Another personage who owes his prominence in the Arthurian story to his importance in Celtic myth was March son of Meirchion, whose swine Arthur attempted to steal, as Gwydion had done those of Pryderi. In the romances, he has become the cowardly and treacherous Mark, king, according to some stories, of Cornwall, but according to others, of the whole of Britain, and known to all as the husband of the Fair Isoult, and the uncle of Sir Tristrem. But as a deformed deity of the underworld[406] he can be found in Gaelic as well as in British myth. He cannot be considered as originally different from Morc, a king of the Fomors at the time when from their Glass Castle they so fatally oppressed the Children of Nemed.[407] The Fomors were distinguished by their animal features, and March had the same peculiarity.[408] When Sir Thomas Malory relates how, to please Arthur and Sir Launcelot, Sir Dinadan made a song about Mark, “which was the worst lay that ever harper sang with harp or any other instruments,”[409] he does not tell us wherein the sting of the lampoon lay. It no doubt reminded King Mark of the unpleasant fact that he had—not like his Phrygian counterpart, ass’s but—horse’s ears. He was, in fact, a Celtic Midas, a distinction which he shared with one of the mythical kings of early Ireland.[410] Neither can we pass over Urien, a deity of the underworld akin to, or perhaps the same as, Brân.[411] Like that son of Llyr, he was at once a god of battle and of minstrelsy;[412] he was adored by the bards as their patron;[413] his badge was the raven (_bran_, in Welsh);[414] while, to make his identification complete, there is an extant poem which tells how Urien, wounded, ordered his own head to be cut off by his attendants.[415] His wife was Modron,[416] known as the mother of Mabon, the sun-god to whom inscriptions exist as _Maponos_. Another of the children of Urien and Modron is Owain, which was perhaps only another name for Mabon.[417] Taliesin calls him “chief of the glittering west”,[418] and he is as certainly a sun-god as his father Urien, “lord of the evening”,[419] was a ruler of the dark underworld.