England -- Description and travel; Icknield Way (England); Thomas, Edward, 1878-1917
More often in books we move, as I have said, from place to place as
in a dream. But it is a dream in the _Mabinogion_ which gives one of
the most majestic scenes of travel. I mean the dream of the Emperor
Maxen. He dreamed that he was journeying along a river valley towards
its source, and up over the highest mountain in the world until he saw
mighty rivers descending to the sea, and one of them he followed to a
great city at its mouth and a vast castle in the city. At the end of
his journey the dreaming Emperor found a girl so beautiful that when
he awoke he could think of naught else, while years went by, except
her beauty. He sent out pioneers to discover the road of his dream,
and at last they brought him to the castle and the same girl Helen
sitting in the hall of it. She became his bride, and he gave her three
castles--one at Arvon in North Wales, one at Caerleon, and one at
Caermarthen in the South. Then, says the tale, “Helen bethought her to
make high-roads from one castle to another throughout the Island of
Britain. And the roads were made. And for this cause are they called
the roads of Helen Luyddawc, that she was sprung from a native of
this island, and the men of the Island of Britain would not have made
these great roads for any save her.” It is natural to connect with this
Helen the great ancient roads leading north and south across Wales
known as Sarn Helen or Elen. Nothing could be more noble as the name
of a mountain road than Sarn Helen or Helen’s Causeway. It suggests to
the ordinary fanciful and unhistoric mind the British Helena, mother
of the Emperor Constantine, and that it suggested this long ago is
clear from the old identification of Helen Luyddawc with the only
child of King Cole of Colchester. The name has more recently been
explained as Sarn y Lleng, the Road of the Legions. Sir John Rhys[1]
insists upon Elen instead of Helen, and believes her to be one of the
pagan goddesses of the dusk. “There is,” he says, “a certain poetic
propriety in associating the primitive paths and roads of the country
with this vagrant goddess of dawn and dusk.” These wandering paths are
to the hard white highways what dusk is to the full blaze of day. First
perhaps trodden by the wild herd and still without terrors for it, they
might well be protected by a sort of Artemis, goddess of wildernesses
and of forked ways, kind both to human hunters and the wild quarry.
They belong to the twilight of the world. No doubt the sun shines no
brighter at noon than it did then on a perfectly wild earth, on flowers
that were never gathered, on bright plumage that no man had coveted.
But all the forest and marsh of primeval earth form in the imagination
mists to which the lack of history adds yet another veil. These mists
lie over the world, to my mind, exactly as the white mist of summer
lies, turning into a sea most of what once was land and making islands
of the woods on the steep, uncultivated tracts. The islands rising
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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