VII.
The shadowy Horror which keeps vigil over these hidden treasures is now a dragon, again a raven or an eagle, again a worm. In the account of the treasure-seeker of Nantyglyn, it is a winged creature of unknown nature, a 'mysterious incubus,' which broods over the chest in the cave. The terrible Crocodile of the Lake, which was drawn from its watery hiding-place by the Ychain Banog, or Prominent Oxen of Hu Gadarn, is also sometimes called a dragon (draig) in those local accounts which survive in the folk-lore of several different districts. It infested the region round about the lake where it lay concealed, and the mighty oxen so strained themselves in the labour of drawing it forth that one of them died and the other rent the mountain in twain with his bellowing. Various legends of Sleeping Warriors appear in Welsh folk-lore, in which the dragon is displaced by a shadowy army of slumbering heroes, lying about in a circle, with their swords and shields by their sides, guarding great heaps of gold and silver. Now they are Owen Lawgoch and his men, who lie in their enchanted sleep in a cavern on the northern side of Mynydd Mawr, in Carmarthenshire; again they are Arthur and his warriors, asleep in a secret ogof under Craig-y-Ddinas, waiting for a day when the Briton and the Saxon shall go to war, when the noise of the struggle will awaken them, and they will reconquer the island, reduce London to dust, and re-establish their king at Caerleon, in Monmouthshire.
Dragon or demon, raven or serpent, eagle or sleeping warriors, the guardian of the underground vaults in Wales where treasures lie is a personification of the baleful influences which reside in caverns, graves, and subterraneous regions generally. It is something more than this, when traced back to its source in the primeval mythology; the dragon which watched the golden apples of Hesperides, and the Payshtha-more, or great worm, which in Ireland guards the riches of O'Rourke, is the same malarious creature which St. Samson drove out of Wales. According to the monkish legend, this pestiferous beast was of vast size, and by its deadly breath had destroyed two districts. It lay hid in a cave, near the river. Thither went St. Samson, accompanied only by a boy, and tied a linen girdle about the creature's neck, and drew it out and threw it headlong from a certain high eminence into the sea.[187] This dreadful dragon became mild and gentle when addressed by the saint; did not lift up its terrible wings, nor gnash its teeth, nor put out its tongue to emit its fiery breath, but suffered itself to be led to the sea and hurled therein.[188] In the 'Mabinogion,' the dragon which fights in Lludd's dominion is mentioned as a plague, whose shriek sounded on every May eve over every hearth in Britain; and it 'went through people's hearts, and so scared them, that the men lost their hue and their strength, and the women their children, and the young men and maidens lost their senses.'[189] 'Whence came the _red_ dragon of Cadwaladr?' asks the learned Thomas Stephens.[190] 'Why was the Welsh dragon in the fables of Merddin, Nennius, and Geoffrey, described as _red_, while the Saxon dragon was _white_?' The question may remain long unanswered, for the reason that there is no answer outside the domain of fancy, and therefore no reason which could in our day be accepted as reasonable.[191] The Welsh word 'dragon' means equally a dragon and a leader in war. Red was the most honourable colour of military garments among the British in Arthur's day; and Arthur wore a dragon on his helmet, according to tradition.
His haughty helmet, horrid all with gold, Both glorious brightness and great terror bred, For all the crest a dragon did enfold With greedy paws.[192]
But the original dragon was an embodiment of mythological ideas as old as mankind, and older than any written record. The mysterious beast of the boy Taliesin's song, in the marvellous legend of Gwion Bach, is a dragon worthy to be classed with the gigantic conceptions of the primeval imagination, which sought by these prodigious figures to explain all the phenomena of nature. 'A noxious creature from the rampart of Satanas,' sings Taliesin; with jaws as wide as mountains; in the hair of its two paws there is the load of nine hundred waggons, and in the nape of its neck three springs arise, through which sea-roughs swim.[193]
FOOTNOTES:
[187] 'Liber Landavensis,' 301.
[188] Ibid., 347.
[189] 'Mabinogion,' 461.
[190] 'Literature of the Kymry,' 25.
[191] Mr. Conway, in his erudite chapter on the Basilisk, appears to think that the red colour of the Welsh dragon, in the legend of Merlin and Vortigern, determines its moral character; that it illustrates the evil principle in the struggle between right and wrong, or light and darkness, as black does in the Persian legends of fighting serpents.--'Demonology and Devil-Lore,' p. 369. (London, Chatto and Windus, 1879.)
[192] Spenser, 'Faerie Queene.'
[193] 'Mabinogion,' 484.