place; 'difant,' the unrimmed place (whence the modern Welsh word
'difancoll,' lost for ever); 'affwys,' the abyss; 'affan,' the land
invisible. The upper-world is sometimes called 'elfydd,' sometimes
'adfant,' the latter term meaning the place whose rim is turned back.
Apparently it implies a picture of the earth as a disc, whose rim or lip
is curved back so as to prevent men from falling over into the 'difant,'
or the rimless place. In modern Celtic folk-lore the various local other-
worlds are the abodes of fairies, and in these traditions there may
possibly be, as Principal Rhys has suggested, some intermixture of
reminiscences of the earlier inhabitants of the various districts. Modern
folk-lore, like mediaeval legend, has its stories of the inter-marriages
of natives of this world with those of the other-world, often located
underneath a lake. The curious reader will find several examples of such
stories in Principal Rhys's collection of Welsh and Manx folk-lore. In
Irish legend one of the most classical of these stories is that of the
betrothal of Etain, a story which has several points of contact with the
narrative of the meeting of Pwyll and Rhiannon in the Welsh Mabinogi. The
name of Arthur's wife, Gwenhwyfar, which means 'the White Spectre,' also
suggests that originally she too played a part in a story of the same
kind. In all these and similar narratives, it is important to note the
way in which the Celtic conceptions of the other-world, in Britain and in
Ireland, have been coloured by the geographical aspects of these two
countries, by their seas, their islands, their caves, their mounds, their
lakes, and their mountains. The local other-worlds of these lands bear,
as we might have expected, the clear impress of their origin. On the
whole the conceptions of the other-world which we meet in Celtic legend
are joyous; it is a land of youth and beauty. Cuchulainn, the Irish
hero, for example, is brought in a boat to an exceedingly fair island
round which there is a silver wall and a bronze palisade. In one Welsh
legend the cauldron of the Head of Annwfn has around it a rim of pearls.