A line in this poem allows us to see Gwyn in another and less sinister rôle. “The lover of Creurdilad, the daughter of Lludd,” he calls himself; and an episode in the mythical romance of “Kulhwch and Olwen”, preserved in the Red Book of Hergest, gives the details of his courtship. Gwyn had as rival a deity called Gwyrthur ap Greidawl, that is “Victor, son of Scorcher”.[299] These two waged perpetual war for Creurdilad, or Creudylad, each in turn stealing her from the other, until the matter was referred to Arthur, who decided that Creudylad should be sent back to her father, and that Gwyn and Gwyrthur “should fight for her every first of May, from henceforth until the day of doom, and that whichever of them should then be conqueror should have the maiden”. What satisfaction this would be to the survivor of what might be somewhat flippantly described as, in two senses, the longest engagement on record, is not very clear; but its mythological interpretation appears fairly obvious. In Gwyn, god of death and the underworld, and in the solar deity, Gwyrthur, we may see the powers of darkness and sunshine, of winter and summer, in contest,[300] each alternately winning and losing a bride who would seem to represent the spring with its grain and flowers. Creudylad, whom the story of “Kulhwch and Olwen” calls “the most splendid maiden in the three islands of the mighty and in the three islands adjacent”, is, in fact, the British Persephoné. As the daughter of Lludd, she is child of the shining sky. But a different tradition must have made her a daughter of Llyr, the sea-god; for her name as such passed, through Geoffrey of Monmouth, to Shakespeare, in whose hands she became that pathetic figure, Cordelia in “King Lear”. It may not be altogether unworthy of notice, though perhaps it is only a coincidence, that in some myths the Greek Persephoné is made a daughter of Zeus and in others of Poseidon.[301]