Last summer I went myself to the village of Mydfai, to see if I could

pick up any variants of the legend, but I was hardly successful;

for though several of the farmers I questioned could repeat bits of

the legend, including the Lake Lady's call to her cattle as she went

away, I got nothing new, except that one of them said that the youth,

when he first saw the Lake Lady at a distance, thought she was a

goose--he did not even rise to the conception of a swan--but that

by degrees he approached her, and discovered that she was a lady in

white, and that in due time they were married, and so on. My friend,

the Warden of Llandovery College, seems, however, to have found a bit

of a version which may have been still more unlike the one recorded

by Mr. Rees of Tonn: it was from an old man at Mydfai last year,

from whom he was, nevertheless, only able to extract the statement

'that the Lake Lady got somehow entangled in a farmer's "gambo,"

and that ever after his farm was very fertile.' A 'gambo,' I ought to

explain, is a kind of a cart without sides, used in South Wales: both

the name and the thing seem to have come from England, though I cannot

find such a word as gambo or gambeau in the ordinary dictionaries.

Among other legends about lake fairies, there are, in the third

chapter of Mr. Sikes' British Goblins, two versions of this story:

the first of them differs but slightly from Mr. Rees', in that the

farmer used to go near the lake to see some lambs he had bought at

a fair, and that whenever he did so three beautiful damsels appeared

to him from the lake. They always eluded his attempts to catch them:

they ran away into the lake, saying, Cras dy fara, &c. But one day

a piece of moist bread came floating ashore, which he ate, and the

next day he had a chat with the Lake Maidens. He proposed marriage to

one of them, to which she consented, provided he could distinguish

her from her sisters the day after. The story then, so far as I

can make out from the brief version which Mr. Sikes gives of it,

went on like that of Mr. Rees. The former gives another version,

with much more interesting variations, which omit all reference,

however, to the Physicians of Mydfai, and relate how a young farmer

had heard of the Lake Maiden rowing up and down the lake in a golden

boat with a golden scull. He went to the lake on New Year's Eve, saw

her, was fascinated by her, and left in despair at her vanishing out

of sight, although he cried out to her to stay and be his wife. She

faintly replied, and went her way, after he had gazed at her long

yellow hair and pale melancholy face. He continued to visit the lake,

and grew thin and negligent of his person, owing to his longing. But

a wise man, who lived on the mountain, advised him to tempt her with

gifts of bread and cheese, which he undertook to do on Midsummer Eve,

when he dropped into the lake a large cheese and a loaf of bread. This

he did repeatedly, until at last his hopes were fulfilled on New

Year's Eve. This time he had gone to the lake clad in his best suit,

and at midnight dropped seven white loaves and his biggest and finest

cheese into the lake. The Lake Lady by-and-by came in her skiff to

where he was, and gracefully stepped ashore. The scene need not be

further described: Mr. Sikes gives a picture of it, and the story

then proceeds as in the other version.

It is a pity that Mr. Rees did not preserve the Welsh versions out

of which he pieced together the English one; but as to Mr. Sikes,

I cannot discover whence his has been derived, for he seems not to

have been too anxious to leave anybody the means of testing his work,

as one will find on verifying his references, when he gives any. See

also the allusions to him in Hartland's Science of Fairy Tales,

pp. 64, 123, 137, 165, 278.

Since writing the foregoing notes the following communication has

reached me from a friend of my undergraduate days at Jesus College,

Oxford, Mr. Llywarch Reynolds of Merthyr Tydfil. Only the first

part of it concerns the legend of Llyn y Fan Fach; but as the rest

is equally racy I make no apology for publishing it in full without

any editing, except the insertion of the meaning of two or three of

the Welsh words occurring in it:--

'Tell Rhys that I have just heard a sequel to the Medygon Mydfai story,

got from a rustic on Mynyd y Banwen, between Glynnêd and Glyntawë, on

a ramble recently with David Lewis the barrister and Sidney Hartland

the folklorist. It was to the effect that after the disappearance of

the forwn, "the damsel," into the lake, the disconsolate husband and

his friends set to work to drain the lake in order to get at her,

if possible. They made a great cutting into the bank, when suddenly

a huge hairy monster of hideous aspect emerged from the water and

stormed at them for disturbing him, and wound up with this threat:--

Os na cha'i lonyd yn ym lle, If I get no quiet in my place,

Fi foda dre' 'Byrhondu! I shall drown the town of Brecon!

It was evidently the last braich, "arm," of a Triban Morgannwg,

but this was all my informant knew of it. From the allusion to Tre'

Byrhondu, it struck me that there was here probably a tale of Llyn

Safadon, which had migrated to Llyn y Fan; because of course there

would have to be a considerable change in the "levels" before Llyn

y Fan and the Sawde could put Brecon in any great jeopardy [9].

'We also got another tale about a cwmshurwr, "conjurer," who once

lived in Ystradgyrlais (as the rustic pronounced it). The wizard was

a dyn llaw-harn, "a man with an iron hand"; and it being reported

that there was a great treasure hidden in Mynyd y Drum, the wizard

said he would secure it, if he could but get some plucky fellow

to spend a night with him there. John Gethin was a plucky fellow

(dyn "ysprydol"), and he agreed to join the dyn llaw-harn in his

diablerie. The wizard traced two rings on the sward touching each

other "like a number 8"; he went into one, and Gethin into the other,

the wizard strictly charging him on no account to step out of the

ring. The llaw-harn then proceeded to trafod 'i lyfrau, or "busy

himself with his books"; and there soon appeared a monstrous bull,

bellowing dreadfully; but the plucky Gethin held his ground, and the

bull vanished. Next came a terrible object, a "fly-wheel of fire,"

which made straight for poor Gethin and made him swerve out of the

ring. Thereupon the wheel assumed the form of the diawl, "devil,"

who began to haul Gethin away. The llaw-harn seized hold of him and

tried to get him back. The devil was getting the upper hand, when the

llaw-harn begged the devil to let him keep Gethin while the piece of

candle he had with him lasted. The devil consented, and let go his hold

of Gethin, whereupon the cwmshurwr immediately blew out the candle,

and the devil was discomfited. Gethin preserved the piece of candle

very carefully, stowing it away in a cool place; but still it wasted

away although it was never lighted. Gethin got such a fright that

he took to his bed, and as the candle wasted away he did the same,

and they both came to an end simultaneously. Gethin vanished--and it

was not his body that was put into the coffin, but a lump of clay

which was put in to save appearances! It is said that the wizard's

books are in an oaken chest at Waungyrlais farm house to this day.

'We got these tales on a ramble to see "Maen y Gwediau," on the

mountain near Coelbren Junction Station on the Neath and Brecon Railway

(marked on the Ordnance Map), but we had to turn back owing to the

fearful heat.'

Before dismissing Mr. Reynolds' letter I may mention a story in point

which relates to a lake on the Brecon side of the mountains. It

is given at length by the Rev. Edward Davies in his Mythology and

Rites of the British Druids (London, 1809), pp. 155-7. According to

this legend a door in the rock was to be found open once a year--on

May-day, as it is supposed--and from that door one could make one's

way to the garden of the fairies, which was an island in the middle

of the lake. This paradise of exquisite bliss was invisible, however,

to those who stood outside the lake: they could only see an indistinct

mass in the centre of the water. Once on a time a visitor tried to

carry away some of the flowers given him by the fairies, but he was

thereby acting against their law, and not only was he punished with the

loss of his senses, but the door has never since been left open. It

is also related that once an adventurous person attempted to drain

the water away 'in order to discover its contents, when a terrific

form arose from the midst of the lake, commanding him to desist,

or otherwise he would drown the country.' This form is clearly of

the same species as that which, according to Mr. Reynolds' story,

threatened to drown the town of Brecon. Subsequent inquiries have

elicited more information, and I am more especially indebted to my

friend Mr. Ivor James, who, as registrar of the University of Wales,

has of late years been living at Brecon. He writes to the following

effect:--'The lake you want is Llyn Cwm Llwch, and the legend is very

well known locally, but there are variants. Once on a time men and

boys dug a gully through the dam in order to let the water out. A

man in a red coat, sitting in an armchair, appeared on the surface

of the water and threatened them in the terms which you quote from

Mr. Reynolds. The red coat would seem to suggest that this form of

the legend dates possibly from a time since our soldiers were first

clothed in red. In another case, however, the spectre was that of an

old woman; and I am told that a somewhat similar story is told in

connexion with a well in the castle wall in the parish of Llandew,

to the north of this town--Giraldus Cambrensis' parish. A friend of

mine is employing his spare time at present in an inquiry into the

origin of the lakes of this district, and he tells me that Llyn Cwm

Llwch is of glacial origin, its dam being composed, as he thinks,

of glacial débris through which the water always percolates into

the valley below. But storm water flows over the dam, and in the

course of ages has cut for itself a gully, now about ten feet deep

at the deepest point, through the embankment. The story was possibly

invented to explain that fact. There is no cave to be seen in the

rock, and probably there never was one, as the formation is the Old

Red Sandstone; and the island was perhaps equally imaginary.'

That is the substance of Mr. James' letter, in which he, moreover,

refers to J. D. Rhys' account of the lake in his Welsh introduction

to his Grammar, published in London in 1592, under the title

Cambrobrytannicæ Cymraecæve Linguæ Institutiones et Rudimenta. There

the grammarian, in giving some account of himself, mentions his

frequent sojourns at the hospitable residence of a nobleman, named

M. Morgan Merêdydh, near y Bugeildy ynn Nyphryn Tabhîda o bhywn

Swydh Bhaesybhed, that is, 'near the Beguildy in the Valley of the

Teme within the county of Radnor.' Then he continues to the following

effect:--'But the latter part of this book was thought out under the

bushes and green foliage in a bit of a place of my own called y Clun

Hîr, at the top of Cwm y Llwch, below the spurs of the mountain of

Bannwchdeni, which some call Bann Arthur and others Moel Arthur. Below

that moel and in its lap there is a lake of pretty large size,

unknown depth, and wondrous nature. For as the stories go, no bird

has ever been seen to repair to it or towards it, or to swim on it:

it is wholly avoided, and some say that no animals or beasts of any

kind are wont to drink of its waters. The peasantry of that country,

and especially the shepherds who are wont to frequent these moels

and bans, relate many other wonders concerning it and the exceeding

strange things beheld at times in connexion with this loch. This lake

or loch is called Llyn Cwm y Llwch [10].'

II.

Before dismissing the story of Llyn y Fan Fach I wish to append a

similar one from the parish of Ystrad Dyfodwg in Glamorganshire. The

following is a translation of a version given in Welsh in Cyfaill

yr Aelwyd a'r Frythones, edited by Elfed and Cadrawd, and published

by Messrs. Williams and Son, Llanelly. The version in question is by

Cadrawd, and it is to the following effect--see the volume for 1892,

p. 59:--

'Llyn y Forwyn, "the Damsel's Pool," is in the parish of Ystrad

Tyfodwg: the inhabitants call it also Llyn Nelferch. It lies about

halfway between the farm house of Rhonda Fechan, "Little Rhonda," and

the Vale of Safrwch. The ancient tradition concerning it is somewhat

as follows:--

'Once on a time a farmer lived at the Rhonda Fechan: he was unmarried,

and as he was walking by the lake early one morning in spring he beheld

a young woman of beautiful appearance walking on the other side of

it. He approached her and spoke to her: she gave him to understand that

her home was in the lake, and that she owned a number of milch cows,

that lived with her at the bottom of the water. The farmer fancied her

so much that he fell in love with her over head and ears: he asked

her on the spot for her hand and heart; and he invited her to come

and spend her life with him as his wife at the Rhonda Fechan. She

declined at first, but as he was importunate she consented at last

on the following conditions, namely, that she would bring her cattle

with her out of the lake, and live with him until he and she had three

disputes with one another: then, she said, she and the cattle would

return into the lake. He agreed to the conditions, and the marriage

took place. They lived very happily and comfortably for long years;

but the end was that they fell out with one another, and, when they

happened to have quarrelled for the third time, she was heard early

in the morning driving the cattle towards the lake with these words:--

Prw dre', prw dre', prw'r gwartheg i dre';

Prw Milfach a Malfach, pedair Llualfach,

Alfach ac Ali, pedair Ladi,

Wynebwen drwynog, tro i'r waun lidiog,

Trech llyn y waun odyn, tair Pencethin,

Tair caseg du draw yn yr eithin [11].

And into the lake they went out of sight, and there they live to

this day. And some believed that they had heard the voice and cry of

Nelferch in the whisper of the breeze on the top of the mountain hard

by--many a time after that--as an old story (wedal) will have it.'

From this it will be seen that the fairy wife's name was supposed

to have been Nelferch, and that the piece of water is called after

her. But I find that great uncertainty prevails as to the old name of

the lake, as I learn from a communication in 1894 from Mr. Llewellyn

Williams, living at Porth, only some five miles from the spot, that

one of his informants assured him that the name in use among former

generations was Llyn Alfach. Mr. Williams made inquiries at the Rhonda

Fechan about the lake legend. He was told that the water had long

since been known as Llyn y Forwyn, from a morwyn, or damsel, with a

number of cattle having been drowned in it. The story of the man who

mentioned the name as Llyn Alfach was similar: the maid belonged to

the farm of Penrhys, he said, and the young man to the Rhonda Fechan,

and it was in consequence of their third dispute, he added, that she

left him and went back to her previous service, and afterwards, while

taking the cattle to the water, she sank accidentally or purposely

into the lake, so that she was never found any more. Here it will

be seen how modern rationalism has been modifying the story into

something quite uninteresting but without wholly getting rid of the

original features, such as the three disputes between the husband

and wife. Lastly, it is worth mentioning that this water appears to

form part of a bit of very remarkable scenery, and that its waves

strike on one side against a steep rock believed to contain caves,

supposed to have been formerly inhabited by men and women. At present

the place, I learn, is in the possession of Messrs. Davis and Sons,

owners of the Ferndale collieries, who keep a pleasure boat on the

lake. I have appealed to them on the question of the name Nelferch

or Alfach, in the hope that their books would help to decide as to

the old form of it. Replying on their behalf, Mr. J. Probert Evans

informs me that the company only got possession of the lake and the

adjacent land in 1862, and that 'Llyn y Vorwyn' is the name of the

former in the oldest plan which they have. Inquiries have also been

made in the neighbourhood by my friend, Mr. Reynolds, who found the

old tenants of the Rhonda Fechan Farm gone, and the neighbouring farm

house of Dyffryn Safrwch supplanted by colliers' cottages. But he

calls my attention to the fact, that perhaps the old name was neither

Nelferch nor Alfach, as Elfarch, which would fit equally well, was once

the name of a petty chieftain of the adjoining Hundred of Senghenyd,

for which he refers me to Clark's Glamorgan Genealogies, p. 511. But

I have to thank him more especially for a longer version of the fairy

wife's call to her cattle, as given in Glanffrwd's Plwyf Llanwyno,

'the Parish of Llanwynno' (Pontyprid, 1888), p. 117, as follows:--

Prw me, prw me,

Prw 'ngwartheg i dre';

Prw Melen a Ioco,

Tegwen a Rhudo,

Rhud-frech a Moel-frech,

Pedair Lliain-frech;

Lliain-frech ag Eli,

A phedair Wen-ladi,

Ladi a Chornwen,

A phedair Wynebwen;

Nepwen a Rhwynog,

Tali Lieiniog;

Brech yn y Glyn

Dal yn dyn;

Tair lygeityn,

Tair gyffredm,

Tair Caseg du, draw yn yr eithin,

Deuwch i gyd i lys y Brenin;

Bwla, bwla,

Saif yn flaena',

Saf yn ol y wraig o'r Ty-fry,

Fyth nis godri ngwartheg i!

The last lines--slightly mended--may be rendered:

Bull, bull!

Stand thou foremost.

Back! thou wife of the House up Hill:

Never shalt thou milk my cows.

This seems to suggest that the quarrel was about another woman, and

that by the time when the fairy came to call her live stock into the

lake she had been replaced by another woman who came from the Ty-fry,

or the House up Hill [12]. In that case this version comes closer

than any other to the story of Undine supplanted by Bertalda as her

knight's favourite.

Mr. Probert Evans having kindly given me the address of an aged farmer

who formerly lived in the valley, my friend, Mr. Llywarch Reynolds,

was good enough to visit him. Mr. Reynolds shall report the result

in his own words, dated January 9, 1899, as follows:--

'I was at Pentyrch this morning, and went to see Mr. David Evans,

formerly of Cefn Colston.

'The old man is a very fine specimen of the better class of Welsh

farmer; is in his eighty-third year; hale and hearty, intelligent,

and in full possession of his faculties. He was born and bred in the

Rhonda Fechan Valley, and lived there until some forty years ago. He

had often heard the lake story from an old aunt of his who lived at

the Maerdy Farm (a short distance north of the lake), and who died

a good many years ago, at a very advanced age. He calls the lake

"Llyn Elferch," and the story, as known to him, has several points in

common with the Llyn y Fan legend, which, however, he did not appear

to know. He could not give me many details, but the following is the

substance of the story as he knows it:--The young farmer, who lived

with his mother at the neighbouring farm, one day saw the lady on

the bank of the lake, combing her hair, which reached down to her

feet. He fell in love at first sight, and tried to approach her; but

she evaded him, and crying out, Dali di dim o fi, crâs dy fara! (Thou

wilt not catch me, thou of the crimped bread), she sank into the

water. He saw her on several subsequent occasions, and gave chase,

but always with the same result, until at length he got his mother

to make him some bread which was not baked (or not baked so hard);

and this he offered to the lady. She then agreed to become his wife,

subject to the condition that if he offended her, or disagreed with

her three times (ar yr ammod, os byssa fa yn 'i chroesi hi dair gwaith)

she would leave him and return into the lake with all her belongings.

'1. The first disagreement (croes) was at the funeral of a neighbour,

a man in years, at which the lady gave way to excessive weeping and

lamentation. The husband expressed surprise and annoyance at this

excessive grief for the death of a person not related to them, and

asked the reason for it; and she replied that she grieved for the

defunct on account of the eternal misery that was in store for him

in the other world.

'2. The second "croes" was at the death of an infant child of the

lady herself, at which she laughed immoderately; and in reply to the

husband's remonstrance, she said she did so for joy at her child's

escape from this wicked world and its passage into a world of bliss.

'3. The third "croes" Mr. Evans was unable to call to mind, but

equally with the other two it showed that the lady was possessed of

preternatural knowledge; and it resulted in her leaving her husband

and returning into the lake, taking the cattle, &c., with her. The

accepted explanation of the name of the lake was Llyn El-ferch [13]

(= Hela 'r ferch), "because of the young man chasing the damsel"

(hela 'r ferch).

'The following is the cattle-call, as given to me by Mr. Evans'

aged housekeeper, who migrated with the family from Rhonda Fechan

to Pentyrch:

Prw i, prw e [14],

Prw 'ngwartheg sha [= tua] thre';

Mil a môl a melyn gwtta;

Milfach a malfach;

Petar [= pedair] llearfach;

Llearfach ag aeli;

Petar a lafi;

Lafi a chornwan [= -wèn];

[...] 'nepwan [= -wèn],

'Nepwan drwynog;

Drotwan [= droedwen] litiog;

Tair Bryncethin;

Tair gyffretin;

Tair casag du

Draw yn yr ithin [= eithin],

Dewch i gyd i lys y brenin.

'Mr. Evans told me that Dyffryn Safrwch was considered to be a

corruption of Dyffryn Safn yr Hwch, "Valley of the Sow's Mouth";

so that the explanation was not due to a minister with whom I

foregathered on my tramp near the lake the other day, and from whom

I heard it first.'

The similarity between Mr. Evans' version of this legend and that of

Llyn y Fan Fach, tends to add emphasis to certain points which I had

been inclined to treat as merely accidental. In the Fan Fach legend

the young man's mother is a widow, and here he is represented living

with his mother. Here also something depends on the young man's bread,

but it is abruptly introduced, suggesting that a part of the story

has been forgotten. Both stories, however, give one the impression

that the bread of the fairies was regarded as always imperfectly

baked. In both stories the young man's mother comes to his help with

her advice. Mr. Evans' version ascribes supernatural knowledge to the

fairy, though his version fails to support it; and her moralizings

read considerably later than those which the Fan legend ascribes

to the fairy wife. Some of these points may be brought under the

reader's notice later, when he has been familiarized with more facts

illustrative of the belief in fairies.

III.

On returning from South Wales to Carnarvonshire in the summer of

1881, I tried to discover similar legends connected with the lakes

of North Wales, beginning with Geirionyd, the waters of which form a

stream emptying itself into the Conwy, near Trefriw, a little below

Llanrwst. I only succeeded, however, in finding an old man of the

name of Pierce Williams, about seventy years of age, who was very

anxious to talk about 'Bony's' wars, but not about lake ladies. I was

obliged, in trying to make him understand what I wanted, to use the

word morforwyn, that is to say in English, 'mermaid'; he then told

me, that in his younger days he had heard people say that somebody

had seen such beings in the Trefriw river. But as my questions were

leading ones, his evidence is not worth much; however, I feel pretty

sure that one who knew the neighbourhood of Geirionyd better would

be able to find some fragments of interesting legends still existing

in that wild district.

I was more successful at Llanberis, though what I found, at first,

was not much; but it was genuine, and to the point. This is the

substance of it:--An old woman, called Siân [15] Dafyd, lived at

Helfa Fawr, in the dingle called Cwm Brwynog, along the left side of

which you ascend as you go to the top of Snowdon, from the village

of lower Llanberis, or Coed y Dol, as it is there called. She was a

curious old person, who made nice distinctions between the virtues

of the respective waters of the district: thus, no other would do

for her to cure her of the defaid gwylltion [16], or cancerous warts,

which she fancied that she had in her mouth, than that of the spring

of Tai Bach, near the lake called Llyn Ffynnon y Gwas, though she

seldom found it out, when she was deceived by a servant who cherished

a convenient opinion of his own, that a drop from a nearer spring

would do just as well. Old Siân has been dead over thirty-five years,

but I have it, on the testimony of two highly trustworthy brothers,

who are of her family, and now between sixty and seventy years of

age, that she used to relate to them how a shepherd, once on a time,

saw a fairy maiden (un o'r Tylwyth Teg) on the surface of the tarn

called Llyn Du'r Ardu, and how, from bantering and joking, their

acquaintance ripened into courtship, when the father and mother of

the lake maiden appeared to give the union their sanction, and to

arrange the marriage settlement. This was to the effect that the

husband was never to strike his wife with iron, and that she was to

bring her great wealth with her, consisting of stock of all kinds

for his mountain farm. All duly took place, and they lived happily

together until one day, when trying to catch a pony, the husband threw

a bridle to his wife, and the iron in that struck her. It was then

all over with him, as the wife hurried away with her property into

the lake, so that nothing more was seen or heard of her. Here I may

as well explain that the Llanberis side of the steep, near the top of

Snowdon, is called Clogwyn du'r Ardu, or the Black Cliff of the Ardu,

at the bottom of which lies the tarn alluded to as the Black Lake of

the Ardu, and near it stands a huge boulder, called Maen du'r Ardu,

all of which names are curious, as involving the word du, black. Ardu

itself has much the same meaning, and refers to the whole precipitous

side of the summit with its dark shadows, and there is a similar Ardu

near Nanmor on the Merionethshire side of Bedgelert.

One of the brothers, I ought to have said, doubts that the lake here

mentioned was the one in old Siân's tale; but he has forgotten which

it was of the many in the neighbourhood. Both, however, remembered

another short story about fairies, which they had heard another old

woman relate, namely, Mari Domos Siôn, who died some thirty years ago:

it was merely to the effect that a shepherd had once lost his way in

the mist on the mountain on the land of Caeau Gwynion, towards Cwellyn

[17] Lake, and got into a ring where the Tylwyth Teg were dancing:

it was only after a very hard struggle that he was able, at length,

to get away from them.

To this I may add the testimony of a lady, for whose veracity I

can vouch, to the effect that, when she was a child in Cwm Brwynog,

from thirty to forty years ago, she and her brothers and sisters used

to be frequently warned by their mother not to go far away from the

house when there happened to be thick mist on the ground, lest they

should come across the Tylwyth Teg dancing, and be carried away to

their abode beneath the lake. They were always, she says, supposed

to live in the lakes; and the one here alluded to was Llyn Dwythwch,

which is one of those famous for its torgochiaid or chars. The mother

is still living; but she seems to have long since, like others,

lost her belief in the fairies.

After writing the above, I heard that a brother to the foregoing

brothers, namely, Mr. Thomas Davies, of Mur Mawr, Llanberis, remembered

a similar tale. Mr. Davies is now sixty-four, and the persons from

whom he heard the tale were the same Siân Dafyd of Helfa Fawr, and

Mari Domos Siôn of Tyn [18] Gadlas, Llanberis: the two women were

about seventy years of age when he as a child heard it from them. At

my request, a friend of mine, Mr. Hugh D. Jones, of Tyn Gadlas, also

a member of this family, which is one of the oldest perhaps in the

place, has taken down from Mr. Davies' mouth all he could remember,

word for word, as follows:--

Yn perthyn i ffarm Bron y Fedw yr oed dyn ifanc wedi cael ei fagu,

nis gwydent faint cyn eu hamser hwy. Arferai pan yn hogyn fynd i'r

mynyd yn Cwm Drywenyd a Mynyd y Fedw ar ochr orllewinol y Wydfa i

fugeilio, a bydai yn taro ar hogan yn y mynyd; ac wrth fynychu gweld

eu gilyd aethant yn ffrindiau mawr. Arferent gyfarfod eu gilyd mewn

lle neillduol yn Cwm Drywenyd, lle'r oed yr hogan a'r teulu yn byw,

lle y bydai pob danteithion, chwareuydiaethau a chanu dihafal; ond

ni fydai'r hogyn yn gwneyd i fyny a neb ohonynt ond yr hogan.

Diwed y ffrindiaeth fu carwriaeth, a phan soniod yr hogyn am idi

briodi, ni wnai ond ar un amod, sef y bywiai hi hefo fo hyd nes y

tarawai ef hi a haiarn.

Priodwyd hwy, a buont byw gyda'u gilyd am nifer o flynydoed, a bu

idynt blant; ac ar dyd marchnad yn Gaernarfon yr oed y gwr a'r wraig

yn medwl mynd i'r farchnad ar gefn merlod, fel pob ffarmwr yr amser

hwnnw. Awd i'r mynyd i dal merlyn bob un.

Ar waelod Mynyd y Fedw mae llyn o ryw dri-ugain neu gan llath o hyd ac

ugain neu deg llath ar hugain o led, ac y mae ar un ochr ido le têg,

fford y bydai'r ceffylau yn rhedeg.

Daliod y gwr ferlyn a rhoes ef i'r wraig i'w dal heb ffrwyn, tra bydai

ef yn dal merlyn arall. Ar ol rhoi ffrwyn yn mhen ei ferlyn ei hun,

taflod un arall i'r wraig i roi yn mhen ei merlyn hithau, ac wrth ei

thaflu tarawod bit y ffrwyn hi yn ei llaw. Gollyngod y wraig y merlyn,

ac aeth ar ei phen i'r llyn, a dyna diwed y briodas.

'To the farm of Bron y Fedw there belonged a son, who grew up to

be a young man, the women knew not how long before their time. He

was in the habit of going up the mountain to Cwm Drywenyd [19] and

Mynyd y Fedw, on the west side of Snowdon, to do the shepherding,

and there he was wont to come across a lass on the mountain, so that

as the result of frequently meeting one another, he and she became

great friends. They usually met at a particular spot in Cwm Drywenyd,

where the girl and her family lived, and where there were all kinds

of nice things to eat, of amusements, and of incomparable music; but

he did not make up to anybody there except the girl. The friendship

ended in courtship; but when the boy mentioned that she should be

married to him, she would only do so on one condition, namely, that

she would live with him until he should strike her with iron. They

were wedded, and they lived together for a number of years, and had

children. Once on a time it happened to be market day at Carnarvon,

whither the husband and wife thought of riding on ponies, like all

the farmers of that time. So they went to the mountain to catch a

pony each. At the bottom of Mynyd y Fedw there is a pool some sixty

or one hundred yards long by twenty or thirty broad, and on one side

of it there is a level space along which the horses used to run. The

husband caught a pony, and gave it to the wife to hold fast without

a bridle, while he should catch another. When he had bridled his own

pony, he threw another bridle to his wife for her to secure hers;

but as he threw it, the bit of the bridle struck her on one of her

hands. The wife let go the pony, and went headlong into the pool,

and that was the end of their wedded life.'

The following is a later tale, which Mr. Thomas Davies heard from

his mother, who died in 1832: she would be ninety years of age had

she been still living:--

Pan oed hi'n hogan yn yr Hafod, Llanberis, yr oed hogan at ei hoed hi'n

cael ei magu yn Cwmglas, Llanberis, ac arferai dweyd, pan yn hogan a

thra y bu byw, y bydai yn cael arian gan y Tylwyth Teg yn Cwm Cwmglas.

Yr oed yn dweyd y bydai ar foreuau niwliog, tywyll, yn mynd i le

penodol yn Cwm Cwmglas gyda dsygiad o lefrith o'r fuches a thywel

glan, ac yn ei rodi ar garreg; ac yn mynd yno drachefn, ac yn cael

y llestr yn wag, gyda darn deuswllt neu hanner coron ac weithiau fwy

wrth ei ochr.

'When she was a girl, living at Yr Hafod, Llanberis, there was a

girl of her age being brought up at Cwmglas in the same parish. The

latter was in the habit of saying, when she was a girl and so long

as she lived, that she used to have money from the Tylwyth Teg, in

the Cwmglas Hollow. Her account was, that on dark, misty mornings she

used to go to a particular spot in that Hollow with a jugful of sweet

milk from the milking place, and a clean towel, and then place them

on a stone. She would return, and find the jug empty, with a piece

of money placed by its side: that is, two shillings or half a crown,

or at times even more.'

A daughter of that woman lives now at a farm, Mr. Davies observes,

called Plas Pennant, in the parish of Llanfihangel yn Mhennant, in

Carnarvonshire; and he adds, that it was a tale of a kind that was

common enough when he was a boy; but many laughed at it, though the old

people believed it to be a fact. To this I may as well append another

tale, which was brought to the memory of an old man who happened to be

present when Mr. Jones and Mr. Davies were busy with the foregoing. His

name is John Roberts, and his age is seventy-five: his present home

is at Capel Sïon, in the neighbouring parish of Llandeiniolen:--

Yr oed ef pan yn hogyn yn gweini yn Towyn Trewern, yn agos i Gaergybi,

gyda hen wr o'r enw Owen Owens, oed yr adeg honno at ei oed ef yn

bresennol.

Yr oedynt unwaith mewn hen adeilad ar y ffarm; a dywedod yr hen

wr ei fod ef wedi cael llawer o arian yn y lle hwnnw pan yn hogyn,

a buasai wedi cael ychwaneg oni bai ei dad.

Yr oed wedi cudio yr arian yn y ty, ond daeth ei fam o hyd idynt,

a dywedod yr hanes wrth ei dad. Ofnai ei fod yn fachgen drwg, mai

eu lladrata yr oed. Dywedai ei dad y gwnai ido dweyd yn mha le yr

oed yn eu cael, neu y tynnai ei groen tros ei ben; ac aeth allan a

thorod wialen bwrpasol at orchwyl o'r fath.

Yr oed y bachgen yn gwrando ar yr ymdidan rhwng ei dad a'i fam, ac

yr oed yn benderfynol o gadw'r peth yn dirgelwch fel yr oed wedi ei

rybudio gan y Tylwyth Teg.

Aeth i'r ty, a dechreuod y tad ei holi, ac yntau yn gwrthod ateb;

ymbiliai a'i dad, a dywedai eu bod yn berffaith onest ido ef, ac

y cai ef ychwaneg os cadwai'r peth yn dirgelwch; ond os dywedai,

nad oed dim ychwaneg i'w gael. Mod bynnag ni wrandawai y tad ar ei

esgusion na'i resymau, a'r wialen a orfu; dywedod y bachgen mai gan

y Tylwyth Teg yr oed yn eu cael, a hynny ar yr amod nad oed i dweyd

wrth neb. Mawr oed edifeirwch yr hen bobl am lad yr wyd oed yn dodwy.

Aeth y bachgen i'r hen adeilad lawer gwaith ar ol hyn, ond ni chafod

byth ychwaneg o arian yno.

'When a lad, he was a servant at Towyn Trewern, near Holyhead, to

an old man about his own age at present. They were one day in an

old building on the farm, and the old man told him that he had had

much money in that place when he was a lad, and that he would have

had more had it not been for his father. He had hidden the money at

home, where his mother found it and told his father of the affair:

she feared he was a bad boy, and that it was by theft he got it. His

father said that he would make him say where he got it, or else that

he would strip him of the skin of his back, at the same time that he

went out and cut a rod fit for effecting a purpose of the kind. The

boy heard all this talk between his father and his mother, and felt

determined to keep the matter a secret, as he had been warned by the

Tylwyth Teg. He went into the house, and his father began to question

him, while he refused to answer. He supplicatingly protested that

the money was honestly got, and that he should get more if he kept

it a secret, but that, if he did not, there would be no more to be

got. However, the father would give no ear to his excuses or his

reasons, and the rod prevailed; so that the boy said that it was from

the Tylwyth Teg he used to get it, and that on condition of his not

telling anybody. Greatly did the old folks regret having killed the

goose that laid the eggs. The boy went many a time afterwards to the

old building, but he never found any more money there.'

IV.

Through the Rev. Daniel Lewis, incumbent of Bettws Garmon, I was

directed to Mr. Samuel Rhys Williams, of the Post Office of that place,

who has kindly given me the result of his inquiries when writing on

the subject of the antiquities of the neighbourhood for a competition

at a literary meeting held there a few years ago. He tells me that he

got the following short tale from a native of Drws y Coed, whose name

is Margaret Williams. She has been living at Bettws Garmon for many

years, and is now over eighty. He does not know whether the story is in

print or not, but he is certain that Margaret Williams never saw it,

even if it be. He further thinks he has heard it from another person,

to wit a man over seventy-seven years of age, who has always lived

at Drws y Coed, in the parish of Bedgelert:--

Y mae hanes am fab i amaethwr a breswyliai yn yr Ystrad [20], Betws

Garmon [21], pan yn dychwelyd adref o daith yn hwyr un noswaith,

darfod ido weled cwmni o'r Tylwyth Teg ynghanol eu hafiaeth a'u

glodest. Syfrdanwyd y llanc yn y fan gan degwch anghymarol un o'r

rhianod hyn, fel y beidiod neidio i ganol y cylch, a chymeryd ei eilun

gydag ef. Wedi idi fod yn trigo gydag ef yn ei gartref am ysbaid,

cafod gandi adaw bod yn wraig ido ar amodau neillduol. Un o'r amodau

hyn ydoed, na bydai ido gyffwrd yndi ag un math o haiarn. Bu yn wraig

ido, a ganwyd idynt dau o blant. Un diwrnod yr oed y gwr yn y maes yn

ceisio dal y ceffyl; wrth ei weled yn ffaelu, aeth y wraig ato i'w

gynorthwyo, a phan oed y march yn carlamu heibio gollyngod yntau y

ffrwyn o'i law, er mwyn ceisio ei atal heibio; a phwy a darawod ond

ei wraig, yr hon a diflannod yn y fan allan o'i olwg?

'The story goes, that the son of a farmer, who lived at the Ystrad

in Bettws Garmon, when returning home from a journey, late in the

evening, beheld a company of fairies in the middle of their mirth and

jollity. The youth was at once bewildered by the incomparable beauty of

one of these ladies, so that he ventured to leap into the circle and

take his idol away with him. After she had tarried awhile with him at

his home, he prevailed on her, on special conditions, to become his

wife. One of these conditions was that he should not touch her with

iron of any description. She became his wife, and two children were

born to them. One day the husband was in the field trying to catch

the horse; seeing him unsuccessful, the wife went to him to help him,

and, when the horse was galloping past him, he let go the bridle at

him in order to prevent him from passing; but whom should he strike

but his wife, who vanished out of his sight on the spot.'

Just as I was engaged in collecting these stories in 1881, a

correspondent sent me a copy of the Ystrad tale as published by

the late bard and antiquary, the Rev. Owen Wyn Jones, better known

in Wales by his bardic name of Glasynys [22], in the Brython [23]

for 1863, p. 193. I will not attempt to translate Glasynys' poetic

prose with all its compound adjectives, but it comes to this in a

few words. One fine sunny morning, as the young heir of Ystrad was

busied with his sheep on the side of Moel Eilio, he met a very pretty

girl, and when he got home he told the folks there of it. A few

days afterwards he met her again, and this happened several times,

when he mentioned it to his father, who advised him to seize her

when he next met her. The next time he met her he proceeded to do

so, but before he could take her away, a little fat old man came to

them and begged him to give her back to him, to which the youth would

not listen. The little man uttered terrible threats, but the heir of

Ystrad would not yield, so an agreement was made between them, that

the latter was to have the girl to wife until he touched her skin

with iron, and great was the joy both of the son and his parents in

consequence. They lived together for many years; but once on a time,

on the evening of the Bettws Fair, the wife's horse became restive,

and somehow, as the husband was attending to the horse, the stirrup

touched the skin of her bare leg, and that very night she was taken

away from him. She had three or four children, and more than one of

their descendants, as Glasynys maintains, were known to him at the

time he wrote in 1863. Glasynys regards this as the same tale which

is given by Williams of Llandegai, to whom we shall refer later;

and he says that he heard it scores of times when he was a lad.

Lastly, I happened to mention these legends last summer among others to

the Rev. Owen Davies, curate of Llanberis, a man who is well versed

in Welsh literature, and thoroughly in sympathy with everything

Welsh. Mr. Davies told me that he knew a tale of the sort from his

youth, as current in the parishes of Llanllechid and Llandegai,

near Bangor. Not long afterwards he visited his mother at his native

place, in Llanllechid, in order to have his memory of it refreshed;

and he also went to the Waen Fawr, on the other side of Carnarvon,

where he had the same legend told him with the different localities

specified. The following is the Waen Fawr version, of which I give

the Welsh as I have had it from Mr. Davies, and as it was related,

according to him, some forty years ago in the valley of Nant y Bettws,

near Carnarvon:--

Ar brydnawngwaith hyfryd yn Hefin, aeth llanc ieuanc gwrol-dewr ac

anturiaethus, sef etifed a pherchennog yr Ystrad, i lan afon Gwyrfai,

heb fod yn nepell o'i chychwyniad o lyn Cawellyn, ac a ymgudiod yno

mewn dyryslwyn, sef ger y fan y bydai poblach y cotiau cochion--y

Tylwyth Teg--yn arfer dawnsio. Yr ydoed yn noswaith hyfryd loergannog,

heb un cwmwl i gau llygaid y Lloer, ac anian yn distaw dawedog,

odigerth murmuriad lledf y Wyrfai, a swn yr awel ysgafndroed yn

rhodio brigau deiliog y coed. Ni bu yn ei ymgudfa ond dros ychydig

amser, cyn cael difyrru o hono ei olygon a dawns y teulu dedwyd. Wrth

syllu ar gywreinrwyd y dawns, y chwim droadau cyflym, yr ymgyniweiriad

ysgafn-droediog, tarawod ei lygaid ar las lodes ieuanc, dlysaf, hardaf,

lunieidiaf a welod er ei febyd. Yr oed ei chwim droadau a lledneisrwyd

ei hagwedion wedi tanio ei serch tu ag ati i'r fath radau, fel ag yr

oed yn barod i unrhyw anturiaeth er mwyn ei hennill yn gydymaith ido

ei hun. O'i ymgudfa dywyll, yr oed yn gwylio pob ysgogiad er mwyn

ei gyfleustra ei hun. Mewn mynud, yn disymwth digon, rhwng pryder

ac ofn, llamneidiod fel llew gwrol i ganol cylch y Tylwyth Teg, ac

ymafaelod a dwylaw cariad yn y fun luniaid a daniod ei serch, a hynny,

pan oed y Tylwyth dedwyd yn nghanol nwyfiant eu dawns. Cofleidiod hi

yn dyner garedig yn ei fynwes wresog, ac aeth a hi i'w gartref--i'r

Ystrad. Ond diflannod ei chyd-dawnsydion fel anadl Gorphennaf, er

ei chroch dolefau am gael ei rhydhau, a'i hymegnion diflino i dianc

o afael yr hwn a'i hoffod. Mewn anwylder mawr, ymdygod y llanc yn

dyner odiaethol tu ag at y fun deg, ac yr oed yn orawydus i'w chadw

yn ei olwg ac yn ei fediant. Llwydod drwy ei dynerwch tu ag ati i

gael gandi adaw dyfod yn forwyn ido yn yr Ystrad. A morwyn ragorol

oed hi. Godrai deirgwaith y swm arferol o laeth odiar bob buwch, ac

yr oed yr ymenyn heb bwys arno. Ond er ei holl daerni, nis gallai

mewn un mod gael gandi dyweud ei henw wrtho. Gwnaeth lawer cais,

ond yn gwbl ofer. Yn damweiniol ryw dro, wrth yrru

Brithen a'r Benwen i'r borfa,

a hi yn noswaith loergan, efe a aeth i'r man lle yr arferai y Tylwyth

Teg fyned drwy eu campau yng ngoleuni'r Lloer wen. Y tro hwn eto, efe

a ymgudiod mewn dyryslwyn, a chlywod y Tylwyth Teg yn dywedyd y naill

wrth y llall--'Pan oedym ni yn y lle hwn y tro diwedaf, dygwyd ein

chwaer Penelope odiarnom gan un o'r marwolion.' Ar hynny, dychwelod

y llencyn adref, a'i fynwes yn llawn o falchder cariad, o herwyd ido

gael gwybod enw ei hoff forwyn, yr hon a synnod yn aruthr, pan glywod

ei meistr ieuanc yn ei galw wrth ei henw. Ac am ei bod yn odiaethol

dlos, a lluniaid, yn fywiog-weithgar, a medrus ar bob gwaith, a bod

popeth yn llwydo dan ei llaw, cynygiod ei hun idi yn wr--y celai fod yn

feistres yr Ystrad, yn lle bod yn forwyn. Ond ni chydsyniai hi a'i gais

ar un cyfrif; ond bod braid yn bendrist oherwyd ido wybod ei henw. Fod

bynnag, gwedi maith amser, a thrwy ei daerineb diflino, cydsyniod,

ond yn amodol. Adawod dyfod yn wraig ido, ar yr amod canlynol, sef,

'Pa bryd bynnag y tarawai ef hi â haiarn, yr elai ymaith odi wrtho,

ac na dychwelai byth ato mwy.' Sicrhawyd yr amod o'i du yntau gyda

pharodrwyd cariad. Buont yn cyd-fyw a'u gilyd yn hapus a chysurus

lawer o flynydoed, a ganwyd idynt fab a merch, y rhai oedynt dlysaf

a llunieidiaf yn yr holl froyd. Ac yn rhinwed ei medrusrwyd a'i

deheurwyd fel gwraig gall, rinwedol, aethant yn gyfoethog iawn--yn

gyfoethocach na neb yn yr holl wlad. Heblaw ei etifediaeth ei hun--Yr

Ystrad, yr oed yn ffarmio holl ogled-barth Nant y Betws, ac odi yno

i ben yr Wydfa, ynghyd a holl Gwm Brwynog, yn mhlwyf Llanberis. Ond,

ryw diwrnod, yn anffortunus digon aeth y dau i'r dol i dal y ceffyl,

a chan fod y ceffylyn braid yn wyllt ac an-nof, yn rhedeg odi arnynt,

taflod y gwr y ffrwyn mewn gwylltineb yn ei erbyn, er ei atal, ac ar

bwy y disgynnod y ffrwyn, ond ar Penelope, y wraig! Diflannod Penelope

yn y fan, ac ni welod byth mo honi. Ond ryw noswaith, a'r gwynt yn

chwythu yn oer o'r gogled, daeth Penelope at ffenestr ei ystafell wely,

a dywedod wrtho am gymmeryd gofal o'r plant yn y geiriau hyn:

Rhag bod anwyd ar fy mab,

Yn rhod rhowch arno gób ei dad;

Rhag bod anwyd ar liw'r can,

Rhodwch arni bais ei mham.

Ac yna ciliod, ac ni chlywyd na siw na miw byth yn ei chylch.

For the sake of an occasional reader who does not know Welsh, I add

a summary of it in English.

One fine evening in the month of June a brave, adventurous youth, the

heir of Ystrad, went to the banks of the Gwyrfai, not far from where it

leaves Cwellyn Lake, and hid himself in the bushes near the spot where

the folks of the Red Coats--the fairies--were wont to dance. The moon

shone forth brightly without a cloud to intercept her light; all was

quiet save where the Gwyrfai gently murmured on her bed, and it was

not long before the young man had the satisfaction of seeing the fair

family dancing in full swing. As he gazed on the subtle course of the

dance, his eyes rested on a damsel, the most shapely and beautiful he

had seen from his boyhood. Her agile movements and the charm of her

looks inflamed him with love for her, to such a degree that he felt

ready for any encounter in order to secure her to be his own. From his

hiding place he watched every move for his opportunity; at last, with

feelings of anxiety and dread, he leaped suddenly into the middle of

the circle of the fairies. There, while their enjoyment of the dance

was at its height, he seized her in his arms and carried her away to

his home at Ystrad. But, as she screamed for help to free her from

the grasp of him who had fallen in love with her, the dancing party

disappeared like one's breath in July. He treated her with the utmost

kindness, and was ever anxious to keep her within his sight and in

his possession. By dint of tenderness he succeeded so far as to get

her to consent to be his servant at Ystrad. And such a servant she

turned out to be! Why, she was wont to milk the cows thrice a day,

and to have the usual quantity of milk each time, so that the butter

was so plentiful that nobody thought of weighing it. As to her name,

in spite of all his endeavours to ascertain it, she would never tell

it him. Accidentally, however, one moonlight night, when driving two

of his cows to the spot where they should graze, he came to the place

where the fairies were wont to enjoy their games in the light of the

moon. This time also he hid himself in a thicket, when he overheard one

fairy saying to another, 'When we were last here our sister Penelope

was stolen from us by a man.' As soon as he heard this off he went

home, full of joy because he had discovered the name of the maid that

was so dear to him. She, on the other hand, was greatly astonished to

hear him call her by her own name. As she was so charmingly pretty,

so industrious, so skilled in every work, and so attended by luck in

everything she put her hand to, he offered to make her his wife instead

of being his servant. At first she would in no wise consent, but she

rather gave way to grief at his having found her name out. However,

his importunity at length brought her to consent, but on the condition

that he should not strike her with iron; if that should happen, she

would quit him never to return. The agreement was made on his side

with the readiness of love, and after this they lived in happiness

and comfort together for many years, and there were born to them a

son and a daughter, who were the handsomest children in the whole

country. Owing, also, to the skill and good qualities of the woman,

as a shrewd and virtuous wife, they became very rich--richer, indeed,

than anybody else in the country around; for, besides the husband's own

inheritance of Ystrad, he held all the northern part of Nant y Bettws,

and all from there to the top of Snowdon, together with Cwm Brwynog

in the parish of Llanberis. But one day, as bad luck would have it,

they went out together to catch a horse in the field, and, as the

animal was somewhat wild and untamed, they had no easy work before

them. In his rashness the man threw a bridle at him as he was rushing

past him, but alas! on whom should the bridle fall but on the wife! No

sooner had this happened than she disappeared, and nothing more was

ever seen of her. But one cold night, when there was a chilling wind

blowing from the north, she came near the window of his bedroom,

and told him in these words to take care of the children:--

Lest my son should find it cold,

Place on him his father's coat:

Lest the fair one find it cold,

Place on her my petticoat.

Then she withdrew, and nothing more was heard of her.

In reply to some queries of mine, Mr. O. Davies tells me that Penelope

was pronounced in three syllables, Pénelôp--so he heard it from his

grandfather: he goes on to say that the offspring of the Lake Lady

is supposed to be represented by a family called Pellings, which was

once a highly respected name in those parts, and that there was a

Lady Bulkeley who was of this descent, not to mention that several

people of a lower rank, both in Anglesey and Arfon, claimed to be of

the same origin. I am not very clear as to how the name got into this

tale, nor have I been able to learn anything about the Pellings; but,

as the word appears to have been regarded as a corrupt derivative

from Penelope, that is, perhaps, all the connexion, so that it may

be that it has really nothing whatever to do with the legend. This

is a point, however, which the antiquaries of North Wales ought to

be able to clear up satisfactorily.

In reply to queries of mine, Mr. O. Davies gave me the following

particulars:--'I am now (June, 1881) over fifty-two years of age, and I

can assure you that I have heard the legend forty years ago. I do not

remember my father, as he died when I was young, but my grandfather

was remarkable for his delight in tales and legends, and it was his

favourite pastime during the winter nights, after getting his short

black pipe ready, to relate stories about struggles with robbers, about

bogies, and above all about the Tylwyth Teg; for they were his chief

delight. He has been dead twenty-six years, and he had almost reached

eighty years of age. His father before him, who was born about the

year 1740, was also famous for his stories, and my grandfather often

mentioned him as his authority in the course of his narration of the

tales. Both he and the rest of the family used to look at Corwrion,

to be mentioned presently, as a sacred spot. When I was a lad and

happened to be reluctant to leave off playing at dusk, my mother or

grandfather had only to say that 'the Pellings were coming,' in order

to induce me to come into the house at once: indeed, this announcement

had the same effect on persons of a much riper age than mine then was.'

Further, Mr. Davies kindly called my attention to a volume, entitled

Observations on the Snowdon Mountains, by Mr. William Williams,

of Llandegai, published in London in 1802. In that work this tale

is given somewhat less fully than by Mr. Davies' informant, but the

author makes the following remarks with regard to it, pp. 37, 40:--'A

race of people inhabiting the districts about the foot of Snowdon,

were formerly distinguished and known by the nickname of Pellings,

which is not yet extinct. There are several persons and even families

who are reputed to be descended from these people.... These children

[Penelope's] and their descendants, they say, were called Pellings,

a word corrupted from their mother's name, Penelope. The late Thomas

Rowlands, Esq., of Caerau, in Anglesey, the father of the late Lady

Bulkeley, was a descendant of this lady, if it be true that the name

Pellings came from her; and there are still living several opulent and

respectable people who are known to have sprung from the Pellings. The

best blood in my own veins is this fairy's.'

Lastly, it will be noticed that these last versions do not distinctly

suggest that the Lake Lady ran into the lake, that is into Cwellyn,

but rather that she disappeared in the same way as the dancing party

by simply becoming invisible like one's breath in July. The fairies

are called in Welsh, Y Tylwyth Teg, or the Fair Family; but the

people of Arfon have been so familiarized with the particular one I

have called the Lake Lady, that, according to one of my informants,

they have invented the term Y Dylwythes Deg, or even Y Dylwythen Deg,

to denote her; but it is unknown to the others, so that the extent

of its use is not very considerable.

This is, perhaps, the place to give another tale, according to which

the man goes to the Lake Maiden's country, instead of her settling

with him at his home. I owe it to the kindness of Mr. William Jones,

of Regent Place, Llangollen, a native of Bedgelert. He heard it from

an old man before he left Bedgelert, but when he sent a friend to

inquire some time afterwards, the old man was gone. According to

Mr. Jones, the details of the tale are, for that reason, imperfect,

as some of the incidents have faded from his memory; but such as he

can still remember the tale, it is here given in his own words:--

Ryw noson lawn lloer ac un o feibion Llwyn On yn Nant y Betws yn

myned i garu i Glogwyn y Gwin, efe a welod y Tylwyth yn ymlodestu a

dawnsio ei hochr hi ar weirglod wrth lan Llyn Cawellyn. Efe a nesaod

tuag atynt; ac o dipyn i beth fe'i llithiwyd gan bereiddra swynol eu

canu a hoender a bywiogrwyd eu chwareu, nes myned o hono tu fewn i'r

cylch; ac yn fuan fe daeth rhyw hud drosto, fel y collod adnabydiaeth

o bobman; a chafod ei hun mewn gwlad hardaf a welod erioed, lle'r oed

pawb yn treulio eu hamser mewn afiaeth a gorfoled. Yr oed wedi bod yno

am saith mlyned, ac eto nid oed dim ond megis breudwyd nos; ond daeth

adgof i'w fedwl am ei neges, a hiraeth yndo am weled ei anwylyd. Felly

efe a ofynod ganiatad i dychwelyd adref, yr hyn a rodwyd ynghyd a llu o

gymdeithion i'w arwain tua'i wlad; ac yn disymwth cafod ei hun fel yn

deffro o freudwyd ar y dol, lle gwelod y Tylwyth Teg yn chwareu. Trod

ei wyneb tuag adref; ond wedi myned yno yr oed popeth wedi newid,

ei rieni wedi meirw, ei frodyr yn ffaelu ei adnabod, a'i gariad wedi

priodi un arall.--Ar ol y fath gyfnewidiadau efe a dorod ei galon,

ac a fu farw mewn llai nag wythnos ar ol ei dychweliad.

'One bright moonlight night, as one of the sons of the farmer who lived

at Llwyn On in Nant y Bettws was going to pay his addresses to a girl

at Clogwyn y Gwin, he beheld the Tylwyth Teg enjoying themselves in

full swing on a meadow close to Cwellyn Lake. He approached them, and

little by little he was led on by the enchanting sweetness of their

music and the liveliness of their playing until he had got within

their circle. Soon some kind of spell passed over him, so that he lost

his knowledge of the place, and found himself in a country, the most

beautiful he had ever seen, where everybody spent his time in mirth

and rejoicing. He had been there seven years, and yet it seemed to

him but a night's dream; but a faint recollection came to his mind of

the business on which he had left home, and he felt a longing to see

his beloved one. So he went and asked for permission to return home,

which was granted him, together with a host of attendants to lead

him to his country; and, suddenly, he found himself, as if waking

from a dream, on the bank where he had seen the fair family amusing

themselves. He turned towards home, but there he found everything

changed: his parents were dead, his brothers could not recognize him,

and his sweetheart was married to another man. In consequence of such

changes he died broken-hearted in less than a week after coming back.'

V.

The Rev. O. Davies regarded the Llanllechid legend as so very like

the one he got about Cwellyn Lake and the Waen Fawr, that he has not

written the former out at length, but merely pointed out the following

differences: (1) Instead of Cwellyn, the lake in the former is the

pool of Corwrion, in the parish of Llandegai, near Bangor. (2) What

the Lake Lady was struck with was not a bridle, but an iron fetter:

the word used is llyfether, which probably means a long fetter

connecting a fore-foot and a hind-foot of a horse together. In Arfon,

the word is applied also to a cord tying the two fore-feet together,

but in Cardiganshire this would be called a hual, the other word,

there pronounced llowethir, being confined to the long fetter. In

books, the word is written llywethair, llefethair and llyffethair

or llyffethar, which is possibly the pronunciation in parts of North

Wales, especially Arfon. This is an interesting word, as it is no other

than the English term 'long fetter,' borrowed into Welsh; as, in fact,

it was also into Irish early enough to call for an article on it in

Cormac's Irish Glossary, where langfiter is described as an English

word for a fetter between the fore and the hind legs: in Anglo-Manx it

is become lanketer. (3) The field in which they were trying to catch

the horse is, in the Llanllechid version, specified as that called

Maes Madog, at the foot of the Llefn. (4) When the fairy wife ran

away, it was headlong into the pool of Corwrion, calling after her

all her milch cows, and they followed her with the utmost readiness.

Before going on to mention bits of information I have received from

others about the Llanllechid legend, I think it best here to finish

with the items given me by Mr. O. Davies, whom I cannot too cordially

thank for his readiness to answer my questions. Among other things,

he expresses himself to the following effect:-- 'It is to this day

a tradition--and I have heard it a hundred times--that the dairy of

Corwrion excelled all other dairies in those parts, that the milk

was better and more plentiful, and that the cheese and butter were

better there than in all the country round, the reason assigned being

that the cattle on the farm of Corwrion had mixed with the breed

belonging to the fairy, who had run away after being struck with the

iron fetter. However that may be, I remember perfectly well the high

terms of praise in which the cows of Corwrion used to be spoken of

as being remarkable for their milk and the profit they yielded; and,

when I was a boy, I used to hear people talk of Tarw Penwyn Corwrion,

or "the White-headed Bull of Corwrion," as derived from the breed of

cattle which had formed the fairy maiden's dowry.'

My next informant is Mr. Hugh Derfel Hughes, of Pendinas, Llandegai

[24], who has been kind enough to give me the version, of which I here

give the substance in English, premising that Mr. Hughes says that

he has lived about thirty-four years within a mile of the pool and

farm house called Corwrion, and that he has refreshed his memory of

the legend by questioning separately no less than three old people,

who had been bred and born at or near that spot. He is a native of

Merioneth, but has lived at Llandegai for the last thirty-seven years,

his age now being sixty-six. I may add that Mr. Hughes is a local

antiquary of great industry and zeal; and that he published a book

on the antiquities of the district, under the title of Hynafiaethau

Llandegai a Llanllechid, that is 'the Antiquities of Llandegai and

Llanllechid' (Bethesda, 1866); but it is out of print, and I have

had some trouble to procure a copy:--

'In old times, when the fairies showed themselves much oftener to

men than they do now, they made their home in the bottomless pool

of Corwrion, in Upper Arllechwed, in that wild portion of Gwyned

called Arfon. On fine mornings in the month of June these diminutive

and nimble folk might be seen in a regular line vigorously engaged

in mowing hay, with their cattle in herds busily grazing in the

fields near Corwrion. This was a sight which often met the eyes

of the people on the sides of the hills around, even on Sundays;

but when they hurried down to them they found the fields empty, with

the sham workmen and their cows gone, all gone. At other times they

might be heard hammering away like miners, shovelling rubbish aside,

or emptying their carts of stones. At times they took to singing

all the night long, greatly to the delight of the people about,

who dearly loved to hear them; and, besides singing so charmingly,

they sometimes formed into companies for dancing, and their movements

were marvellously graceful and attractive. But it was not safe to

go too near the lake late at night, for once a brave girl, who was

troubled with toothache, got up at midnight and went to the brink

of the water in search of the root of a plant that grows there full

of the power to kill all pain in the teeth. But, as she was plucking

up a bit of it, there burst on her ear, from the depths of the lake,

such a shriek as drove her back into the house breathless with fear

and trembling; but whether this was not the doing of a stray fairy,

who had been frightened out of her wits at being suddenly overtaken by

a damsel in her nightdress, or the ordinary fairy way of curing the

toothache, tradition does not tell. For sometimes, at any rate, the

fairies busied themselves in doing good to the men and women who were

their neighbours, as when they tried to teach them to keep all promises

and covenants to which they pledged themselves. A certain man and his

wife, to whom they wished to teach this good habit, have never been

forgotten. The husband had been behaving as he ought, until one day,

as he held the plough, with the wife guiding his team, he broke his

covenant towards her by treating her harshly and unkindly. No sooner

had he done so, than he was snatched through the air and plunged in the

lake. When the wife went to the brink of the water to ask for him back,

the reply she had was, that he was there, and that there he should be.

'The fairies when engaged in dancing allowed themselves to be gazed

at, a sight which was wont greatly to attract the young men of the

neighbourhood, and once on a time the son and heir of the owner of

Corwrion fell deeply in love with one of the graceful maidens who

danced in the fairy ring, for she was wondrously beautiful and pretty

beyond compare. His passion for her ere long resulted in courtship,

and soon in their being married, which took place on the express

understanding, that firstly the husband was not to know her name,

though he might give her any name he chose; and, secondly, that he

might now and then beat her with a rod, if she chanced to misbehave

towards him; but he was not to strike her with iron on pain of her

leaving him at once. This covenant was kept for some years, so that

they lived happily together and had four children, of whom the two

youngest were a boy and a girl. But one day as they went to one of the

fields of Bryn Twrw in the direction of Pennard Gron, to catch a pony,

the fairy wife, being so much nimbler than her husband, ran before

him and had her hand in the pony's mane in no time. She called out

to her husband to throw her a halter, but instead of that he threw

towards her a bridle with an iron bit, which, as bad luck would have

it, struck her. The wife at once flew through the air, and plunged

headlong into Corwrion Pool. The husband returned sighing and weeping

towards Bryn Twrw, "Noise Hill," and when he had reached it, the twrw,

"noise," there was greater than had ever been heard before, namely that

of weeping after "Belenë"; and it was then, after he had struck her

with iron, that he first learnt what his wife's name was. Belenë never

came back to her husband, but the feelings of a mother once brought her

to the window of his bedroom, where she gave him the following order:--

Os byd anwyd ar fy mab, If my son should feel it cold,

Rho'wch am dano gob ei dad; Let him wear his father's coat;

Os anwydog a fyd can [25], If the fair one feel the cold,

Rho'wch am dani bais ei mam. Let her wear my petticoat.

'As years and years rolled on a grandson of Belenë's fell in love with

a beautiful damsel who lived at a neighbouring farm house called Tai

Teulwriaid, and against the will of his father and mother they married,

but they had nothing to stock their land with. So one morning what was

their astonishment, when they got up, to see grazing quietly in the

field six black cows and a white-headed bull, which had come up out

of the lake as stock for them from old grannie Belenë? They served

them well with milk and butter for many a long year, but on the day

the last of the family died, the six black cows and the white-headed

bull disappeared into the lake, never more to be seen.'

Mr. Hughes referred to no less than three other versions, as

follows:--(1) According to one account, the husband was ploughing,

with the wife leading the team, when by chance he came across her

and the accident happened. The wife then flew away like a wood-hen

(iar goed) into the lake. (2) Another says that they were in a stable

trying to bridle one of the horses, when the misfortune took place

through inadvertence. (3) A third specifies the field in front of the

house at Corwrion as the place where the final accident took place,

when they were busied with the cows and horses.

To these I would add the following traditions, which Mr. Hughes further

gives. Sometimes the inhabitants, who seem to have been on the whole

on good terms with the fairies, used to heat water and leave it in a

vessel on the hearth overnight for the fairies to wash their children

in it. This they considered such a kindness that they always left

behind them on the hearth a handful of their money. Some pieces are

said to have been sometimes found in the fields near Corwrion, and that

they consisted of coins which were smaller than our halfpennies, but

bigger than farthings, and had a harp on one side. But the tradition

is not very definite on these points.

Here also I may as well refer to a similar tale which I got last year

at Llanberis from a man who is a native of the Llanllechid side of the

mountain, though he now lives at Llanberis. He is about fifty-five

years of age, and remembers hearing in his youth a tale connected

with a house called Hafoty'r Famaeth, in a very lonely situation on

Llanllechid Mountain, and now represented only by some old ruined

walls. It was to the effect that one night, when the man who lived

there was away from home, his wife, who had a youngish baby, washed

him on the hearth, left the water there, and went to bed with her

little one: she woke up in the night to find that the Tylwyth Teg

were in possession of the hearth, and busily engaged in washing their

children. That is all I got of this tale of a well-known type.

To return to Mr. Hughes' communications, I would select from them

some remarks on the topography of the teeming home of the fairies. He

estimated the lake or pool of Corwrion to be about 120 yards long,

and adds that it is nearly round; but he thinks it was formerly

considerably larger, as a cutting was made some eighty or a hundred

years ago to lead water from it to Penrhyn Castle; but even then

its size would not approach that ascribed to it by popular belief,

according to which it was no less than three miles long. In fact

it was believed that there was once a town of Corwrion which was

swallowed up by the lake, a sort of idea which one meets with in

many parts of Wales, and some of the natives are said to be able to

discern the houses under the water. This must have been near the end

which is not bottomless, the latter being indicated by a spot which

is said never to freeze even in hard winters. Old men remember it

the resort of herons, cormorants, and the water-hen (hobi wen). Near

the banks there grew, besides the water-lily, various kinds of rushes

and sedges, which were formerly much used for making mats and other

useful articles. It was also once famous for eels of a large size,

but it is not supposed to have contained fish until Lord Penrhyn placed

some there in recent years. It teemed, however, with leeches of three

different kinds so recently that an old man still living describes to

Mr. Hughes his simple way of catching them when he was a boy, namely,

by walking bare-legged in the water: in a few minutes he landed with

nine or ten leeches sticking to his legs, some of which fetched a

shilling each from the medical men of those days. Corwrion is now a

farm house occupied by Mr. William Griffiths, a grandson of the late

bard Gutyn Peris. When Mr. Hughes called to make inquiries about the

legend, he found there the foundations of several old buildings, and

several pieces of old querns about the place. He thinks that there

belonged to Corwrion in former times, a mill and a fuller's house,

which he seems to infer from the names of two neighbouring houses

called 'Y Felin Hen,' the Old Mill, and 'Pandy Tre Garth,' the Fulling

Mill of Tregarth, respectively. He also alludes to a gefail or smithy

there, in which one Rhys ab Robert used to work, not to mention that

a great quantity of ashes, such as come from a smithy, are found at

the end of the lake furthest from the farm house. The spot on which

Corwrion stands is part of the ground between the Ogwen and another

stream which bears the name of 'Afon Cegin Arthur,' or the River of

Arthur's Kitchen, and most of the houses and fields about have names

which have suggested various notions to the people there: such are the

farms called 'Coed Howel,' whence the belief in the neighbourhood that

Howel Da, King of Wales, lived here. About him Mr. Hughes has a great

deal to say: among other things, that he had boats on Corwrion lake,

and that he was wont to present the citizens of Bangor yearly with 300

fat geese reared on the waters of the same. I am referred by another

man to a lecture delivered in the neighbourhood on these and similar

things by the late bard and antiquary the Rev. Robert Ellis (Cyndelw),

but I have never come across a copy. A field near Corwrion is called

'Cae Stabal,' or the Field of the Stable, which contains the remains

of a row of stables, as it is supposed, and of a number of mangers

where Howel's horses were once fed. In a neighbouring wood, called

'Parc y Gelli' or 'Hopiar y Gelli,' my informant goes on to say,

there are to be seen the foundations of seventeen or eighteen old

hut-circles, and near them some think they see the site of an old

church. About a mile to the south-east of Corwrion is Pendinas,

which Mr. Hughes describes as an old triangular Welsh fortress,

on the bank of the Ogwen; and within two stone's-throws or so of

Corwrion on the south side of it, and a little to the west of Bryn

Twrw mentioned in the legend, is situated Penard Gron, a caer or

fort, which he describes as being, before it was razed in his time,

forty-two yards long by thirty-two wide, and defended by a sort of

rampart of earth and stone several yards wide at the base. It used

to be the resort of the country people for dancing, cock-fighting

[26], and other amusements on Sundays. Near it was a cairn, which,

when it was dug into, was found to cover a kistvaen, a pot, and a

quern: a variety of tales attaching to it are told concerning ghosts,

caves, and hidden treasures. Altogether Mr. Hughes is strongly of

opinion that Corwrion and its immediate surroundings represent a spot

which at one time had great importance; and I see no reason wholly to

doubt the correctness of that conclusion, but it would be interesting

to know whether Penrhyn used, as Mr. Hughes suggests, to be called

Penrhyn Corwrion; there ought, perhaps, to be no great difficulty in

ascertaining this, as some of the Penrhyn estate appears to have been

the subject of litigation in times gone by.

Before leaving Mr. Hughes' notes, I must here give his too brief

account of another thing connected with Corwrion, though, perhaps,

not with the legends here in question. I allude to what he calls the

Lantern Ghost (Ysbryd y Lantar):--'There used to be formerly,' he says,

'and there is still at Corwrion, a good-sized sour apple-tree, which

during the winter half of the year used to be lit up by fire. It

began slowly and grew greater until the whole seemed to be in a

blaze. He was told by an old woman that she formerly knew old people

who declared they had seen it. In the same way the trees in Hopiar y

Gelli appeared, according to them, to be also lit up with fire.' This

reminds me of Mr. Fitzgerald's account of the Irish Bile-Tineadh in

the Revue Celtique, iv. 194.

After communicating to me the notes of which the foregoing are

abstracts, Mr. Hughes kindly got me a version of the legend from

Mr. David Thomas, of Pont y Wern, in the same neighbourhood, but as it

contains nothing which I have not already given from Mr. Hughes' own,

I pass it by. Mr. Thomas, however, has heard that the number of the

houses making up the town of Corwrion some six or seven centuries ago

was about seventy-five; but they were exactly seventy-three according

to my next informant, Mr. David Evan Davies, of Treflys, Bethesda,

better known by his bardic name of Dewi Glan Ffrydlas. Both these

gentlemen have also heard the tradition that there was a church at

Corwrion, where there used to be every Sunday a single service, after

which the people went to a spot not far off to amuse themselves, and

at night to watch the fairies dancing, or to mix with them while they

danced in a ring around a glow-worm. According to Dewi Glan Ffrydlas,

the spot was the Pen y Bonc, already mentioned, which means, among

other things, that they chose a rising ground. This is referred to

in a modern rhyme, which runs thus:--

A'r Tylwyth Teg yn dawnsio'n sionc

O gylch magïen Pen y Bonc.

With the fairies nimbly dancing round

The glow-worm on the Rising Ground.

Dewi Glan Ffrydlas has kindly gone to the trouble of giving me a brief,

but complete, version of the legend as he has heard it. It will be

noticed that the discovering of the fairy's name is an idle incident

in this version: it is brought in too late, and no use is made of it

when introduced. This is the substance of his story in English:--'At

one of the dances at Pen y Bonc, the heir of Corwrion's eyes fell

on one of the damsels of the fair family, and he was filled with

love for her. Courtship and marriage in due time ensued, but he had

to agree to two conditions, namely, that he was neither to know her

name nor to strike her with iron. By-and-by they had children, and

when the husband happened to go, during his wife's confinement, to a

merry-making at Pen y Bonc, the fairies talked together concerning

his wife, and in expressing their feelings of sympathy for her,

they inadvertently betrayed the mystery of her name by mentioning it

within his hearing. Years rolled on, when the husband and wife went out

together one day to catch a colt of theirs that had not been broken

in, their object being to go to Conway Fair. Now, as she was swifter

of foot than her husband, she got hold of the colt by the mane, and

called out to him to throw her a halter, but instead of throwing her

the one she asked for, he threw another with iron in it, which struck

her. Off she went into the lake. A grandson of this fairy many years

afterwards married one of the girls of Corwrion. They had a large

piece of land, but no means of stocking it, so that they felt rather

distressed in their minds. But lo and behold! one day a white-headed

bull came out of the lake, bringing with him six black cows to their

land. There never were the like of those cows for milk, and great

was the prosperity of their owners, as well as the envy it kindled

in their neighbours' breasts. But when they both grew old and died,

the bull and the cows went back into the lake.'

Now I add the other sayings about the Tylwyth Teg, which Dewi Glan

Ffrydlas has kindly collected for me, beginning with a blurred story

about changelings:--

'Once on a time, in the fourteenth century, the wife of a man at

Corwrion had twins, and she complained one day to a witch, who lived

close by, at Tydyn y Barcud, that the children were not getting on,

but that they were always crying day and night. "Are you sure that

they are your children?" asked the witch, adding that it did not

seem to her that they were like hers. "I have my doubts also," said

the mother. "I wonder if somebody has exchanged children with you,"

said the witch. "I do not know," said the mother. "But why do you not

seek to know?" asked the other. "But how am I to go about it?" said the

mother. The witch replied, "Go and do something rather strange before

their eyes and watch what they will say to one another." "Well, I do

not know what I should do," said the mother. "Well," said the other,

"take an egg-shell, and proceed to brew beer in it in a chamber

aside, and come here to tell me what the children will say about

it." She went home and did as the witch had directed her, when the

two children lifted their heads out of the cradle to find what she

was doing--to watch and to listen. Then one observed to the other,

"I remember seeing an oak having an acorn," to which the other replied,

"And I remember seeing a hen having an egg"; and one of the two added,

"But I do not remember before seeing anybody brew beer in the shell

of a hen's egg." The mother then went to the witch and told her what

the twins had said one to the other; and she directed her to go to a

small wooden bridge, not far off, with one of the strange children

under each arm, and there to drop them from the bridge into the

river beneath. The mother went back home again and did as she had

been directed. When she reached home this time, she found to her

astonishment that her own children had been brought back.'

Next comes a story about a midwife who lived at Corwrion. 'One of

the fairies called to ask her to come and attend on his wife. Off

she went with him, and she was astonished to be taken into a splendid

palace. There she continued to go night and morning to dress the baby

for some time, until one day the husband asked her to rub her eyes

with a certain ointment he offered her. She did so, and found herself

sitting on a tuft of rushes, and not in a palace. There was no baby:

all had disappeared. Some time afterwards she happened to go to the

town, and whom should she there see busily buying various wares,

but the fairy on whose wife she had been attending. She addressed

him with the question, "How are you to-day?" Instead of answering

her, he asked, "How do you see me?" "With my eyes," was the prompt

reply. "Which eye?" he asked. "This one," said the woman, pointing to

it; and instantly he disappeared, never more to be seen by her.' This

tale, as will be seen on comparison later, is incomplete, and probably

incorrect.

Here is another from Mr. D. E. Davies:--'One day Guto, the farmer of

Corwrion, complained to his wife that he lacked men to mow his hay,

when she replied, "Why fret about it? look yonder! There you have

a field full of them at it, and stripped to their shirt-sleeves

(yn llewys eu crysau)." When he went to the spot the sham workmen

of the fairy family had disappeared. This same Guto--or somebody

else--happened another time to be ploughing, when he heard some

person he could not see, calling out to him, "I have got the bins

(that is the vice) of my plough broken." "Bring it to me," said the

driver of Guto's team, "that I may mend it." When they finished the

furrow, they found the broken vice, with a barrel of beer placed

near it. One of the men sat down and mended the vice. Then they

made another furrow, and when they returned to the spot they found

there a two-eared dish filled to the brim with bara a chwrw, or

"bread and beer." The word vice, I may observe, is an English term,

which is applied in Carnarvonshire to a certain part of the plough:

it is otherwise called bins, but neither does this seem to be a Welsh

word, nor have I heard either used in South Wales.

At times one of the fairies was in the habit, as I was told by more

than one of my informants, of coming out of Llyn Corwrion with her

spinning-wheel (troell bach) on fine summer days and betaking herself

to spinning. While at that work she might be heard constantly singing

or humming, in a sort of round tune, the words sìli ffrit. So that sìli

ffrit Leisa Bèla may now be heard from the mouths of the children in

that neighbourhood. But I have not been successful in finding out what

Liza Bella's 'silly frit' exactly means, though I am, on the whole,

convinced that the words are other than of Welsh origin. The last of

them, ffrit, is usually applied in Cardiganshire to anything worthless

or insignificant, and the derivative, ffrityn, means one who has no go

or perseverance in him: the feminine is ffriten. In Carnarvonshire my

wife has heard ffrityn and ffritan applied to a small man and a small

woman respectively. Mr. Hughes says that in Merioneth and parts of

Powys sìli ffrit is a term applied to a small woman or a female dwarf

who happens to be proud, vain, and fond of the attentions of the other

sex (benyw fach neu goraches falch a hunanol a fydai hoff o garu);

but he thinks he has heard it made use of with regard to the gipsies,

and possibly also to the Tylwyth Teg. The Rev. O. Davies thinks the

words sìli ffrit Leisa Bèla to be very modern, and that they refer

to a young woman who lived at a place in the neighbourhood, called

Bryn Bèla or Brymbèla, 'Bella's Hill,' the point being that this Bella

was ahead, in her time, of all the girls in those parts in matters of

taste and fashion. This however does not seem to go far enough back,

and it is possible still that in Bèla, that is, in English spelling,

Bella, we have merely a shortening of some such a name as Isabella

or Arabella, which were once much more popular in the Principality

than they are now: in fact, I do not feel sure that Leisa Bèla is

not bodily a corruption of Isabella. As to sìli ffrit, one might at

first have been inclined to render it by small fry, especially in

the sense of the French 'de la friture' as applied to young men and

boys, and to connect it with the Welsh sil and silod, which mean small

fish; but the pronunciation of silli or sìli being nearly that of the

English word silly, it appears, on the whole, to belong to the host of

English words to be found in colloquial Welsh, though they seldom find

their way into books. Students of English ought to be able to tell us

whether frit had the meaning here suggested in any part of England,

and how lately; also, whether there was such a phrase as 'silly frit'

in use. After penning this, I received the following interesting

communication from Mr. William Jones, of Llangollen:--The term sìli

ffrit was formerly in use at Bedgelert, and what was thereby meant

was a child of the Tylwyth Teg. It is still used for any creature

that is smaller than ordinary. 'Pooh, a silly frit like that!' (Pw,

rhyw sìli ffrit fel yna!). 'Mrs. So-and-So has a fine child.' 'Ha,

do you call a silly frit like that a fine child?' (Mae gan hon a hon

blentyn braf. Ho, a ydych chwi'n galw rhyw sìli ffrit fel hwnna'n

braf?) To return to Leisa Bèla and Belenë, it may be that the same

person was meant by both these names, but I am in no hurry to identify

them, as none of my correspondents knows the latter of them except

Mr. Hughes, who gives it on the authority of the bard Gutyn Peris,

and nothing further so far as I can understand, whereas Bèla will

come before us in another story, as it is the same name, I presume,

which Glasynys has spelled Bella in Cymru Fu.

So I wrote in 1881: since then I have ascertained from Professor

Joseph Wright, who is busily engaged on his great English Dialect

Dictionary, that frit [27] is the same word, in the dialects of

Cheshire, Shropshire, and Pembrokeshire, as fright in literary

English; and that the corresponding verb to frighten is in them

fritten, while a frittenin (= the book English frightening) means a

ghost or apparition. So sìli ffrit is simply the English silly frit,

and means probably a silly sprite or silly ghost, and sìli ffrit Leisa

Bèla would mean the silly ghost of a woman called Liza Bella. But the

silly frit found spinning near Corwrion Pool will come under notice

again, for that fairy belongs to the Rumpelstiltzchen group of tales,

and the fragment of a story about her will be seen to have treated

Silly Frit as her proper name, which she had not intended to reach

the ears of the person of whom she was trying to get the better.

These tales are brought into connexion with the present day in more

ways than one, for besides the various accounts of the bwganod

or bogies of Corwrion frightening people when out late at night,

Mr. D. E. Davies knows a man, who is still living, and who well

remembers the time when the sound of working used to be heard in the

pool, and the voices of children crying somewhere in its depths,

but that when people rushed there to see what the matter was, all

was found profoundly quiet and still. Moreover, there is a family

or two, now numerously represented in the parishes of Llandegai

and Llanllechid, who used to be taunted with being the offspring of

fairy ancestors. One of these families was nicknamed 'Simychiaid' or

'Smychiaid'; and my informant, who is not yet quite forty, says that

he heard his mother repeat scores of times that the old people used to

say, that the Smychiaid, who were very numerous in the neighbourhood,

were descended from fairies, and that they came from Llyn Corwrion. At

all this the Smychiaid were wont to grow mightily angry. Another

tradition, he says, about them was that they were a wandering family

that arrived in the district from the direction of Conway, and that the

father's name was a Simwch, or rather that was his nickname, based on

the proper name Simwnt, which appears to have once been the prevalent

name in Llandegai. The historical order of these words would in that

case have been Simwnt, Simwch, Simychiaid, Smychiaid. Now Simwnt seems

to be merely the Welsh form given to some such English name as Simond,

just as Edmund or Edmond becomes in North Wales Emwnt. The objection to

the nickname seems to lie in the fact, which one of my correspondents

points out to me, that Simwch is understood to mean a monkey, a point

on which I should like to have further information. Pughe gives simach,

it is true, as having the meaning of the Latin simia. A branch of the

same family is said to be called 'y Cowperiaid' or the Coopers, from

an ancestor who was either by name or by trade a cooper. Mr. Hughes'

account of the Smychiaid was, that they are the descendants of one

Simonds, who came to be a bailiff at Bodysgallan, near Deganwy, and

moved from there to Coetmor in the neighbourhood of Corwrion. Simonds

was obnoxious to the bards, he goes on to say, and they described the

Smychiaid as having arrived in the parish at the bottom of a cawell,

'a creel or basket carried on the back,' when chance would have it that

the cawell cord snapped just in that neighbourhood, at a place called

Pont y Llan. That accident is described, according to Mr. Hughes,

in the following doggerel, the origin of which I do not know--

E dorai 'r arwest, ede wan,

Brwnt y lle, ar Bont y Llan.

The cord would snap, feeble yarn,

At that nasty spot, Pont y Llan.

Curiously enough, the same cawell story used to be said of a widely

spread family in North Cardiganshire, whose surname was pronounced

Massn and written Mason or Mazon: as my mother was of this family,

I have often heard it. The cawell, if I remember rightly, was said,

in this instance, to have come from Scotland, to which were traced

three men who settled in North Cardiganshire. One had no descendants,

but the other two, Mason and Peel--I think his name was Peel, but I am

only sure that it was not Welsh--had so many, that the Masons, at any

rate, are exceedingly numerous there; but a great many of them, owing

to some extent, probably, to the cawell story, have been silly enough

to change their name into that of Jones, some of them in my time. The

three men came there probably for refuge in the course of troubles

in Scotland, as a Frazer and a Francis did to Anglesey. At any rate,

I have never heard it suggested that they were of aquatic origin, but,

taking the cawell into consideration, and the popular account of the

Smychiaid, I should be inclined to think that the cawell originally

referred to some such a supposed descent. I only hope that somebody

will help us with another and a longer cawell tale, which will make

up for the brevity of these allusions. We may, however, assume,

I think, that there was a tendency at one time in Gwyned, if not in

other parts of the Principality, to believe, or pretend to believe,

that the descendants of an Englishman or Scotsman, who settled among

the old inhabitants, were of fairy origin, and that their history was

somehow uncanny, which was all, of course, duly resented. This helps,

to some extent, to explain how names of doubtful origin have got

into these tales, such as Smychiaid, Cowperiaid, Pellings, Penelope,

Leisa Bèla or Isabella, and the like. This association of the lake

legends with intruders from without is what has, perhaps, in a great

measure served to rescue such legends from utter oblivion.

As to a church at Corwrion, the tradition does not seem to be an old

one, and it appears founded on one of the popular etymologies of the

word Corwrion, which treats the first syllable as cor in the sense of

a choir; but the word has other meanings, including among them that

of an ox-stall or enclosure for cattle. Taking this as coming near

the true explanation, it at once suggests itself, that Creuwyryon in

the Mabinogi of Math ab Mathonwy is the same place, for creu or crau

also meant an enclosure for animals, including swine. In Irish the

word is cró, an enclosure, a hut or hovel. The passage in the Mabinogi

[28] relates to Gwydion returning with the swine he had got by dint of

magic and deceit from Pryderi, prince of Dyfed, and runs thus in Lady

Charlotte Guest's translation: 'So they journeyed on to the highest

town of Arllechwed, and there they made a sty (creu) for the swine,

and therefore was the name of Creuwyryon given to that town.' As to

wyryon or wyrion, which we find made into wrion in Corwrion according

to the modern habit, it would seem to be no other word than the usual

plural of wyr, a grandson, formerly also any descendant in the direct

line. If so, the name of an ancestor must have originally followed,

just as one of the places called Bettws was once Betws Wyrion Idon,

'the Bettws of Idon's Descendants'; but it is possible that wyrion

in Creu- or Cor-wyrion was itself a man's name, though I have never

met with it. It is right to add that the name appears in the Record

of Carnarvon (pp. 12, 25, 26) as Creweryon, which carries us back to

the first half of the fourteenth century. There it occurs as the name

of a township containing eight gavels, and the particulars about it

might, in the hand of one familiar with the tenures of that time,

perhaps give us valuable information as to what may have been its

status at a still earlier date.

VI.

Here, for the sake of comparison with the Northwalian stories in

which the fairy wife runs away from her husband in consequence of

his having unintentionally touched or hit her with the iron in the

bridle, the fetter, or the stirrup, as on pp. 35, 40, 46, 50, 54,

61. I wish to cite the oldest recorded version, namely from Walter

Mapes' curious miscellany of anecdotes and legends entitled De Nugis

Curialium Distinctiones Quinque. Mapes flourished in the latter part

of the twelfth century, and in Distinctio ii. 11 of Thomas Wright's

edition, published in the year 1850, one reads the following story,

which serves the purpose there of giving the origin of a certain

Trinio, of whom Mapes had more to say:--

Aliud non miraculum sed portentum nobis Walenses referunt. Wastinum

Wastiniauc secus stagnum Brekeinauc [read Brecheinauc], quod in

circuitu duo miliaria tenet, mansisse aiunt et vidisse per tres

claras a luna noctes choreas fæminarum in campo avenæ suæ, et

secutum eum eas fuisse donec in aqua stagni submergerentur, unam

tamen quarta vice retinuisse. Narrabat etiam ille raptor illius quod

eas noctibus singulis post submersionem earum murmurantes audisset

sub aqua et dicentes, 'Si hoc fecisset, unam de nobis cepisset,'

et se ab ipsis edoctum quomodo hanc adepta [read -us] sit, quæ

et consensit et nupsit ei, et prima verba sua hæc ad virum suum,

'Libens tibi serviam, et tota obedientiæ devotione usque in diem illum

prosilire volens ad clamores ultra Lenem [read Leueni] me freno tuo

percusseris.' Est autem Leueni aqua vicina stagno. Quod et factum

est; post plurimæ prolis susceptionem ab eo freno percussa est,

et in reditu suo inventam eam fugientem cum prole, insecutus est,

et vix unum ex filiis suis arripuit, nomine Triunem Uagelauc.

'The Welsh relate to us another thing, not so much a miracle as a

portent, as follows. They say that Gwestin of Gwestiniog dwelt beside

Brecknock Mere, which has a circumference of two miles, and that on

three moonlight nights he saw in his field of oats women dancing,

and that he followed them until they sank in the water of the mere;

but the fourth time they say that he seized hold of one of them. Her

captor further used to relate that on each of these nights he had

heard the women, after plunging into the mere, murmuring beneath the

water and saying, "If he had done so and so, he would have caught

one of us," and that he had been instructed by their own words, as

to the manner in which he caught her. She both yielded and became his

wife, and her first words to her husband were these: "Willingly will

I serve thee, and with whole-hearted obedience, until that day when,

desirous of sallying forth in the direction of the cries beyond the

Llyfni, thou shalt strike me with thy bridle"--the Llyfni is a burn

near the mere. And this came to pass: after presenting him with a

numerous offspring she was struck by him with the bridle, and on

his returning home, he found her running away with her offspring,

and he pursued her, but it was with difficulty that he got hold even

of one of his sons, and he was named Trinio (?) Faglog.'

The story, as it proceeds, mentions Trinio engaged in battle with

the men of a prince who seems to have been no other than Brychan of

Brycheiniog, supposed to have died about the middle of the fifth

century. The battle was disastrous to Trinio and his friends, and

Trinio was never seen afterwards; so Walter Mapes reports the fact

that people believed him to have been rescued by his mother, and that

he was with her living still in the lake. Giraldus calls it lacus

ille de Brecheniauc magnus et famosus, quem et Clamosum dicunt, 'that

great and famous lake of Brecknock which they also call Clamosus,'

suggested by the Welsh Llyn Llefni, so called from the river Llefni,

misinterpreted as if derived from llef 'a cry.' With this lake he

connects the legend, that at the bidding of the rightful Prince of

Wales, the birds frequenting it would at once warble and sing. This

he asserts to have been proved in the case of Gruffud, son of Rhys,

though the Normans were at the time masters of his person and of his

territory [29]. After dwelling on the varying colours of the lake he

adds the following statement:--Ad hæc etiam totus ædificiis consertus,

culturis egregiis, hortis ornatus et pomeriis, ab accolis quandoque

conspicitur, 'Now and then also it is seen by the neighbouring

inhabitants to be covered with buildings, and adorned with excellent

farming, gardens, and orchards.' It is remarkable as one of the few

lakes in Wales where the remains of a crannog have been discovered,

and while Mapes gives it as only two miles round, it is now said to

be about five; so it has sometimes [30] been regarded as a stockaded

island rather than as an instance of pile dwellings.

In the Brython for 1863, pp. 114-15, is to be found what purports to be

a copy of a version of the Legend of Llyn Syfadon, as contained in a

manuscript of Hugh Thomas' in the British Museum. It is to the effect

that the people of the neighbourhood have a story that all the land

now covered by the lake belonged to a princess, who had an admirer

to whom she would not be married unless he procured plenty of gold:

she did not care how. So he one day murdered and robbed a man who

had money, and the princess then accepted the murderer's suit, but

she felt uneasy on account of the reports as to the murdered man's

ghost haunting the place where his body had been buried. So she made

her admirer go at night to interview the ghost and lay it. Whilst he

waited near the grave he heard a voice inquiring whether the innocent

man was not to be avenged, and another replying that it would not be

avenged till the ninth generation. The princess and her lover felt

safe enough and were married: they multiplied and became numerous,

while their town grew to be as it were another Sodom; and the original

pair lived on so astonishingly long that they saw their descendants

of the ninth generation. They exulted in their prosperity, and one

day held a great feast to celebrate it; and when their descendants

were banqueting with them, and the gaiety and mirth were at their

zenith, ancestors and descendants were one and all drowned in a mighty

cataclysm which produced the present lake.

Lastly may be briefly mentioned the belief still lingering in the

neighbourhood, to the effect that there is a town beneath the waters

of the lake, and that in rough weather the bells from the church

tower of that town may be heard ringing, while in calm weather the

spire of the church may be distinctly seen. My informant, writing in

1892, added the remark: 'This story seems hardly creditable to us,

but many of the old people believe it.'

I ought to have mentioned that the fifteenth-century poet Lewis Glyn

Cothi connects with Syfadon [31] Lake an afanc legend; but this will

be easier to understand in the light of the more complete one from

the banks of the river Conwy. So the reader will find Glyn Cothi's

words given in the next chapter.

CHAPTER II

THE FAIRIES' REVENGE

In th'olde dayes of the king Arthour,

Of which that Britons speken greet honour,

Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.

The elf-queen, with hir joly companye,

Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede;

This was the olde opinion, as I rede.

I speke of manye hundred yeres ago.

Chaucer.

I.

The best living authority I have found on the folklore of Bedgelert,

Drws y Coed, and the surrounding district, is Mr. William Jones, of

Llangollen. He has written a good deal on the subject in the Brython,

and in essays intended for competition at various literary meetings in

Wales. I had the loan from him of one such essay, and I have referred

to the Brython; and I have also had from Mr. Jones a number of letters,

most of which contain some additional information. In harmony,

moreover, with my usual practice, I have asked Mr. Jones to give

me a little of his own history. This he has been kind enough to do;

and, as I have so far followed no particular order in these jottings,

I shall now give the reader the substance of his letters in English,

as I am anxious that no item should be lost or left inaccessible to

English students of folklore. What is unintelligible to me may not be

so to those who have made a serious study of the subject. Mr. Jones'

words are in substance to the following effect:--

'I was bred and born in the parish of Bedgelert, one of the most

rustic neighbourhoods and least subject to change in the whole

country. Some of the old Welsh customs remained within my memory,

in spite of the adverse influence of the Calvinistic Reformation,

as it is termed, and I have myself witnessed several Knitting Nights

and Nuptial Feasts (Neithiorau), which, be it noticed, are not to

be confounded with weddings, as they were feasts which followed the

weddings, at the interval of a week. At these gatherings song and

story formed an element of prime importance in the entertainment at a

time when the Reformation alluded to had already blown the blast of

extinction on the Merry Nights (Noswyliau Llawen) and Saints' Fêtes

[32] (Gwyliau Mabsant) before the days of my youth, though many of

my aged acquaintances remembered them well, and retained a vivid

recollection of scores of the amusing tales which used to be related

for the best at the last mentioned long-night meetings. I have heard

not a few of them reproduced by men of that generation. As an example

of the old-fashioned habits of the people of Bedgelert in my early

days, I may mention the way in which wives and children used to be

named. The custom was that the wife never took her husband's family

name, but retained the one she had as a spinster. Thus my grandmother

on my mother's side was called Ellen Hughes, daughter to Hugh Williams,

of Gwastad Annas. The name of her husband, my grandfather, was William

Prichard [= W. ab Rhisiart, or Richard's son], son to Richard William,

of the Efail Newyd. The name of their eldest son, my uncle (brother

to my mother), was Hugh Hughes, and the second son's name was Richard

William. The mother had the privilege of naming her first-born after

her own family in case it was a boy; but if it happened to be a girl,

she took her name from the father's family, for which reason my

mother's maiden name was Catharine Williams. This remained her name

to the day of her death: and the old people at Bedgelert persisted

in calling me, so long as I was at home, William Prichard, after my

grandfather, as I was my mother's eldest child.

'Most of the tales I have collected,' says Mr. Jones, 'relate to

the parishes of Bedgelert and Dolwydelen. My kindred have lived for

generations in those two parishes, and they are very numerous: in

fact, it used to be said that the people of Dolwydelen and Bedgelert

were all cousins. They were mostly small farmers, and jealous of

all strangers, so that they married almost without exception from

the one parish into the other. This intermixture helped to carry

the tales of the one parish to the other, and to perpetuate them

on the hearths of their homes from generation to generation, until

they were swept away by another influence in this century. Many of my

ancestors seem to have been very fond of stories, poetry, and singing,

and I have been told that some of them were very skilled in these

things. So also, in the case of my parents, the memory of the past

had a great charm for them on both sides; and when the relatives

from Dolwydelen and Bedgelert met in either parish, there used to

be no end to the recounting of pedigrees and the repeating of tales

for the best. By listening to them, I had been filled with desire to

become an adept in pedigrees and legends. My parents used to let me

go every evening to the house of my grandfather, William ab Rhisiart,

the clerk, to listen to tales, and to hear edifying books read. My

grandfather was a reader "without his rival," and "he used to beat

the parson hollow." Many people used to meet at Pen y Bont in the

evenings to converse together, and the stories of some of them were

now and then exceedingly eloquent. Of course, I listened with eager

ears and open mouth, in order, if I heard anything new, to be able

to repeat it to my mother. She, unwilling to let herself be beaten,

would probably relate another like it, which she had heard from her

mother, her grandmother, or her old aunt of Gwastad Annas, who was

a fairly good verse-wright of the homely kind. Then my father, if

he did not happen to be busy with his music-book, would also give

us a tale which he had heard from his grandmother or grandfather,

the old John Jones, of Tyn Llan Dolwydelen, or somebody else would

do so. That is one source from which I got my knowledge of folklore;

but this ceased when we moved from Bedgelert to Carnarvon in the year

1841. My grandfather died in 1844, aged seventy-eight.

'Besides those,' Mr. Jones goes on to say, 'who used to come to

my grandfather's house and to his workshop to relate stories, the

blacksmith's shop used to be, especially on a rainy day, a capital

place for a story, and many a time did I lurk there instead of going

to school, in order to hear old William Dafyd, the sawyer, who, peace

be to his ashes! drank many a hornful from the Big Quart without ever

breaking down, and old Ifan Owen, the fisherman, tearing away for

the best at their yarns, sometimes a tissue of lies and sometimes

truth. The former was funny, and a great wag, up to all kinds of

tricks. He made everybody laugh, whereas the latter would preserve

the gravity of a saint, however lying might be the tale which he

related. Ifan Owen's best stories were about the Water Spirit, or,

as he called it, Llamhigyn y Dwr, "the Water Leaper." He had not

himself seen the Llamhigyn, but his father had seen it "hundreds of

times." Many an evening it had prevented him from catching a single

fish in Llyn Gwynan, and, when the fisherman got on this theme, his

eloquence was apt to become highly polysyllabic in its adjectives. Once

in particular, when he had been angling for hours towards the close

of the day, without catching anything, he found that something took

the fly clean off the hook each time he cast it. After moving from

one spot to another on the lake, he fished opposite the Benlan Wen,

when something gave his line a frightful pull, "and, by the gallows,

I gave another pull," the fisherman used to say, "with all the

force of my arm: out it came, and up it went off the hook, whilst

I turned round to see, as it dashed so against the cliff of Benlan

that it blazed like a lightning." He used to add, "If that was not

the Llamhigyn, it must have been the very devil himself." That cliff

must be two hundred yards at least from the shore. As to his father,

he had seen the Water Spirit many times, and he had also been fishing

in the Llyn Glâs or Ffynnon Lâs, once upon a time, when he hooked a

wonderful and fearful monster: it was not like a fish, but rather

resembled a toad, except that it had a tail and wings instead of

legs. He pulled it easily enough towards the shore, but, as its head

was coming out of the water, it gave a terrible shriek that was enough

to split the fisherman's bones to the marrow, and, had there not been

a friend standing by, he would have fallen headlong into the lake,

and been possibly dragged like a sheep into the depth; for there is

a tradition that if a sheep got into the Llyn Glâs, it could not be

got out again, as something would at once drag it to the bottom. This

used to be the belief of the shepherds of Cwm Dyli, within my memory,

and they acted on it in never letting their dogs go after the sheep

in the neighbourhood of this lake. These two funny fellows, William

Dafyd and Ifan Owen, died long ago, without leaving any of their

descendants blessed with as much as the faintest gossamer thread of

the story-teller's mantle. The former, if he had been still living,

would now be no less than 129 years of age, and the latter about 120.'

Mr. Jones proceeds to say that he had stories from sources besides

those mentioned, namely, from Lowri Robart, wife of Rhisiart Edwart,

the 'Old Guide'; from his old aunt of Gwastad Annas; from William

Wmffra, husband to his grandmother's sister; from his grandmother, who

was a native of Dolwydelen, but had been brought up at Pwllgwernog,

in Nanmor; from her sister; and from Gruffud Prisiart, of Nanmor,

afterwards of Glan Colwyn, who gave him the legend of Owen Lawgoch of

which I shall have something to say later, and the story of the bogie

of Pen Pwll Coch, which I do not know. 'But the chief story-teller of

his time at Bedgelert,' Mr. Jones goes on to say, 'was Twm Ifan Siams

(pronounced Siams or Shams), brother, I believe, to Dafyd Siôn Siams,

of the Penrhyn, who was a bard and pedigree man. Twm lived at Nanmor,

but I know not what his vocation was; his relatives, however, were

small farmers, carpenters, and masons. It is not improbable that he

was also an artisan, as he was conversant with numbers, magnitude, and

letters, and left behind him a volume forming a pedigree book known

at Nanmor as the Barcud Mawr, or "Great Kite," as Gruffud Prisiart

told me. The latter had been reading it many a time in order to know

the origin of somebody or other. All I can remember of this character

is that he was very old--over 90--and that he went from house to

house in his old age to relate tales and recount pedigrees: great

was the welcome he had from everybody everywhere. I remember, also,

that he was small of stature, nimble, witty, exceedingly amusing,

and always ready with his say on every subject. He was in the habit

of calling on my grandfather in his rambles, and very cordial was the

reception which my parents always gave him on account of his tales

and his knowledge of pedigrees. The story of the afanc, as given in my

collection, is from his mouth. You will observe how little difference

there is between his version [33] and that known to Edward Llwyd in the

year 1695. I had related this story to a friend of mine at Portmadoc,

who was grandson or great-grandson to Dafyd Siôn Siams, of Penrhyn,

in 1858, when he called my attention to the same story in the Cambrian

Journal from the correspondence of Edward Llwyd. I was surprised at

the similarity between the two versions, and I went to Bedgelert to

Gruffud Rhisiart, who was related to Twm Siôn Siams. I read the story

to him, and I found that he had heard it related by his uncle just as

it was by me, and as given in the Cambrian Journal. Twm Ifan Siams

had funny stories about the tricks of Gwrach y Rhibyn, the Bodach

[34] Glas, and the Bwbach Llwyd, which he localized in Nanmor and

Llanfrothen; he had, also, a very eloquent tale about the courtship

between a sailor from Moel y Gest, near Portmadoc, and a mermaid,

of which I retain a fairly good recollection. I believe Twm died in

the year 1835-6, aged about ninety-five.'

So far, I have merely translated Mr. Jones' account of himself and

his authorities as given me in the letter I have already referred to,

dated in June of last year, 1881. I would now add the substance of his

general remarks about the fairies, as he had heard them described, and

as he expressed himself in his essay for the competition on folklore at

the Carnarvon Eistedfod of 1880:--The traditions, he says, respecting

the Tylwyth Teg vary according to the situation of the districts with

which they are connected, and many more such traditions continue to

be remembered among the inhabitants of the mountains than by those of

the more level country. In some places the Tylwyth Teg are described

as a small folk of a thieving nature, living in summer among the fern

bushes in the mountains, and in winter in the heather and gorse. These

were wont to frequent the fairs and to steal money from the farmers'

pockets, where they placed in its stead their own fairy money,

which looked like the coin of the realm, but when it was paid for

anything bought it would vanish in the pockets of the seller. In other

districts the fairies were described as a little bigger and stronger

folk; but these latter were also of a thieving disposition. They

would lurk around people's houses, looking for an opportunity to

steal butter and cheese from the dairies, and they skulked about

the cow-yards, in order to milk the cows and the goats, which they

did so thoroughly that many a morning there was not a drop of milk

to be had. The principal mischief, however, which those used to do,

was to carry away unbaptized infants, and place in their stead their

own wretched and peevish offspring. They were said to live in hidden

caves in the mountains, and he had heard one old man asserting his

firm belief that it was beneath Moel Eilio, also called Moel Eilian,

a mountain lying between Llanberis and Cwellyn, the Tylwyth Teg of

Nant y Bettws lived, whom he had seen many a time when he was a lad;

and, if any one came across the mouth of their cave, he thought that he

would find there a wonderful amount of wealth, 'for they were thieves

without their like.' There is still another species of Tylwyth Teg,

very unlike the foregoing ones in their nature and habits. Not only

was this last kind far more beautiful and comely than the others,

but they were honest and good towards mortals. Their whole nature was

replete with joy and fun, nor were they ever beheld hardly, except

engaged in some merry-making or other. They might be seen on bright

moonlight nights at it, singing and carolling playfully on the fair

meadows and the green slopes, at other times dancing lightly on the

tops of the rushes in the valleys. They were also wont to be seen

hunting in full force on the backs of their grey horses; for this

kind were rich, and kept horses and servants. Though it used to be

said that they were spiritual and immortal beings, still they ate

and drank like human beings: they married and had children. They were

also remarkable for their cleanliness, and they were wont to reward

neat maid-servants and hospitable wives. So housewives used to exhort

their maids to clean their houses thoroughly every night before going

to bed, saying that if the Tylwyth Teg happened to enter, they would

be sure to leave money for them somewhere; but they were to tell no

one in case they found any, lest the Tylwyth should be offended and

come no more. The mistresses also used to order a tinful of water to

be placed at the foot of the stairs, a clean cloth on the table, with

bread and its accompaniments (bara ac enllyn) placed on it, so that, if

the Tylwyth came in to eat, the maids should have their recompense on

the hob as well as unstinted praise for keeping the house clean, or, as

Mr. Jones has it in a couplet from Goronwy Owen's Cywyd y Cynghorfynt--

Cael eu rhent ar y pentan,

A llwyr glod o bai llawr glân.

Finding the fairies' pay on the hob,

With full credit for a clean floor.

Thus, whether the fairies came or not to pay a visit to them

during their sleep, the house would be clean by the morning, and

the table ready set for breakfast. It appears that the places most

frequently resorted to by this species were rushy combes surrounded

by smooth hills with round tops, also the banks of rivers and the

borders of lakes; but they were seldom seen at any time near rocks

or cliffs. So more tales about them are found in districts of the

former description than anywhere else, and among them may be mentioned

Penmachno, Dolwydelan, the sides of Moel Siabod, Llandegái Mountain,

and from there to Llanberis, to Nantlle Lakes, to Moel Tryfan [35]

and Nant y Bettws, the upper portion of the parish of Bedgelert from

Drws y Coed to the Pennant, and the district beginning from there and

including the level part of Eifion, on towards Celynnog Fawr. I have

very little doubt that there are many traditions about them in the

neighbourhood of the Eifl and in Lleyn; I know but little, however,

about these last. This kind of fairies was said to live underground,

and the way to their country lay under hollow banks that overhung

the deepest parts of the lakes, or the deepest pools in the rivers,

so that mortals could not follow them further than the water, should

they try to go after them. They used to come out in broad daylight,

two or three together, and now and then a shepherd, so the saying

went, used to talk and chat with them. Sometimes, moreover, he fell

over head and ears in love with their damsels, but they did not

readily allow a mortal to touch them. The time they were to be seen

in their greatest glee was at night when the moon was full, when

they celebrated a merry night (noswaith lawen). At midnight to the

minute, they might be seen rising out of the ground in every combe

and valley; then, joining hands, they would form into circles, and

begin to sing and dance with might and main until the cock crew, when

they would vanish. Many used to go to look at them on those nights,

but it was dangerous to go too near them, lest they should lure the

spectator into their circle; for if that happened, they would throw

a charm over him, which would make him invisible to his companions,

and he would be detained by the fairies as long as he lived. At times

some people went too near to them, and got snatched in; and at other

times a love-inspired youth, fascinated by the charms of one of their

damsels, rushed in foolhardily to try to seize one of them, and became

instantly surrounded and concealed from sight. If he could be got

out before the cock crew he would be no worse; but once the fairies

disappeared without his having been released, he would never more be

seen in the land of the living. The way to get the captured man out

was to take a long stick of mountain ash (pren criafol), which two

or more strong men had to hold with one of its ends in the middle of

the circle, so that when the man came round in his turn in the dance

he might take hold of it, for he is there bodily though not visible,

so that he cannot go past without coming across the stick. Then the

others pull him out, for the fairies, no more than any other spirit,

dare touch the mountain ash.

We now proceed to give some of Mr. Jones' legends. The first is

one which he published in the fourth volume of the Brython, p. 70,

whence the following free translation is made of it:--