Quite recently—at the end of 1899 in fact—I received three brief stories, for which I am indebted to the further kindness of Alaw Ỻeyn (p. 228), who lives at Bynhadlog near Edern in Ỻeyn, and two out of the three touch on the question of language. But as the three belong to one and the same district, I give the substance of all in English as follows:—
(1) There were at a small harbour belonging to Nefyn some houses in which several families formerly lived; the houses are there still, but nobody lives in them now. There was one family there to which a little girl belonged: they used to lose her for hours every day; so her mother was very angry with her for being so much away. ‘I must know,’ said she, ‘where you go for your play.’ The girl answered that it was to Pin y Wig, ‘The Wig Point,’ which meant a place to the west of the Nefyn headland: it was there, she said, she played with many children. ‘Whose children?’ asked the mother. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied; ‘they are very nice children, much nicer than I am.’ ‘I must know whose children they are,’ was the reply; and one day the mother went with her little girl to see the children: it was a distance of about a quarter of a mile to Pin y Wig, and after climbing the slope and walking a little along the top they came in sight of the Pin. It is from this Pin that the people of Pen yr Aỻt got water, and it is from there they get it still. Now after coming near the Pin the little girl raised her hands with joy at the sight of the children. ‘O mother,’ said she, ‘their father is with them to-day: he is not with them always, it is only sometimes that he is.’ The mother asked the child where she saw them. ‘There they are, mother, running down to the Pin, with their father sitting down.’ ‘I see nobody, my child,’ was the reply, and great fear came upon the mother: she took hold of the child’s hand in terror, and it came to her mind at once that they were the Tylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin y Wig: the mother had heard that the Tylwyth Teg exchanged people’s children.
Such is the first story, and it is only remarkable, perhaps, for its allusion to the father of the fairy children.
(2) There used to be at Edern an old woman who occupied a small farm called Glan y Gors: the same family lives there still. One day this old woman had gone to a fair at Criccieth, whence she returned through Pwỻheli. As she was getting above Gors Geirch, which was then a turbary and a pretty considerable bog, a noise reached her ears: she stopped and heard the sound of much talking. By-and-by she beheld a great crowd of men and women coming to meet her. She became afraid and stepped across the fence to let them go by. There she remained a while listening to their chatter, and when she thought that they had gone far enough she returned to the road and began to resume her way home. But before she had gone many steps she heard the same sort of noise again, and saw again the same sort of crowd coming; so she recrossed the fence in great fear, saying to herself, ‘Here I shall be all night!’ She remained there till they also had gone, and she wondered what they could be, and whether they were people who had been to visit Plas Madrun—afterwards, on inquiry, she found that no such people had been there that day. Now the old woman was near enough to the passers-by to hear them talking (clebran) and chattering (bregliach), but not a word could she understand of what they uttered: it was not Welsh and she did not think that it was English—it is, however, not supposed that she knew English. She related further that the last crowd shouted all together to the other crowd in advance of them Wi, and that the latter replied Wi Wei or something like that.
This account Alaw Ỻeyn has got, he says, from a great-granddaughter of the old woman, and she heard it all from her father, Barđ Ỻechog, who always had faith in the fairies, and believed that they will come again to be seen of men and women. For he thought that they had their periods, a belief which I have come across elsewhere, and more especially in Carnarvonshire[35]. Now what are we to make of such a story? I recollect reading somewhere of a phantom wedding in Scotland, but in Wales we seem to have nothing more closely resembling this than a phantom funeral. Nevertheless what the old woman of Glan y Gors thought she saw looks by no means unlike a Welsh wedding marching on foot, especially when, as I have seen done, one party tried—seemingly in good earnest—to escape the other and to take the bride away from it. Moreover, that the figures making up the two crowds in her story are to be regarded as fairies is rendered probable by the next story, which describes the phantoms therein expressly as little men and little women.
(3) The small farm of Perth y Celyn in Edern used to be held by an old man named Griffith Griffiths. In his best days he stood six foot, and he has left behind him a double reputation for bodily strength and great piety. My informant can well remember him walking to chapel with the aid of his two sticks. The story goes that one day, when he was in his prime, he set out from Perth y Celyn at two in the morning to walk to Carnarvon to pay his rent: there was no talk in those days of a carriage for anybody. After passing through Nefyn and Pistyỻ, he came in due time to Bwlch Trwyn Swncwl[36]: he writes this name also Bwlch Drws Wncwl, with the suggestion that it ought to be Bwlch Drws Encil, and that the place must have been of importance in the wars of the ancient Kymry. The high-road, he goes on to say, runs through the Bwlch, and as Griffith was entering this gap what should he hear but a great deal of talking. He stopped and listened, when to his surprise he saw coming towards him, devoid of all fear, a crowd of little men and little women. They talked aloud, but he could not understand a single word they said: he thought that it was neither Welsh nor English. They passed by him on the road, but he moved aside to the ditch lest they should knock against him; but no feeling of fear came upon him. The old man believed them to have been the Tylwyth Teg.
In the story of the Moeđin funeral the language of the toeli was not intelligible to the farmer and his wife, or to the tailor, and here in two stories from Ỻeyn we have it clearly stated that it was neither Welsh nor, probably, English. Since the fairies are always represented as old-fashioned in their ways, it is quite possible that they were once regarded as talking a more ancient language of the country. Which was it? An early version of these legends might perhaps have supplied the answer, and told us that it was Gwyđelig or Goidelic, if not an earlier idiom, to wit that of the Aborigines before they learnt Goidelic from the Celts of the first wave of Aryan invasion, whether it was in the region of the Eifl or in the Demetian half of Keredigion. As to the former it is worthy of note that when Griffith had reached Bwlch Trwyn Swncwl he was in the outskirts of the Eifl Mountains, on one of whose heights, not very far off, is the extensive prehistoric fortress of Tre’r Ceiri, or the Town of the Keiri, a vocable which may be provisionally rendered by ‘giants.’ In any case it dissociates that stronghold from the Brythonic people of Wales. We shall find, however, that a Goidel, or Pict, buried in a cairn on Snowdon, is known as Rhita Gawr, ‘Rhita the Giant’; and it is possible that in the Keiri of Tre’r Ceiri we have no other race than that of mixed Goidels and Picts whom the encroaching Brythons found in possession of the west of our island. Nay, one may say that this is rendered probable by the use made of the word ceiri in medieval Welsh: thus in some poetry composed by a certain Dafyđ Offeiriad, and copied by Thomas Williams of Trefriw, we have a line alluding to Britain in the words:—
Coron ynys y Ceûri[37].
The Crown of the Giants’ Island.
Here Ynys y Ceûri inevitably recalls the fact that Britain is called Ynys y Kedyrn, or Island of the Mighty, in the Mabinogion, and also, in effect, in the story of Kulhwch and Olwen. But such stories as these, which enabled Geoffrey to say, i. 16, when he introduced his banal brood of Trojans, that up to that time Britain had only been inhabited by a few giants, are the legends, as will be pointed out later, of the Brythonicized Goidels of Wales. So one may infer that their ancestors had given this country the name of the Island of the Mighty, unless it should prove more accurate to suppose them to have somehow derived the term from the Aborigines.