Another dark deity, Gwyn son of Nudd, we discover under all of his three titles. Called variously “Sir Gwinas”,[476] “Sir Guynas”,[477] and “Sir Gwenbaus”[478] by Malory, the Welsh Gwynwas (or Gwyn) is altogether on Arthur’s side. The Cornish Melwas, split into two different knights, divides his allegiance. As Sir Melias,[479] or Meleaus,[480] de Lile (“of the Isle”), he is a Knight of the Round Table, though, on the quarrel between Arthur and Launcelot, he sides with the knight against the king. But as Sir Meliagraunce, or Meliagaunce, it is he who, as in the older myth, captures Queen Guinevere and carries her off to his castle.[481] Under his Somerset name of Avallon, or Avallach, he is connected with the episode of the Grail. King Evelake[482] is a Saracen ruler who was converted by Joseph of Arimathea, and brought by him to Britain. In his convert’s enthusiasm, he attempted the quest of the holy vessel, but was not allowed to succeed.[483] As a consolation, however, it was divinely promised him that he should not die until he had seen a knight of his blood in the ninth degree who should achieve it. This was done by Sir Percivale, King Evelake being then three hundred years old.[484] Turning from deities of darkness to deities of light, we find the sky-god figuring largely in the Morte Darthur. The Lludd of the earlier mythology is Malory’s King Loth, or Lot, of Orkney,[485] through an intrigue with whose wife Arthur becomes the father of Sir Mordred. Lot’s wife was the mother also of Sir Gawain, whose birth Malory does not, however, attribute to Arthur, though such must have been the original form of the myth.[486] Sir Gawain, of the Arthurian legend, is the Gwalchmei of the Welsh stories, the successor of the still earlier Lleu Llaw Gyffes, just as Sir Mordred—the Welsh Medrawt—corresponds to Lleu’s brother Dylan. As Sir Mordred retains the dark character of Medrawt, so Sir Gawain, even in Malory,[487] shows the attributes of a solar deity. We are told that his strength increased gradually from dawn till high noon, and then as gradually decreased again—a piece of pagan symbolism which forms a good example of the appositeness of Sir Edward Strachey’s figure; for it stands out of the mediæval narrative like an ancient brick in some more modern building.