eared, gave his
name as Mider, and challenged Eochaid to a game of chess for a wager. Many
were the games they played, and at first Eochaid won, and bade Mider carry
out certain tasks. But at last Eochaid was defeated, and Mider for his
reward asked to be allowed to hold Etain in his arms and kiss her. Eochaid
put him off for a month; at the end of which time he called together the
armies of Ireland, and took Etain into the palace, and shut and locked the
doors, and ringed the house with guards. Yet at the appointed hour Mider
stood in their midst, fairer than ever; and he sang to Etain:--

"_O fair-haired woman, will you come with me into a marvellous land wherein
is music, where heads are covered with primrose hair and bodies are white
as snow? There is no "mine" or "thine" there; white are teeth, and black
are eyebrows, and cheeks are the hue of the foxglove, and eyes the hue of
blackbirds' eggs.... We see everything on every side, yet no man seeth us.
Though pleasant the plains of Ireland, yet are they a wilderness for him
who has known the great plain_."

But Etain would not go to him, before Eochaid was willing to resign her.
And the king would not, yet allowed Mider to embrace her before him. Mider
took his weapons into his left hand, and Etain with his right, and bore her
away through the skylight. The guards outside beheld two swans flying, and
they flew towards the elf-mound of Femun, which is called the Mound of the
Fair-haired Women.

For nine years Eochaid waged war against Mider, digging into the
elf-mounds, until he hit upon the fairy-mansion; whereupon Mider sent to
the side of the palace sixty women, all exactly like Etain. And first the
king carried away the wrong woman, but when he returned to sack Bri Leith,
Etain made herself known to him, and he bore her back to the palace at
Tara.

It is reasonable to suppose, then, that some Armorican bard, hearing the
classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, remembered the Celtic legend of
Eochaid and Etain, and grafted the one on the other. Hades became Bri
Leith, or the vaguely-defined beautiful unknown country; but the classical
names displaced the Celtic. The confusion, however, did not at once cease.
In one of the MSS. of _Sir Orfeo_ it is said that Orfeo's father

"Was comen of king Pluto,
And his moder of king Juno"

--confusion worse confounded. Moreover, as we have already seen, even
Chaucer called the fairy-king Pluto and the queen Proserpin