Welsh Folklore Quotes

One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Name "Arthur" The etymology of the Welsh name Arthur is uncertain, though most scholars favour either a derivation from the Roman gens name Artorius (ultimately of Messapic or Etruscan origin), or a native Brittonic compound based on the root *arto- "bear" (which became arth in Medieval and Modern Welsh). Similar "bear" names appear throughout the Celtic-speaking world. Gildas does not give the name Arthur but he does mention a British king Cuneglasus who had been "charioteer to the bear". Those that favor a mythological origin for Arthur point out that a Gaulish bear goddess Artio is attested, but as yet no certain examples of Celtic male bear gods have been detected. John Morris argues that the appearance of the name Arthur, as applied to the Scottish, Welsh and Pennine "Arthurs", and the lack of the name at any time earlier, suggests that in the early 6th century the name became popular amongst the indigenous British for a short time. He proposes that all of these occurrences were due to the importance of another Arthur, who may have ruled temporarily as Emperor of Britain. He suggests on the basis of archaeology that a period of Saxon advance was halted and turned back, before resuming again in the 570s. Morris also suggests that the Roman Camulodunum, modern Colchester, and capital of the Roman province of Britannia, is the origin of the name "Camelot". The name Artúr is frequently attested in southern Scotland and northern England in the 7th and 8th centuries. For example, Artúr mac Conaing, who may have been named after his uncle Artúr mac Áedáin. Artúr son of Bicoir Britone, was another 'Arthur' reported in this period, who slew Morgan mac Fiachna of Ulster in 620/625 in Kintyre. A man named Feradach, apparently the grandson of an 'Artuir', was a signatory at the synod that enacted the Law of Adomnan in 697. Arthur ap Pedr was a prince in Dyfed, born around 570–580. Given the popularity of this name at the time, it is likely that others were named for a figure who was already established in folklore by that time.

The Gwrach-y-Rhybin (hag of the mist) was a hideous fairy hag who lived in Wales and haunted certain old aristocratic Welsh families. She was also said to haunt Pennard Castle and the banks of the river Dribble. The Gwrach-y-Rhybin was described as being winged, with matted black hair, overlong arms, black teeth and a hooked nose. She was said to flap her wings against the window at night and howl the name of the person who will die.lxxxviii She also had another form, when she was called the yr Hen Chrwchwd (old hump-backed one), in which she appeared as a shrieking old woman, whose cries presaged the death of a local person.lxxxix

This supernatural disappearance, the stick gathering, the hill-top and the time of her appearances being the dark half of the year all hint at a Cailleach connection. Additionally we may note here the meaning of the name of the Welsh Gwrach-y-Rhybin, who shares some characteristics with the Cailleach, is hag of the mist.

Celts”—a linguistic construction based on relationships between Welsh, Breton, and Cornish, which seventeenth-century French historian Paul Yves Perzon first traced to the “Keltoi” of ancient Greek writers

The extent to which cheese figures in Cambrian folklore is surprising.

From all this we can divine the following: the serpent or dragon people live both in the ground and fly through the air, just like angels and “fallen angels,” some of them are probably the ancient form of the Watchers, those who illuminated the witchblood with their cunning fire. Faeries and Witches (the same creature on two different sides of the hedge, both with one foot on each side, a twilight, liminal creature, both) are the children of them, or are sometimes manifestations of them in human/faerie form. Baltic tradition suggests that “dragon” is but the name given to a powerful male faerie, or in later language, a kind of warrior angel, much like St Michael. To bring these two threads together we need only refer to Welsh folklore. Romani lore and many other British depictions of serpents as spirits place them as a vitalist force, a titanic layer of power in the Underworld, where as Ristic's Bulgarian sources make dragons into something much like the Watchers.

Older characteristics acquired by elves/fairies in the Middle Ages included their penchant for stealing children (borrowed from the lamiae of the ancient world); their helpfulness in the home (acquired, perhaps, from the Lares and Penates) – including, sometimes, less welcome poltergeist-like activity; their desire to have intercourse with men and women, especially in wild places (borrowed from the fauns, dusii, incubi and succubi) and, of course, their association with fate and destiny – extending into the realm of magic and enchantment – derived ultimately from the Parcae. Furthermore, the Middle Ages crystallised the idea that the fairies lived in an otherworld kingdom (usually underground), an idea that seems to have originated in Welsh folklore and British belief. Occasionally, the fairies were portrayed as diminutive in stature, and the idea that they were dangerous persisted from the threatening Anglo-Saxon elves.

The book’s final chapter argues that the various elements of fairy belief as we might recognise it, including belief in an underground otherworld inhabited by sometimes pygmy-sized otherworlders, the connection between fairies and fate and fairy sexuality, were brought together as a direct result of the Norman Conquest. The key role played in the Conquest by Breton nobles who felt a cultural affinity with the Cornish and Welsh, combined with the Normans’ desire to escape the English past, resulted in the crafting of a new ‘British’ identity for the whole island of Great Britain by authors with a Brittonic cultural background such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map. These authors united elements of English and Brittonic folklore to fashion a new fairy world that was subsequently adopted as the setting for literary romances. The fairies of romance soon took on a life of their own and fed back into popular culture as a source of fairy lore, creating a complex amalgam of belief that was not fully described until the early modern period.

Instead, the best known and most widely used Welsh term for the nation’s folkloric beings is perhaps tylwyth teg, ‘the good folk’, first attested in the fourteenth century in a poem of Dafydd ap Gwilym,19 and later in William Salesbury’s Welsh-English dictionary (1547).20 Other later terms such as plant (‘children’), plant annwn (‘children of the underworld’), gwragedd annwyl (‘dear women’) and anweledig (‘hidden ones’) are similarly euphemistic and elliptical.

One of the most interesting Welsh euphemisms for the fairies, from a historical point of view, is bendith y mamau, ‘the blessing of the mothers’, a phrase found especially in South Wales, because it might suggest a memory of the Deae Matres.27 The euphemism was first identified by the Protestant preacher John Penry in 1587: our swarmes of south saiers, and enchanters … will not stick openly, to professe that they walke, on Tuesdaies, and Thursdaies at nights, with the fairies, of whom they brag themselves to have their knowlege. These sonnes of Belial, who shuld die the death, Levit. 20.6. have stroken such an astonishing reverence of the fairies, into the harts of our silly people, that they dare not name them, without honor. We cal them bendith û mamme, that is, such as have deserved their mothers blessing. Now our people, wil never utter, bendith û mamme, but they wil saie, bendith û mamme û dhûn, that is, their mothers blessing (which they account the greatest felicity that any creature can be capeable of) light upon them,28 as though they were not to be named without reverence.29 The idea that the name of the bendith y mamau could derive from the pre-Christian cult of the Deae Matres is not new,30 and it is lent some support by Breton folklore where the fairies were sometimes spoken of as ‘our good mothers the fairies’ or ‘the good ladies’.31 Furthermore, the indirectness of bendith y mamau, which does not call the fairies mothers but implies that they are personifications of speech uttered by the mothers, mirrors the origin of the French word fée as a re-personification of the fate-bearing speech of the Parcae.