The poet’s request is granted, and then he describes his aerial passage in these words:—
“Codasant fi ar eu hysgwyddau, fel codi Marchog Sir; ac yna ymaith â ni fel y gwynt, tros dai a thiroedd, dinasoedd a theyrnasoedd, a moroedd a mynyddoedd, heb allu dal sylw ar ddim, gan gyflymed yr oeddynt yn hedeg.” This translated is:—
“They raised me on their shoulders, as they do a Knight of
the Shire, and away we went like the wind, over houses and fields, over cities and kingdoms, over seas and mountains, but I was unable to notice particularly anything, because of the rapidity with which they flew.”
What the poet writes of his own flight with the Fairies depicts the then prevailing notions respecting aerial journeys by Fairy agencies, and they bear a striking resemblance to like stories in oriental fiction. That the belief in this form of transit survived the days of Bardd Cwsg will be seen from the following tale related by my friend Mr. E. Hamer in his Parochial Account of Llanidloes:—
A Man Carried Through the Air by the Fairies.
“One Edward Jones, or ‘Ned the Jockey,’ as he was familiarly called, resided, within the memory of the writer, in one of the roadside cottages a short distance from Llanidloes, on the Newtown road. While returning home late one evening, it was his fate to fall in with a troop of Fairies, who were not pleased to have their gambols disturbed by a mortal. Requesting him to depart, they politely offered him the choice of three means of locomotion, viz., being carried off by a ‘high wind, middle wind, or low wind.’ The jockey soon made up his mind, and elected to make his trip through the air by the assistance of a high wind. No sooner had he given his decision, than he found himself whisked high up into the air and his senses completely bewildered by the rapidity of his flight; he did not recover himself till he came in contact with the earth, being suddenly dropped in the middle of a garden near Ty Gough, on the Bryndu road, many miles distant from the spot whence he started on his aerial journey. Ned, when relating this story, would vouch for its genuineness in the most solemn manner, and the person who narrated it to the writer brought forward as a proof of its truth, ‘that there
was not the slightest trace of any person going into the garden while Ned was found in the middle of it.’”
Montgomeryshire Collections, vol. x., p. 247.
Mr. Hamer records another tale much like the foregoing, but the one I have given is a type of all such stories.