The Coblynau or Knockers were supposed to be a species of Fairies who had their abode in the rocks, and whose province it was to indicate by knocks, and other sounds, the presence of ore in mines.
It would seem that many people had dim traditions of a small race who had their dwellings in the rocks. This wide-spread belief in the existence of cave men has, in our days, been shown to have had a foundation in fact, and many vestiges of this people have been revealed by intelligent cave hunters. But the age in which the cave men lived cannot even approximately be ascertained. In various
parts of Wales, in the lime rock, their abodes have been brought to light. It is not improbable that the people who occupied the caves of ancient days were, in reality, the original Fairy Knockers. These people were invested, in after ages, by the wonder-loving mind of man, with supernatural powers.
Æschylus, the Greek tragic poet, who died in the 69th year of his age, B.C. 456, in Prometheus Vinctus, refers to cave dwellers in a way that indicates that even then they belonged to a dateless antiquity.
In Prometheus’s speech to the chorus—κουτε πλιυθυφεις . . έν μυχοις ανηλίοις—lines 458-461, is a reference to this ancient tradition. His words, put into English, are these:—“And neither knew the warm brick-built houses exposed to the sun, nor working in wood, but they dwelt underground, like as little ants, in the sunless recesses of caves.”
The above quotation proves that the Greeks had a tradition that men in a low, or the lowest state of civilization, had their abodes in caves, and possibly the reference to ants would convey the idea that the cave dwellers were small people. Be this as it may, it is very remarkable that the word applied to a dwarf in the dialects of the northern countries of Europe signifies also a Fairy, and the dwarfs, or Fairies, are there said to inhabit the rocks. The following quotation from Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary under the word Droich, a dwarf, a pigmy, shows this to have been the case:—
“In the northern dialects, dwerg does not merely signify a dwarf, but also a Fairy! The ancient Northern nations, it is said, prostrated themselves before rocks, believing that they were inhabited by these pigmies, and that they thence gave forth oracles. Hence they called the echo dwergamal, as believing it to be their voice or speech. . .
They were accounted excellent artificers, especially as smiths, from which circumstance some suppose that they have received their name . . . Other Isl. writers assert that their ancestors did not worship the pigmies as they did the genii or spirits, also supposed to reside in the rocks.”
Bishop Percy, in a letter to the Rev. Evan Evans (Ieuan Prydydd Hir), writes:—
“Nay, I make no doubt but Fairies are derived from the Duergar, or Dwarfs, whose existence was so generally believed among all the northern nations.”
The Cambro-Briton, vol. i., p. 331.