast, like the Mauthe Doog, the Black Dog of Peel Castle in the Isle of Man.
# 100
S. G. Wildman has propounded a theory that the black horse was the symbol of the Arthurian Britons, just as the white horse was that of the Saxons, and that is possible to find out where Arthurian influence prevailed by discovering the whereabouts of inns called the Black Horse.
# 100 - 729
# 562: Kymon was defeated by the Black Knight who rode away with his horse. Kymon went back afoot to the castle, where nothing was asked, but they gave him a new horse, 'a dark bay palfrey with nostrils as red as scarlet' on which he rode to Caerleon Fired by the tale of Kymon, Owain rode forth to seek for the same adventure. He wounded the Black Knight so sorely that he fled, Owain pursuing him hotly and so close that his horse was cut in two when they passed an outer castlebridge and its portcullis fell. He was by this imprisoned between the outer gate of the drawbridge and the inner. A maiden gave him a ring, which made him invisible, when clenched in his hand. In that night a great lamentation was heard in the castle - its lord had died of the wound which Owain had given him. Owain got sight of the castle's mistress, and he fell instant in love. He soon became her husband and lord of the Castle of the Fountain and all the dominions of the Black Knight.
# 156:
# 156 - 562
(sen'glend) CuChulain's last horse breaks from him minutes before he died. See: CUCHULAIN, THE DEATH OF.
# 562
The blackbird has ever been one of Britain's most melodious songsters and this is doubtless why the Birds of Rhiannon are said to be three blackbirds: they sing on the branch of the everlasting otherworldly tree which grows in the centre of the earthly paradise. Their singing entranced the hearer, ushering him or her into the Otherworld. They sing for Bran and the Company of the Noble Head, in their feasting between the worlds. The blackbird is also responsible for the finding of Mabon.
# 439 - 454
# 628: A perpetual fire, dedicated to Minerva by the mythical godking Baldudus (Bladud), was kept burning at Aquae Sulis. Bladud reigned for twenty years and built the city of Kaerbadus, now called Bath. Baldudus was a man of great ingenuity, and taught necromancy throughout Britain, continually doing many wonderful deeds, and finally making himself wings to fly through the upper air. But he fell onto the Temple of Apollo in Ternova (London), his body broken to many pieces.
# 454: King of Britain who built Caer Badum (Bath). He established the temple to Minerva at Bath and, having discovered the medicinal qualities of the waters, caused the baths to be attached to the temple-precincts. He made wings and crashed to his death from the Temple of Apollo in Trinovantum (London). His mythos is similar to that of Abaris, and he seems to embody the traditions of both priest and king in one.
# 243 - 454 - 627 - 628 p 96
One of the twenty-four Knights of Arthur's Court, possibly identical with Blaise, the master of Merlin.
# 104 - 156
Oisin's Danaan mother.
# 54 - 562
(blà'e broo'ha) An Ulster warrior famous for his hospitality; one of CuChulain's fosterers.
# 454
# 156: A hermit, to whom Merlin's mother went when she was enceinte (pregnant). When Merlin was two, he dedicated to Blaise the story of the Grail. Blaise also wrote an account of Arthur's battles. He hailed originally form Vercelli (Italy). He may be identical with the Blaes of THE TRIADS in which he is called the son of the Earl of Llyclyn.
# 454: The shadowy figure who stands behind Merlin. Described as his teacher, Blaise retired from Northumberland where Merlin often visited him and where his deeds and prophesies were recorded.
# 104 - 156 - 185 - 238 - 418 - 454
A Knight of the Round Table. On one occasion he accused King Anguish of Ireland of murder but he was defeated in trial by combat by Tristan. Afterwards, they became friends. When Lancelot quarrelled with Arthur, Blamore and his brother Bleoberis supported their father, Lancelot, and Blamore became Duke of Limousin. After Arthur died, he became a hermit.
# 156 - 418
The wife of Cu Roi mac Daire who came originally from the Otherworld, and who fell to him as the spoils of war. She secretly loved CuChulain and enabled him to murder Cu Roi by entangling his hair, Delilah-like, to the bedstead. She was killed by Cu Roi's poet who avenged his lord by throwing himself off a high place clasping the faithless Blanaid. Her name means 'flower' and she is analogous to Blodeuwedd.
# 166 - 399 - 439 - 454
The fairy steed of Lanval, given him by his lover Tryamour.
# 156 - 425
# 156:
# 153 - 156 - 256 - 454
Wife of Curoi; sets her love on Cuchulain; Fercartna, the bard of Curoi, avenged him by taking Blanid with him in a jump from a cliffedge, and from where they perished. See: BLANAID.
# 562
A sister of Arthur. She married Nentres of Garlot. Their son was Galachin, Duke of Clarence. See: BELISENT and HERMESENT.
# 156
(blàh'nid) Daughter of Mind and wife of Cu Roi mac Dairi; betrayer of her husband.
# 166
A Welsh poet identical with Bledhericus, mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis, and with Brèris, quoted by Thomas of Brittany.
# 562
Tristan's mother in the Icelandic SAGA OF TRISTAN AND ISODD. Her lover, Plegrus, was killed jousting with Kalegras who thereafter became her lover and Tristan's father.
# 156 - 355
A Knight of the Round Table, brother of Blamore. He was defeated by Tristan when he abducted Segwaride's wife from Mark's court. He supported Lancelot, who was his relation, when the latter quarrelled with Arthur. He became Duke of Poitiers and eventually a Crusader.
# 156 - 418
(bleeroom) Sound made by Taliesin by which a spell was put on bards at Arthur's court. (In the 'Mabinogion' transl. by Charlotte Guest, however, Elphin was a prisoner of Maelgwyn and not King Arthur (# 272)).
# 562
The group of otherworldly islands which lie west of Ireland, wherein the worthy dead and otherworldly folk live in the Celtic earthly paradise.
# 454
The word 'Stroke' for a sudden paralytic seizure comes directly from fairy belief. It is an abbreviation of 'fairy stroke' or 'elf stroke', and was supposed to come from an elf-shot or an elf-blow, which struck down the victim, animal or human, who was then carried off invisibly, while a Stock remained to take its place. Sometimes this was a transformed fairy, sometimes a lump of wood, transformed by glamour and meant to be taken for the corpse of the victim. See: KIRK, ROBERT.
# 100
(blod AI weth) Flowerface.
# 454: The Flower-wife of Llew, formed out of flowers, blossom, and nine separate elements by Gwydion and Math, in order to circumvent the geise laid upon Llew by Arianrhod. She was never asked whether she loved Llew and soon fell in love with a passing hunter, Gronw Pebr, with whom she plotted her husband's death. Like Delilah, she coaxed the destined cause of death from Llew and then entrapped him by enacting the conditions exactly. She was then punished by Gwydion, by being turned into an owl - the night-hunting bird which is mobbed and shunned by all day-time fowls.
Her story follows a well-known folk motif: that of the betraying Flower-Bride, a role she shares with both Blanaid and Guinevere.
# 272 - 439 - 454 - 562
Daughter of the King of Wales, turned into a serpent by the magicians Mabon and Evrain. She was freed by Guinglain who kissed her.
# 156
The Blue Men used particularly to haunt the strait between Long Island and the Shiant Islands. They swam out to wreck passing ships, and could be baulked by captains who were ready at rhyming and could keep the last word. They were supposed to be fallen angels. The sudden storms that arose around the Shiant Islands were said to be caused by the Blue Men, who lived in under-water caves and were ruled by a chieftain.
# 100
# 562: (bô'en) (The River Boyne) Angus Og (Angus the Young), son of the Dagda, by Boanna, was the Irish god of love. His palace was supposed to be at the New Grange, on the Boyne. See also: BOYNE, THE RIVER.
# 454: Goddess of the river Boyne, wife of Elcmar, mother of Angus. Her name means 'She of the White Cows'. The Dagda desired her and sent Elcmar on an errand which lasted nine months, although it was made to seem like one day.
# 96 - 454 - 496 - 562
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