i've been brooding on the line, "y mae yno ryw ystyr hut" (l. 225 in thomson's edition) in Mabinogi Pwyll. the joneses translate the phrase as "magic meaning," ganz as "hidden meaning," ford as "mysterious meaning," and thomson himself gives "meaning" as the only gloss for "ystyr." now, "ystyr" comes from lat. "historia," and according to brynley roberts "historia" was taken into welsh twice, once in the era of roman occupation, which becomes then "ystyr, meaning" and once in the medieval period, which becomes "ystoria, story." medieval narratives that are called "ystoria" tend to be narratives that rely on some kind of textual authority, such as Ystorya Dared. this seems to me to imply that there is some sense in which "ystyr" may connote meaning as literal/letter-al meaning, meaning like you look up in a dictionary or encyclopedia, meaning based on writing. so, could we maybe understand "ystyr hut" as having the same connotations as eng. "magic spell"? "spell" is interesting because we think of it as something spoken, but at the same time it has the latent sense of something that was first written; the efficacy of a magic spell, it seems to me, is that the "translation" from the written to the oral performance of the spell is what makes it efficacious. when it's written, it is only potential; when it is performed, it is creative. also, it seems to me that there is then a conceptual similarity in the kind of magic attributed to rhiannon, who is the subject of the "ystyr hut" and the kind of magic practiced by ceridwen, who studies "Virgil", i.e., written magical texts. this all just occurred to me over my second cup of coffee this morning, so i'm bascially free-associating at this point. does anyone out there have any thoughts on the subject? leslie jones ljones@law.uoregon.edu