The Old Fairies of Wales.

Diolch yn fawr, The Welsh Fairy Book

by W. Jenkyn Thomas.

You see, whilst over time I have acquired some miscellanous knowledge of  Celtic mythology (the one about the boy Myrddin and his two dragons in the pool at Eryri springs to mind,or even more obviously, King Arthur - now we've all heard of him!) – I knew nothing about the largely overlooked area of Welsh folklore that is Welsh fairy stories. Why do these tales not crop up in primary school assemblies? Or get thrown into the eistedfoddau cocktail alongside the daffodils, anthem and poetry?

Then again, I rather relish in the fact that these tales are enigmatic and understated. As they are not obvious, you forget they are there. Like the fairies themselves in these tales, you have got to stumble upon them.

There are oh so many tales of Welsh fairies that lived – and terrorised – much of Wales. They belonged to an era of roughly late-medieval to C18th folklore (perhaps later in some cases though the stories of this book have granted me that specific guesstimate). Certainly, as already pointed out, these tales are not significant to the contemporary Welshperson, or their  immediate elders, which places some distance between us and a time when such tales were popular.

[pic courtesy of www.sacred-texts.com]

There are several circumstances in which fairies appear in Welsh folklore, and several contraditory behaviours that they display (e.g. you find that some are angelic nymphs whilst others are nasty imps): -

• They are referred to sometimes as if they are almost human, because they belong to a specific clan; Welshpeople called their fairies the ‘Fair Family’.

• These fairies generally always lived invisibly alongside the human Welsh community, to be glimpsed in the corner of our eyes, or accidentally overheard by a passerby who was not looking for them. One tale is  an exception to this rule; fairies regularly popped into an old lady’s house to borrow her appliances in exchange for fairy money. Whilst some tales give you get a sense that the fairies are on a completely different plane and are living in Wales but on that different, unseen level, other tales place them in a seperate ‘fairy world’ altogether. Such a world has to be accessed, for instance, through a magical tunnel, a knoll in a tree or a hidden cave; sometimes the fairies are referred to as inhabiting a far-off island off the Welsh coast, that humans are able to look out to if they know where to look.

• Welsh fairies are forever partying; while peasants supped mead and strong ale, they had the finest  fairy wine (these tales were composed in a time of jovial merrymaking ). Often a human protagonist in these tales is drunk when stumbling upon the fairies. On their way home from a human party they would wander into a fairy realm and party with the fairies in their luxurious world, falling asleep in a heavenly bed after lots of fairy food and fairy wine, and then wake up in the morning on a muddy barren Welsh hiltop with no fairy world in sight. This surely harks back to scenarios where real-life drunkards staggered off in the night, and  disappeared ‘away with the fairies!’

• Welsh fairies loved teaching Welsh people lessons, to be punished for crimes against the fairies (i.e. insulting them) or simply teaching an arrogant Welshperson a lesson in morality. Similarly, fairies were rewarding of kindness to them.  They would gladly dish out the fairy gold to kind folk.

• They enjoyed luring people off their tracks. Quite commonly this was when a Welshperson was on their way to or from market. Another common scenario is that the protagonist is a shepherd who gets lost, perhaps searching for a stray sheep, and then encounters the Fair Family. In some tales, protagonists stumble upon a fairy ring, with fairies dancing and singing in it. If you stepped into the circle you got sucked into it, forced to dance there with the fairies. Whilst you believe that you are dancing for mere moments in the fairy ring, years have passed in the real human world, and you were feared dead by your loved ones. I am certain the fairy ring is a concept that crops up in fairy tales generally, not simply Welsh ones.

• Fairy time is different from human time. For sometimes when a human spends time with the fairies in their realm, they think that they are there for years but they are only gone a matter of minutes by a human’s watch. Conversely, other times (as aforementioned) the fairies may borrow seconds of your time, but decades pass back in the human world. When you return to the human world you are thus unaged and often unrecognised.

• Fairies were always attracting the attention of human suitors. Welshmen were frequently espying beautiful fairy damsels in the woods or on lakes, and pretty much pressurising them into marrying them. There was always a condition, though, e.g. “I will be your wife, Einion, as long as you never throw a bit of clay at me.” And stupid old Einion would always end up throwing the clay in some banale circumstance, and end up losing his fairy-wife forever more.

• Fairies were smaller than humans, and (made you see them as) more beautiful. They may turn out to be ugly hags. But they never let you see them as hideous. Several Welsh stories mention fairy ointment, and if you rub the ointment in your eyes you see them, and the world, for what it really is i.e. plain, not in the fantastical way they would have you believe.

• The impish types of fairies were frequently terrorising communities for no reason. One common trick was their swapping newborn human babies for ugly fairy “changlings” e.g. in the place of the baby the mother would one day find an ugly bearded creature in the cradle. Most of these tales had happy endings, though. The wisened old man or woman of the village knew the incantation to ameliorate the situation. There was always, conveniently, a wisened old person in the village.

They were a pretty freaky bunch. But extremely intriguing. I suppose Welsh people once truly believed that there were fairies living alongside them. The tales mention that fairies were blamed for trouble in the town e.g. bad harvests, cows not letting milk.

Such tales are fascinating, and add a whole other dimension to Welsh culture, besides the better-known myths of wars, conquest and wizardry: Merlin, Arthur, Gireldus Cambrensis, Geoffrey of Monmouthshire, Adam Usk. These fairy tales are tales of everyday townsfolk in small town scenarios having random and frequent magical encounters.

Like the fairies themselves, you might not know that these stories are there if you do not look closely:)