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 Tyđyn 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 ỻewys 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 Ỻyn Corwrion with her spinning-wheel (troeỻ 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 fyđai 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 Ỻangoỻen:—The term sìli ffrit was formerly in use at Beđgelert, 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 Ỻandegai and Ỻanỻechid, 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 Ỻyn 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 Ỻandegai. 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 Bodysgaỻan, 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 caweỻ, ‘a creel or basket carried on the back,’ when chance would have it that the caweỻ cord snapped just in that neighbourhood, at a place called Pont y Ỻan. That accident is described, according to Mr. Hughes, in the following doggerel, the origin of which I do not know—