XIV.

XIV.Before closing this chapter, I wish to touch on the question of the language of the fairies, though fairy tales hardly ever raise it, as they usually assume the fairies to speak the same language as the mortals around them. There is, however, one well-known exception, namely, the story of Eliodorus, already mentioned, p. 117, as recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, who relates how Eliodorus, preferring at the age of twelve to play the truant to undergoing a frequent beating by his teacher, fasted two days in hiding in the hollow of a river bank, and how he was then accosted by two little men whoinduced him to follow them to a land of sports and other delights. There he remained long enough to be able, years later, to give his diocesan, the second Menevian bishop named David30, a comprehensive account of the people and realm of Faery. After Eliodorus had for some time visited and revisited that land of twilight, his mother desired him to bring her some of the gold of the fairies. So one day he tried to bring away the gold ball with which the fairy king’s son used to play; but he was not only unsuccessful, but subjected to indignities also, and prevented from evermore finding his way back to fairyland. So he had to go again to school and to the studies which he so detested; but in the course of time he learned enough to become a priest; and when, stricken in years, he used to be entreated by Bishop David to relate this part of his early history, he never could be got to unfold his tale without shedding tears. Among other things which he said of the fairies’ mode of living, he stated that they ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived for the most part on various kinds of milk food cooked after the fashion of stirabout, flavoured as it were with saffron31. But one of the most curious portions of Eliodorus’ yarn was that relating to the language of the fairies; for he pretended to have learnt it and to have found it to resemble his ownBritannica Lingua, ‘Brythoneg, or Welsh.’ In the words instanced Giraldus perceived a similarity to Greek32, which he accountedfor by means of the fabulous origin of the Welsh from the Trojans and the supposed sojourn made in Greece by those erring Trojans on their way to Britain. Giraldus displays quite a pretty interest in comparative philology, and talks glibly of theLingua Britannica; but one never feels certain that he knew very much more about it than the author of theGermania, the first to refer to it under that name. Tacitus, however, had the excuse that he lived at a distance and some eleven centuries before the advent of Gerald the Welshman.Giraldus’ words prove, on close examination, to be of no help to us on the question of language; but on the other hand I have but recently begun looking out for stories bearing on it. It is my impression that such are not plentiful; but I proceed to subjoin an abstract of a phantom funeral tale in point fromYstên Sioned(Aberystwyth, 1882), pp. 8–16.Ystên Sioned, I ought to explain, consists of a number of stories collected and edited in Welsh by the Rev. Chancellor Silvan Evans, though he has not attached his name to it:—The harvest of 1816 was one of the wettest ever known in Wales, and a man and his wife who lived on a small farm in one of the largest parishes in the Hundred of Moeđin (see p. 245 above) in the Demetian part of Cardiganshire went out in the evening of a day which had been comparatively dry to make some reaped corn into sheaves, as it had long been down. It was a beautiful night, with the harvest moon shining brightly, and the field in which they worked had the parish road passing along one of its sides, without a hedge or a ditch to separate it fromthe corn. When they had been busily at work binding sheaves for half an hour or more, they happened to hear the hum of voices, as if of a crowd of people coming along the road leading into the field. They stopped a moment, and looking in the direction whence the sounds came, they saw in the light of the moon a number of people coming into sight and advancing in their direction. They bentthenagain to their work without thinking much about what they had seen and heard; for they fancied it was some belated people making for the village, which was about a mile off. But the hum and confused sounds went on increasing, and when the two binders looked up again, they beheld a large crowd of people almost opposite and not far from them. As they continued looking on they beheld quite clearly a coffin on a bier carried on the shoulders of men, who were relieved by others in turns, as usual in funeral processions in the country. ‘Here is a funeral,’ said the binders to one another, forgetting for the moment that it was not usual for funerals to be seen at night. They continued looking on till the crowd was right opposite them, and some of them did not keep to the road, but walked over the corn alongside of the bulk of the procession. The two binders heard the talk and whispering, the noise and hum as if of so many real men and women passing by, but they did not understand a word that was said: not a syllable could they comprehend, not a face could they recognize. They kept looking at the procession till it went out of sight on the way leading towards the parish church. They saw no more of them, and now they began to feel uneasy and went home leaving the corn alone as it was; but further on the funeral was met by a tailor at a point in the road where it was narrow and bounded by a fence (clawđ) on either side. The procession filled the roadfrom hedge to hedge, and the tailor tried to force his way through it, but such was the pressure of the throng that he was obliged to get out of their way by crossing the hedge. He also failed to understand a word of the talk which he heard. In about three weeks after this sham funeral33, there came a real one down that way from the upper end of the parish.Such, in brief, is the story so charmingly told by Silvan Evans, which he got from the mouths of the farmer and his wife, whom he considered highly honest and truthful persons, as well as comparatively free from superstition. The last time they talked to him about the incident they were very advanced in years, and both died within a few weeks of one another early in the year 1852. Their remains, he adds, lie in the churchyard towards which they had seen thetoelislowly making its way. Fortoeliis the phonetic spelling inYstên Sionedof the word which isteuluin North Cardiganshire and in North Wales, for Old Welshtoulu. The word now means ‘family,’ though literally it should mean ‘house-army’ or ‘house-troops,’ and it is practically a synonym fortylwyth, ‘family or household,’ literally ‘house-tribe.’ Now thetoeliortouluis such an important institution in Demetian Cardiganshire and some parts of Dyfed proper, that the word has been confined to the phantom, and for the word family in its ordinary significations one has there to have recourse to the non-dialect formteulu34. In North Cardiganshire and North Wales thetoeliis called simply aclađedigaeth, ‘burial,’ oranglađ, ‘funeral’; in the latter alsocynhebrwngis a funeral. I may add that when I was a child in the neighbourhood of Ponterwyd, on the upper course of the Rheidol, hardly a year used to pass without somebody or other meeting a phantom funeral. Sometimes one got entangled in the procession, and ran the risk of being carried off one’s feet by the throng. There is, however, one serious difference between our phantom funerals and the Demetiantoeli, namely, that we recognize our neighbours’ ghosts as making up the processions, and we have no trouble in understanding their talk. At this point a question of some difficulty presents itself as to thetoeli, namely, what family does it mean?—is it the family and friends of the departed on his way to the grave, or does it mean the family in the sense ofTylwyth Teg, ‘Fair Family,’ as applied to the fairies? I am inclined to the latter view, but I prefer thinking that the distinction itself does not penetrate very deeply, seeing that a certain species of theTylwyth Teg, or fairies, may, in point of origin, be regarded as deceased friends and ancestors of thetylwyth, in the ordinary sense of the word. In fact all this kind of rehearsal of events seems to have been once looked at as friendly to the men and women whom it concerned. This will be seen, for instance, in the Demetian account of thecanwyỻ gorff, or corpse candle, as granted through the intercession of St. David to the people of his special care, as a means of warning each to get ready in time for his death; that is to say, to prevent death finding him unprepared. It is hard to guess why it was assumed that thecanwyỻ gorffwas unknown in other parts of Wales. One or two instances in point occur in Owen’sWelsh Folklore, pp. 298–301; and I have myself heard of them being seen in Anglesey, while they were quite well known to members of Mrs. Rhys’ mother’s family, who lived in the parish of Waen Fawr, in the neighbourhood of Carnarvon. Nor does it appear that phantom funerals were at all confined to South Wales. Proof to the contrary is supplied to some extent in Owen’sFolklore, p. 301; but there is no doubt that in recent times the belief in them, as well as in thecanwyỻ gorff, has been more general and more vivid in South Wales than in North Wales, especially Gwyneđ.I have not been fortunate enough to come across anything systematic or comprehensive on the origin and meaning of ghostly rehearsals like the Welsh phantom funeral or coffin making. But the subject is an interesting one which deserves the attention of our leading folklore philosophers, as does also the cognate one of second sight, by which it is widely overlapped.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 theTylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin y Wig: the mother had heard that theTylwyth Tegexchanged 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 throughPwỻheli. 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 themWi, and that the latter repliedWi Weior 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 Carnarvonshire35. Now what are we to make of such a story? I recollectreading 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 Swncwl36: 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 andlistened, 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 theTylwyth Teg.In the story of the Moeđin funeral the language of thetoeliwas 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 wasGwyđeligor 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 RhitaGawr, ‘Rhita the Giant’; and it is possible that in the Keiri ofTre’r Ceiriwe have no other race than that of mixed Goidels and Picts whom the encroaching Brythonsfound in possession of the west of our island. Nay, one may say that this is rendered probable by the use made of the wordceiriin 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 Ceûri37.The Crown of the Giants’ Island.HereYnys y Ceûriinevitably recalls the fact that Britain is calledYnys y Kedyrn, or Island of the Mighty, in theMabinogion, 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.This last surmise is countenanced by the fact that in the Kulhwch story, the British Isles as a group are called Islands of the Mighty. The words areTeir ynys y kedyrn ae their rac ynys; that is, the Three Islands of the Mighty and their Three outpost Islands. That is not all, for in the same story the designation is varied thus:Teir ynys prydein ae their rac ynys38, orPrydain’s Three Islands and Prydain’s Three outpost Islands; and the substantial antiquity of the designation ‘the Islands of Prydain,’ is proved by its virtual identity with that used by ancient Greek authors like Ptolemy, who calls both Britain and Ireland aνῆσος Πρετανική, wherePretanicandPrydainare closely related words. Now ourPrydainhad in medieval Welsh the two formsPrydeinandPrydyn. But some time or other there set in a tendency to desynonymize them, so as to makeYnys Prydein, ‘the Picts’ Island,’ mean Great Britain, andPrydynmean the Pictland of the North. But just asCymrymeant the plural Welshmenandthe singular Wales, soPrydynmeant Picts39andthe country of the Picts. Now the pluralPrydynhas its etymological Goidelic equivalent in the vocableCruithni, which is well known to have meant the Picts or the descendants of thePictiof Roman historians. Further, this last name cannot be severed from that of thePictones40in Gaul, and it is usually supposed to have referred to their habit of tattooing themselves. At all events this agrees with the apparent meaning of the namesPrydynandCruithni, fromprydandcruth, the words in Welsh and Irish respectively forformorshape, the designation being supposed to refer to the forms or pictures of various animals punctured on the skins of the Picts. So much as to the practical identity of the termsPrydyn,Cruithni, and the Greeks’Pretanic; but how couldCedyrnandPrydeincorrespond in the termsYnys y KedyrnandYnys Prydein? This one is enabled to understand by means ofceûriorceirias a middle term. Nowcadarnmeans strong or valiant, and makes the pluralcedyrn; but there is another Welsh wordcadr41which has also the meaning of valiant or powerful, and may have yielded some such a medieval form asceidyrin the plural. Now thiscadris proved by its cognates42not to have always had the meaning of valiant or strong: its original signification was more nearly ‘fine, beautiful, or beautified.’ Thus what seems to have happened is, thatcadarn, ‘strong, powerful, mighty,’ influenced the meaning ofcadr, ‘beautiful,’ and eventually usurped its place in the name of the island, which from beingYnys y CeidyrbecameYnys y Cedyrn. But the former meant the ‘Island of the fine or beautiful men,’ which was closely enough the meaning also of the words Prydain, Cruithni, and Picts, as names of a people who delighted to beautify their persons by tattooing theirskins and making themselvesdistinguéin that savage fashion. That is not all, for on examination it turns out that the wordceiri, which has been treated up to this point as meaning giants, is but a double, so to say, of the wordcadrin the plural, both as to etymology and original meaning of beautiful. It is a word in constant use in Carnarvonshire, where it is ironically applied to pretentious men fond of showing themselves off, especially in the matter of clothes.’D ydi nhw ’n geiri!‘Aren’t they swells!’Dyna i ch’i gawr!‘There’s a fine fellow for you!’ and so also with the femininecawres. Of course thecawrof standard Welsh is familiar enough in the sense of giant to Carnarvonshire people, so the meaning can be best ascertained in the case of the pluralceiri, which they hardly ever meet with in print; and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, byceirithey mean—in an ironical sense it is true—fine fellows, with reference not to great stature or strength but to their get-up. Thus one arrives at the true interpretation of the nameTre’r Ceirias the Town of thePrydynorCruithni; that is to say, the Town of the Picts or the Aborigines, who showed themselves off decorated with pictures. So far also fromYnys y Ceiribeing an echo ofYnys y Cedyrn, it turns out to be really the more original of the two. Such names, when they are closely examined, are apt to prove old beyond all hastily formed expectation.

XIV.Before closing this chapter, I wish to touch on the question of the language of the fairies, though fairy tales hardly ever raise it, as they usually assume the fairies to speak the same language as the mortals around them. There is, however, one well-known exception, namely, the story of Eliodorus, already mentioned, p. 117, as recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, who relates how Eliodorus, preferring at the age of twelve to play the truant to undergoing a frequent beating by his teacher, fasted two days in hiding in the hollow of a river bank, and how he was then accosted by two little men whoinduced him to follow them to a land of sports and other delights. There he remained long enough to be able, years later, to give his diocesan, the second Menevian bishop named David30, a comprehensive account of the people and realm of Faery. After Eliodorus had for some time visited and revisited that land of twilight, his mother desired him to bring her some of the gold of the fairies. So one day he tried to bring away the gold ball with which the fairy king’s son used to play; but he was not only unsuccessful, but subjected to indignities also, and prevented from evermore finding his way back to fairyland. So he had to go again to school and to the studies which he so detested; but in the course of time he learned enough to become a priest; and when, stricken in years, he used to be entreated by Bishop David to relate this part of his early history, he never could be got to unfold his tale without shedding tears. Among other things which he said of the fairies’ mode of living, he stated that they ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived for the most part on various kinds of milk food cooked after the fashion of stirabout, flavoured as it were with saffron31. But one of the most curious portions of Eliodorus’ yarn was that relating to the language of the fairies; for he pretended to have learnt it and to have found it to resemble his ownBritannica Lingua, ‘Brythoneg, or Welsh.’ In the words instanced Giraldus perceived a similarity to Greek32, which he accountedfor by means of the fabulous origin of the Welsh from the Trojans and the supposed sojourn made in Greece by those erring Trojans on their way to Britain. Giraldus displays quite a pretty interest in comparative philology, and talks glibly of theLingua Britannica; but one never feels certain that he knew very much more about it than the author of theGermania, the first to refer to it under that name. Tacitus, however, had the excuse that he lived at a distance and some eleven centuries before the advent of Gerald the Welshman.Giraldus’ words prove, on close examination, to be of no help to us on the question of language; but on the other hand I have but recently begun looking out for stories bearing on it. It is my impression that such are not plentiful; but I proceed to subjoin an abstract of a phantom funeral tale in point fromYstên Sioned(Aberystwyth, 1882), pp. 8–16.Ystên Sioned, I ought to explain, consists of a number of stories collected and edited in Welsh by the Rev. Chancellor Silvan Evans, though he has not attached his name to it:—The harvest of 1816 was one of the wettest ever known in Wales, and a man and his wife who lived on a small farm in one of the largest parishes in the Hundred of Moeđin (see p. 245 above) in the Demetian part of Cardiganshire went out in the evening of a day which had been comparatively dry to make some reaped corn into sheaves, as it had long been down. It was a beautiful night, with the harvest moon shining brightly, and the field in which they worked had the parish road passing along one of its sides, without a hedge or a ditch to separate it fromthe corn. When they had been busily at work binding sheaves for half an hour or more, they happened to hear the hum of voices, as if of a crowd of people coming along the road leading into the field. They stopped a moment, and looking in the direction whence the sounds came, they saw in the light of the moon a number of people coming into sight and advancing in their direction. They bentthenagain to their work without thinking much about what they had seen and heard; for they fancied it was some belated people making for the village, which was about a mile off. But the hum and confused sounds went on increasing, and when the two binders looked up again, they beheld a large crowd of people almost opposite and not far from them. As they continued looking on they beheld quite clearly a coffin on a bier carried on the shoulders of men, who were relieved by others in turns, as usual in funeral processions in the country. ‘Here is a funeral,’ said the binders to one another, forgetting for the moment that it was not usual for funerals to be seen at night. They continued looking on till the crowd was right opposite them, and some of them did not keep to the road, but walked over the corn alongside of the bulk of the procession. The two binders heard the talk and whispering, the noise and hum as if of so many real men and women passing by, but they did not understand a word that was said: not a syllable could they comprehend, not a face could they recognize. They kept looking at the procession till it went out of sight on the way leading towards the parish church. They saw no more of them, and now they began to feel uneasy and went home leaving the corn alone as it was; but further on the funeral was met by a tailor at a point in the road where it was narrow and bounded by a fence (clawđ) on either side. The procession filled the roadfrom hedge to hedge, and the tailor tried to force his way through it, but such was the pressure of the throng that he was obliged to get out of their way by crossing the hedge. He also failed to understand a word of the talk which he heard. In about three weeks after this sham funeral33, there came a real one down that way from the upper end of the parish.Such, in brief, is the story so charmingly told by Silvan Evans, which he got from the mouths of the farmer and his wife, whom he considered highly honest and truthful persons, as well as comparatively free from superstition. The last time they talked to him about the incident they were very advanced in years, and both died within a few weeks of one another early in the year 1852. Their remains, he adds, lie in the churchyard towards which they had seen thetoelislowly making its way. Fortoeliis the phonetic spelling inYstên Sionedof the word which isteuluin North Cardiganshire and in North Wales, for Old Welshtoulu. The word now means ‘family,’ though literally it should mean ‘house-army’ or ‘house-troops,’ and it is practically a synonym fortylwyth, ‘family or household,’ literally ‘house-tribe.’ Now thetoeliortouluis such an important institution in Demetian Cardiganshire and some parts of Dyfed proper, that the word has been confined to the phantom, and for the word family in its ordinary significations one has there to have recourse to the non-dialect formteulu34. In North Cardiganshire and North Wales thetoeliis called simply aclađedigaeth, ‘burial,’ oranglađ, ‘funeral’; in the latter alsocynhebrwngis a funeral. I may add that when I was a child in the neighbourhood of Ponterwyd, on the upper course of the Rheidol, hardly a year used to pass without somebody or other meeting a phantom funeral. Sometimes one got entangled in the procession, and ran the risk of being carried off one’s feet by the throng. There is, however, one serious difference between our phantom funerals and the Demetiantoeli, namely, that we recognize our neighbours’ ghosts as making up the processions, and we have no trouble in understanding their talk. At this point a question of some difficulty presents itself as to thetoeli, namely, what family does it mean?—is it the family and friends of the departed on his way to the grave, or does it mean the family in the sense ofTylwyth Teg, ‘Fair Family,’ as applied to the fairies? I am inclined to the latter view, but I prefer thinking that the distinction itself does not penetrate very deeply, seeing that a certain species of theTylwyth Teg, or fairies, may, in point of origin, be regarded as deceased friends and ancestors of thetylwyth, in the ordinary sense of the word. In fact all this kind of rehearsal of events seems to have been once looked at as friendly to the men and women whom it concerned. This will be seen, for instance, in the Demetian account of thecanwyỻ gorff, or corpse candle, as granted through the intercession of St. David to the people of his special care, as a means of warning each to get ready in time for his death; that is to say, to prevent death finding him unprepared. It is hard to guess why it was assumed that thecanwyỻ gorffwas unknown in other parts of Wales. One or two instances in point occur in Owen’sWelsh Folklore, pp. 298–301; and I have myself heard of them being seen in Anglesey, while they were quite well known to members of Mrs. Rhys’ mother’s family, who lived in the parish of Waen Fawr, in the neighbourhood of Carnarvon. Nor does it appear that phantom funerals were at all confined to South Wales. Proof to the contrary is supplied to some extent in Owen’sFolklore, p. 301; but there is no doubt that in recent times the belief in them, as well as in thecanwyỻ gorff, has been more general and more vivid in South Wales than in North Wales, especially Gwyneđ.I have not been fortunate enough to come across anything systematic or comprehensive on the origin and meaning of ghostly rehearsals like the Welsh phantom funeral or coffin making. But the subject is an interesting one which deserves the attention of our leading folklore philosophers, as does also the cognate one of second sight, by which it is widely overlapped.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 theTylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin y Wig: the mother had heard that theTylwyth Tegexchanged 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 throughPwỻheli. 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 themWi, and that the latter repliedWi Weior 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 Carnarvonshire35. Now what are we to make of such a story? I recollectreading 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 Swncwl36: 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 andlistened, 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 theTylwyth Teg.In the story of the Moeđin funeral the language of thetoeliwas 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 wasGwyđeligor 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 RhitaGawr, ‘Rhita the Giant’; and it is possible that in the Keiri ofTre’r Ceiriwe have no other race than that of mixed Goidels and Picts whom the encroaching Brythonsfound in possession of the west of our island. Nay, one may say that this is rendered probable by the use made of the wordceiriin 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 Ceûri37.The Crown of the Giants’ Island.HereYnys y Ceûriinevitably recalls the fact that Britain is calledYnys y Kedyrn, or Island of the Mighty, in theMabinogion, 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.This last surmise is countenanced by the fact that in the Kulhwch story, the British Isles as a group are called Islands of the Mighty. The words areTeir ynys y kedyrn ae their rac ynys; that is, the Three Islands of the Mighty and their Three outpost Islands. That is not all, for in the same story the designation is varied thus:Teir ynys prydein ae their rac ynys38, orPrydain’s Three Islands and Prydain’s Three outpost Islands; and the substantial antiquity of the designation ‘the Islands of Prydain,’ is proved by its virtual identity with that used by ancient Greek authors like Ptolemy, who calls both Britain and Ireland aνῆσος Πρετανική, wherePretanicandPrydainare closely related words. Now ourPrydainhad in medieval Welsh the two formsPrydeinandPrydyn. But some time or other there set in a tendency to desynonymize them, so as to makeYnys Prydein, ‘the Picts’ Island,’ mean Great Britain, andPrydynmean the Pictland of the North. But just asCymrymeant the plural Welshmenandthe singular Wales, soPrydynmeant Picts39andthe country of the Picts. Now the pluralPrydynhas its etymological Goidelic equivalent in the vocableCruithni, which is well known to have meant the Picts or the descendants of thePictiof Roman historians. Further, this last name cannot be severed from that of thePictones40in Gaul, and it is usually supposed to have referred to their habit of tattooing themselves. At all events this agrees with the apparent meaning of the namesPrydynandCruithni, fromprydandcruth, the words in Welsh and Irish respectively forformorshape, the designation being supposed to refer to the forms or pictures of various animals punctured on the skins of the Picts. So much as to the practical identity of the termsPrydyn,Cruithni, and the Greeks’Pretanic; but how couldCedyrnandPrydeincorrespond in the termsYnys y KedyrnandYnys Prydein? This one is enabled to understand by means ofceûriorceirias a middle term. Nowcadarnmeans strong or valiant, and makes the pluralcedyrn; but there is another Welsh wordcadr41which has also the meaning of valiant or powerful, and may have yielded some such a medieval form asceidyrin the plural. Now thiscadris proved by its cognates42not to have always had the meaning of valiant or strong: its original signification was more nearly ‘fine, beautiful, or beautified.’ Thus what seems to have happened is, thatcadarn, ‘strong, powerful, mighty,’ influenced the meaning ofcadr, ‘beautiful,’ and eventually usurped its place in the name of the island, which from beingYnys y CeidyrbecameYnys y Cedyrn. But the former meant the ‘Island of the fine or beautiful men,’ which was closely enough the meaning also of the words Prydain, Cruithni, and Picts, as names of a people who delighted to beautify their persons by tattooing theirskins and making themselvesdistinguéin that savage fashion. That is not all, for on examination it turns out that the wordceiri, which has been treated up to this point as meaning giants, is but a double, so to say, of the wordcadrin the plural, both as to etymology and original meaning of beautiful. It is a word in constant use in Carnarvonshire, where it is ironically applied to pretentious men fond of showing themselves off, especially in the matter of clothes.’D ydi nhw ’n geiri!‘Aren’t they swells!’Dyna i ch’i gawr!‘There’s a fine fellow for you!’ and so also with the femininecawres. Of course thecawrof standard Welsh is familiar enough in the sense of giant to Carnarvonshire people, so the meaning can be best ascertained in the case of the pluralceiri, which they hardly ever meet with in print; and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, byceirithey mean—in an ironical sense it is true—fine fellows, with reference not to great stature or strength but to their get-up. Thus one arrives at the true interpretation of the nameTre’r Ceirias the Town of thePrydynorCruithni; that is to say, the Town of the Picts or the Aborigines, who showed themselves off decorated with pictures. So far also fromYnys y Ceiribeing an echo ofYnys y Cedyrn, it turns out to be really the more original of the two. Such names, when they are closely examined, are apt to prove old beyond all hastily formed expectation.

XIV.Before closing this chapter, I wish to touch on the question of the language of the fairies, though fairy tales hardly ever raise it, as they usually assume the fairies to speak the same language as the mortals around them. There is, however, one well-known exception, namely, the story of Eliodorus, already mentioned, p. 117, as recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, who relates how Eliodorus, preferring at the age of twelve to play the truant to undergoing a frequent beating by his teacher, fasted two days in hiding in the hollow of a river bank, and how he was then accosted by two little men whoinduced him to follow them to a land of sports and other delights. There he remained long enough to be able, years later, to give his diocesan, the second Menevian bishop named David30, a comprehensive account of the people and realm of Faery. After Eliodorus had for some time visited and revisited that land of twilight, his mother desired him to bring her some of the gold of the fairies. So one day he tried to bring away the gold ball with which the fairy king’s son used to play; but he was not only unsuccessful, but subjected to indignities also, and prevented from evermore finding his way back to fairyland. So he had to go again to school and to the studies which he so detested; but in the course of time he learned enough to become a priest; and when, stricken in years, he used to be entreated by Bishop David to relate this part of his early history, he never could be got to unfold his tale without shedding tears. Among other things which he said of the fairies’ mode of living, he stated that they ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived for the most part on various kinds of milk food cooked after the fashion of stirabout, flavoured as it were with saffron31. But one of the most curious portions of Eliodorus’ yarn was that relating to the language of the fairies; for he pretended to have learnt it and to have found it to resemble his ownBritannica Lingua, ‘Brythoneg, or Welsh.’ In the words instanced Giraldus perceived a similarity to Greek32, which he accountedfor by means of the fabulous origin of the Welsh from the Trojans and the supposed sojourn made in Greece by those erring Trojans on their way to Britain. Giraldus displays quite a pretty interest in comparative philology, and talks glibly of theLingua Britannica; but one never feels certain that he knew very much more about it than the author of theGermania, the first to refer to it under that name. Tacitus, however, had the excuse that he lived at a distance and some eleven centuries before the advent of Gerald the Welshman.Giraldus’ words prove, on close examination, to be of no help to us on the question of language; but on the other hand I have but recently begun looking out for stories bearing on it. It is my impression that such are not plentiful; but I proceed to subjoin an abstract of a phantom funeral tale in point fromYstên Sioned(Aberystwyth, 1882), pp. 8–16.Ystên Sioned, I ought to explain, consists of a number of stories collected and edited in Welsh by the Rev. Chancellor Silvan Evans, though he has not attached his name to it:—The harvest of 1816 was one of the wettest ever known in Wales, and a man and his wife who lived on a small farm in one of the largest parishes in the Hundred of Moeđin (see p. 245 above) in the Demetian part of Cardiganshire went out in the evening of a day which had been comparatively dry to make some reaped corn into sheaves, as it had long been down. It was a beautiful night, with the harvest moon shining brightly, and the field in which they worked had the parish road passing along one of its sides, without a hedge or a ditch to separate it fromthe corn. When they had been busily at work binding sheaves for half an hour or more, they happened to hear the hum of voices, as if of a crowd of people coming along the road leading into the field. They stopped a moment, and looking in the direction whence the sounds came, they saw in the light of the moon a number of people coming into sight and advancing in their direction. They bentthenagain to their work without thinking much about what they had seen and heard; for they fancied it was some belated people making for the village, which was about a mile off. But the hum and confused sounds went on increasing, and when the two binders looked up again, they beheld a large crowd of people almost opposite and not far from them. As they continued looking on they beheld quite clearly a coffin on a bier carried on the shoulders of men, who were relieved by others in turns, as usual in funeral processions in the country. ‘Here is a funeral,’ said the binders to one another, forgetting for the moment that it was not usual for funerals to be seen at night. They continued looking on till the crowd was right opposite them, and some of them did not keep to the road, but walked over the corn alongside of the bulk of the procession. The two binders heard the talk and whispering, the noise and hum as if of so many real men and women passing by, but they did not understand a word that was said: not a syllable could they comprehend, not a face could they recognize. They kept looking at the procession till it went out of sight on the way leading towards the parish church. They saw no more of them, and now they began to feel uneasy and went home leaving the corn alone as it was; but further on the funeral was met by a tailor at a point in the road where it was narrow and bounded by a fence (clawđ) on either side. The procession filled the roadfrom hedge to hedge, and the tailor tried to force his way through it, but such was the pressure of the throng that he was obliged to get out of their way by crossing the hedge. He also failed to understand a word of the talk which he heard. In about three weeks after this sham funeral33, there came a real one down that way from the upper end of the parish.Such, in brief, is the story so charmingly told by Silvan Evans, which he got from the mouths of the farmer and his wife, whom he considered highly honest and truthful persons, as well as comparatively free from superstition. The last time they talked to him about the incident they were very advanced in years, and both died within a few weeks of one another early in the year 1852. Their remains, he adds, lie in the churchyard towards which they had seen thetoelislowly making its way. Fortoeliis the phonetic spelling inYstên Sionedof the word which isteuluin North Cardiganshire and in North Wales, for Old Welshtoulu. The word now means ‘family,’ though literally it should mean ‘house-army’ or ‘house-troops,’ and it is practically a synonym fortylwyth, ‘family or household,’ literally ‘house-tribe.’ Now thetoeliortouluis such an important institution in Demetian Cardiganshire and some parts of Dyfed proper, that the word has been confined to the phantom, and for the word family in its ordinary significations one has there to have recourse to the non-dialect formteulu34. In North Cardiganshire and North Wales thetoeliis called simply aclađedigaeth, ‘burial,’ oranglađ, ‘funeral’; in the latter alsocynhebrwngis a funeral. I may add that when I was a child in the neighbourhood of Ponterwyd, on the upper course of the Rheidol, hardly a year used to pass without somebody or other meeting a phantom funeral. Sometimes one got entangled in the procession, and ran the risk of being carried off one’s feet by the throng. There is, however, one serious difference between our phantom funerals and the Demetiantoeli, namely, that we recognize our neighbours’ ghosts as making up the processions, and we have no trouble in understanding their talk. At this point a question of some difficulty presents itself as to thetoeli, namely, what family does it mean?—is it the family and friends of the departed on his way to the grave, or does it mean the family in the sense ofTylwyth Teg, ‘Fair Family,’ as applied to the fairies? I am inclined to the latter view, but I prefer thinking that the distinction itself does not penetrate very deeply, seeing that a certain species of theTylwyth Teg, or fairies, may, in point of origin, be regarded as deceased friends and ancestors of thetylwyth, in the ordinary sense of the word. In fact all this kind of rehearsal of events seems to have been once looked at as friendly to the men and women whom it concerned. This will be seen, for instance, in the Demetian account of thecanwyỻ gorff, or corpse candle, as granted through the intercession of St. David to the people of his special care, as a means of warning each to get ready in time for his death; that is to say, to prevent death finding him unprepared. It is hard to guess why it was assumed that thecanwyỻ gorffwas unknown in other parts of Wales. One or two instances in point occur in Owen’sWelsh Folklore, pp. 298–301; and I have myself heard of them being seen in Anglesey, while they were quite well known to members of Mrs. Rhys’ mother’s family, who lived in the parish of Waen Fawr, in the neighbourhood of Carnarvon. Nor does it appear that phantom funerals were at all confined to South Wales. Proof to the contrary is supplied to some extent in Owen’sFolklore, p. 301; but there is no doubt that in recent times the belief in them, as well as in thecanwyỻ gorff, has been more general and more vivid in South Wales than in North Wales, especially Gwyneđ.I have not been fortunate enough to come across anything systematic or comprehensive on the origin and meaning of ghostly rehearsals like the Welsh phantom funeral or coffin making. But the subject is an interesting one which deserves the attention of our leading folklore philosophers, as does also the cognate one of second sight, by which it is widely overlapped.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 theTylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin y Wig: the mother had heard that theTylwyth Tegexchanged 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 throughPwỻheli. 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 themWi, and that the latter repliedWi Weior 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 Carnarvonshire35. Now what are we to make of such a story? I recollectreading 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 Swncwl36: 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 andlistened, 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 theTylwyth Teg.In the story of the Moeđin funeral the language of thetoeliwas 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 wasGwyđeligor 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 RhitaGawr, ‘Rhita the Giant’; and it is possible that in the Keiri ofTre’r Ceiriwe have no other race than that of mixed Goidels and Picts whom the encroaching Brythonsfound in possession of the west of our island. Nay, one may say that this is rendered probable by the use made of the wordceiriin 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 Ceûri37.The Crown of the Giants’ Island.HereYnys y Ceûriinevitably recalls the fact that Britain is calledYnys y Kedyrn, or Island of the Mighty, in theMabinogion, 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.This last surmise is countenanced by the fact that in the Kulhwch story, the British Isles as a group are called Islands of the Mighty. The words areTeir ynys y kedyrn ae their rac ynys; that is, the Three Islands of the Mighty and their Three outpost Islands. That is not all, for in the same story the designation is varied thus:Teir ynys prydein ae their rac ynys38, orPrydain’s Three Islands and Prydain’s Three outpost Islands; and the substantial antiquity of the designation ‘the Islands of Prydain,’ is proved by its virtual identity with that used by ancient Greek authors like Ptolemy, who calls both Britain and Ireland aνῆσος Πρετανική, wherePretanicandPrydainare closely related words. Now ourPrydainhad in medieval Welsh the two formsPrydeinandPrydyn. But some time or other there set in a tendency to desynonymize them, so as to makeYnys Prydein, ‘the Picts’ Island,’ mean Great Britain, andPrydynmean the Pictland of the North. But just asCymrymeant the plural Welshmenandthe singular Wales, soPrydynmeant Picts39andthe country of the Picts. Now the pluralPrydynhas its etymological Goidelic equivalent in the vocableCruithni, which is well known to have meant the Picts or the descendants of thePictiof Roman historians. Further, this last name cannot be severed from that of thePictones40in Gaul, and it is usually supposed to have referred to their habit of tattooing themselves. At all events this agrees with the apparent meaning of the namesPrydynandCruithni, fromprydandcruth, the words in Welsh and Irish respectively forformorshape, the designation being supposed to refer to the forms or pictures of various animals punctured on the skins of the Picts. So much as to the practical identity of the termsPrydyn,Cruithni, and the Greeks’Pretanic; but how couldCedyrnandPrydeincorrespond in the termsYnys y KedyrnandYnys Prydein? This one is enabled to understand by means ofceûriorceirias a middle term. Nowcadarnmeans strong or valiant, and makes the pluralcedyrn; but there is another Welsh wordcadr41which has also the meaning of valiant or powerful, and may have yielded some such a medieval form asceidyrin the plural. Now thiscadris proved by its cognates42not to have always had the meaning of valiant or strong: its original signification was more nearly ‘fine, beautiful, or beautified.’ Thus what seems to have happened is, thatcadarn, ‘strong, powerful, mighty,’ influenced the meaning ofcadr, ‘beautiful,’ and eventually usurped its place in the name of the island, which from beingYnys y CeidyrbecameYnys y Cedyrn. But the former meant the ‘Island of the fine or beautiful men,’ which was closely enough the meaning also of the words Prydain, Cruithni, and Picts, as names of a people who delighted to beautify their persons by tattooing theirskins and making themselvesdistinguéin that savage fashion. That is not all, for on examination it turns out that the wordceiri, which has been treated up to this point as meaning giants, is but a double, so to say, of the wordcadrin the plural, both as to etymology and original meaning of beautiful. It is a word in constant use in Carnarvonshire, where it is ironically applied to pretentious men fond of showing themselves off, especially in the matter of clothes.’D ydi nhw ’n geiri!‘Aren’t they swells!’Dyna i ch’i gawr!‘There’s a fine fellow for you!’ and so also with the femininecawres. Of course thecawrof standard Welsh is familiar enough in the sense of giant to Carnarvonshire people, so the meaning can be best ascertained in the case of the pluralceiri, which they hardly ever meet with in print; and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, byceirithey mean—in an ironical sense it is true—fine fellows, with reference not to great stature or strength but to their get-up. Thus one arrives at the true interpretation of the nameTre’r Ceirias the Town of thePrydynorCruithni; that is to say, the Town of the Picts or the Aborigines, who showed themselves off decorated with pictures. So far also fromYnys y Ceiribeing an echo ofYnys y Cedyrn, it turns out to be really the more original of the two. Such names, when they are closely examined, are apt to prove old beyond all hastily formed expectation.

XIV.Before closing this chapter, I wish to touch on the question of the language of the fairies, though fairy tales hardly ever raise it, as they usually assume the fairies to speak the same language as the mortals around them. There is, however, one well-known exception, namely, the story of Eliodorus, already mentioned, p. 117, as recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, who relates how Eliodorus, preferring at the age of twelve to play the truant to undergoing a frequent beating by his teacher, fasted two days in hiding in the hollow of a river bank, and how he was then accosted by two little men whoinduced him to follow them to a land of sports and other delights. There he remained long enough to be able, years later, to give his diocesan, the second Menevian bishop named David30, a comprehensive account of the people and realm of Faery. After Eliodorus had for some time visited and revisited that land of twilight, his mother desired him to bring her some of the gold of the fairies. So one day he tried to bring away the gold ball with which the fairy king’s son used to play; but he was not only unsuccessful, but subjected to indignities also, and prevented from evermore finding his way back to fairyland. So he had to go again to school and to the studies which he so detested; but in the course of time he learned enough to become a priest; and when, stricken in years, he used to be entreated by Bishop David to relate this part of his early history, he never could be got to unfold his tale without shedding tears. Among other things which he said of the fairies’ mode of living, he stated that they ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived for the most part on various kinds of milk food cooked after the fashion of stirabout, flavoured as it were with saffron31. But one of the most curious portions of Eliodorus’ yarn was that relating to the language of the fairies; for he pretended to have learnt it and to have found it to resemble his ownBritannica Lingua, ‘Brythoneg, or Welsh.’ In the words instanced Giraldus perceived a similarity to Greek32, which he accountedfor by means of the fabulous origin of the Welsh from the Trojans and the supposed sojourn made in Greece by those erring Trojans on their way to Britain. Giraldus displays quite a pretty interest in comparative philology, and talks glibly of theLingua Britannica; but one never feels certain that he knew very much more about it than the author of theGermania, the first to refer to it under that name. Tacitus, however, had the excuse that he lived at a distance and some eleven centuries before the advent of Gerald the Welshman.Giraldus’ words prove, on close examination, to be of no help to us on the question of language; but on the other hand I have but recently begun looking out for stories bearing on it. It is my impression that such are not plentiful; but I proceed to subjoin an abstract of a phantom funeral tale in point fromYstên Sioned(Aberystwyth, 1882), pp. 8–16.Ystên Sioned, I ought to explain, consists of a number of stories collected and edited in Welsh by the Rev. Chancellor Silvan Evans, though he has not attached his name to it:—The harvest of 1816 was one of the wettest ever known in Wales, and a man and his wife who lived on a small farm in one of the largest parishes in the Hundred of Moeđin (see p. 245 above) in the Demetian part of Cardiganshire went out in the evening of a day which had been comparatively dry to make some reaped corn into sheaves, as it had long been down. It was a beautiful night, with the harvest moon shining brightly, and the field in which they worked had the parish road passing along one of its sides, without a hedge or a ditch to separate it fromthe corn. When they had been busily at work binding sheaves for half an hour or more, they happened to hear the hum of voices, as if of a crowd of people coming along the road leading into the field. They stopped a moment, and looking in the direction whence the sounds came, they saw in the light of the moon a number of people coming into sight and advancing in their direction. They bentthenagain to their work without thinking much about what they had seen and heard; for they fancied it was some belated people making for the village, which was about a mile off. But the hum and confused sounds went on increasing, and when the two binders looked up again, they beheld a large crowd of people almost opposite and not far from them. As they continued looking on they beheld quite clearly a coffin on a bier carried on the shoulders of men, who were relieved by others in turns, as usual in funeral processions in the country. ‘Here is a funeral,’ said the binders to one another, forgetting for the moment that it was not usual for funerals to be seen at night. They continued looking on till the crowd was right opposite them, and some of them did not keep to the road, but walked over the corn alongside of the bulk of the procession. The two binders heard the talk and whispering, the noise and hum as if of so many real men and women passing by, but they did not understand a word that was said: not a syllable could they comprehend, not a face could they recognize. They kept looking at the procession till it went out of sight on the way leading towards the parish church. They saw no more of them, and now they began to feel uneasy and went home leaving the corn alone as it was; but further on the funeral was met by a tailor at a point in the road where it was narrow and bounded by a fence (clawđ) on either side. The procession filled the roadfrom hedge to hedge, and the tailor tried to force his way through it, but such was the pressure of the throng that he was obliged to get out of their way by crossing the hedge. He also failed to understand a word of the talk which he heard. In about three weeks after this sham funeral33, there came a real one down that way from the upper end of the parish.Such, in brief, is the story so charmingly told by Silvan Evans, which he got from the mouths of the farmer and his wife, whom he considered highly honest and truthful persons, as well as comparatively free from superstition. The last time they talked to him about the incident they were very advanced in years, and both died within a few weeks of one another early in the year 1852. Their remains, he adds, lie in the churchyard towards which they had seen thetoelislowly making its way. Fortoeliis the phonetic spelling inYstên Sionedof the word which isteuluin North Cardiganshire and in North Wales, for Old Welshtoulu. The word now means ‘family,’ though literally it should mean ‘house-army’ or ‘house-troops,’ and it is practically a synonym fortylwyth, ‘family or household,’ literally ‘house-tribe.’ Now thetoeliortouluis such an important institution in Demetian Cardiganshire and some parts of Dyfed proper, that the word has been confined to the phantom, and for the word family in its ordinary significations one has there to have recourse to the non-dialect formteulu34. In North Cardiganshire and North Wales thetoeliis called simply aclađedigaeth, ‘burial,’ oranglađ, ‘funeral’; in the latter alsocynhebrwngis a funeral. I may add that when I was a child in the neighbourhood of Ponterwyd, on the upper course of the Rheidol, hardly a year used to pass without somebody or other meeting a phantom funeral. Sometimes one got entangled in the procession, and ran the risk of being carried off one’s feet by the throng. There is, however, one serious difference between our phantom funerals and the Demetiantoeli, namely, that we recognize our neighbours’ ghosts as making up the processions, and we have no trouble in understanding their talk. At this point a question of some difficulty presents itself as to thetoeli, namely, what family does it mean?—is it the family and friends of the departed on his way to the grave, or does it mean the family in the sense ofTylwyth Teg, ‘Fair Family,’ as applied to the fairies? I am inclined to the latter view, but I prefer thinking that the distinction itself does not penetrate very deeply, seeing that a certain species of theTylwyth Teg, or fairies, may, in point of origin, be regarded as deceased friends and ancestors of thetylwyth, in the ordinary sense of the word. In fact all this kind of rehearsal of events seems to have been once looked at as friendly to the men and women whom it concerned. This will be seen, for instance, in the Demetian account of thecanwyỻ gorff, or corpse candle, as granted through the intercession of St. David to the people of his special care, as a means of warning each to get ready in time for his death; that is to say, to prevent death finding him unprepared. It is hard to guess why it was assumed that thecanwyỻ gorffwas unknown in other parts of Wales. One or two instances in point occur in Owen’sWelsh Folklore, pp. 298–301; and I have myself heard of them being seen in Anglesey, while they were quite well known to members of Mrs. Rhys’ mother’s family, who lived in the parish of Waen Fawr, in the neighbourhood of Carnarvon. Nor does it appear that phantom funerals were at all confined to South Wales. Proof to the contrary is supplied to some extent in Owen’sFolklore, p. 301; but there is no doubt that in recent times the belief in them, as well as in thecanwyỻ gorff, has been more general and more vivid in South Wales than in North Wales, especially Gwyneđ.I have not been fortunate enough to come across anything systematic or comprehensive on the origin and meaning of ghostly rehearsals like the Welsh phantom funeral or coffin making. But the subject is an interesting one which deserves the attention of our leading folklore philosophers, as does also the cognate one of second sight, by which it is widely overlapped.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 theTylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin y Wig: the mother had heard that theTylwyth Tegexchanged 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 throughPwỻheli. 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 themWi, and that the latter repliedWi Weior 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 Carnarvonshire35. Now what are we to make of such a story? I recollectreading 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 Swncwl36: 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 andlistened, 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 theTylwyth Teg.In the story of the Moeđin funeral the language of thetoeliwas 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 wasGwyđeligor 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 RhitaGawr, ‘Rhita the Giant’; and it is possible that in the Keiri ofTre’r Ceiriwe have no other race than that of mixed Goidels and Picts whom the encroaching Brythonsfound in possession of the west of our island. Nay, one may say that this is rendered probable by the use made of the wordceiriin 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 Ceûri37.The Crown of the Giants’ Island.HereYnys y Ceûriinevitably recalls the fact that Britain is calledYnys y Kedyrn, or Island of the Mighty, in theMabinogion, 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.This last surmise is countenanced by the fact that in the Kulhwch story, the British Isles as a group are called Islands of the Mighty. The words areTeir ynys y kedyrn ae their rac ynys; that is, the Three Islands of the Mighty and their Three outpost Islands. That is not all, for in the same story the designation is varied thus:Teir ynys prydein ae their rac ynys38, orPrydain’s Three Islands and Prydain’s Three outpost Islands; and the substantial antiquity of the designation ‘the Islands of Prydain,’ is proved by its virtual identity with that used by ancient Greek authors like Ptolemy, who calls both Britain and Ireland aνῆσος Πρετανική, wherePretanicandPrydainare closely related words. Now ourPrydainhad in medieval Welsh the two formsPrydeinandPrydyn. But some time or other there set in a tendency to desynonymize them, so as to makeYnys Prydein, ‘the Picts’ Island,’ mean Great Britain, andPrydynmean the Pictland of the North. But just asCymrymeant the plural Welshmenandthe singular Wales, soPrydynmeant Picts39andthe country of the Picts. Now the pluralPrydynhas its etymological Goidelic equivalent in the vocableCruithni, which is well known to have meant the Picts or the descendants of thePictiof Roman historians. Further, this last name cannot be severed from that of thePictones40in Gaul, and it is usually supposed to have referred to their habit of tattooing themselves. At all events this agrees with the apparent meaning of the namesPrydynandCruithni, fromprydandcruth, the words in Welsh and Irish respectively forformorshape, the designation being supposed to refer to the forms or pictures of various animals punctured on the skins of the Picts. So much as to the practical identity of the termsPrydyn,Cruithni, and the Greeks’Pretanic; but how couldCedyrnandPrydeincorrespond in the termsYnys y KedyrnandYnys Prydein? This one is enabled to understand by means ofceûriorceirias a middle term. Nowcadarnmeans strong or valiant, and makes the pluralcedyrn; but there is another Welsh wordcadr41which has also the meaning of valiant or powerful, and may have yielded some such a medieval form asceidyrin the plural. Now thiscadris proved by its cognates42not to have always had the meaning of valiant or strong: its original signification was more nearly ‘fine, beautiful, or beautified.’ Thus what seems to have happened is, thatcadarn, ‘strong, powerful, mighty,’ influenced the meaning ofcadr, ‘beautiful,’ and eventually usurped its place in the name of the island, which from beingYnys y CeidyrbecameYnys y Cedyrn. But the former meant the ‘Island of the fine or beautiful men,’ which was closely enough the meaning also of the words Prydain, Cruithni, and Picts, as names of a people who delighted to beautify their persons by tattooing theirskins and making themselvesdistinguéin that savage fashion. That is not all, for on examination it turns out that the wordceiri, which has been treated up to this point as meaning giants, is but a double, so to say, of the wordcadrin the plural, both as to etymology and original meaning of beautiful. It is a word in constant use in Carnarvonshire, where it is ironically applied to pretentious men fond of showing themselves off, especially in the matter of clothes.’D ydi nhw ’n geiri!‘Aren’t they swells!’Dyna i ch’i gawr!‘There’s a fine fellow for you!’ and so also with the femininecawres. Of course thecawrof standard Welsh is familiar enough in the sense of giant to Carnarvonshire people, so the meaning can be best ascertained in the case of the pluralceiri, which they hardly ever meet with in print; and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, byceirithey mean—in an ironical sense it is true—fine fellows, with reference not to great stature or strength but to their get-up. Thus one arrives at the true interpretation of the nameTre’r Ceirias the Town of thePrydynorCruithni; that is to say, the Town of the Picts or the Aborigines, who showed themselves off decorated with pictures. So far also fromYnys y Ceiribeing an echo ofYnys y Cedyrn, it turns out to be really the more original of the two. Such names, when they are closely examined, are apt to prove old beyond all hastily formed expectation.

XIV.

Before closing this chapter, I wish to touch on the question of the language of the fairies, though fairy tales hardly ever raise it, as they usually assume the fairies to speak the same language as the mortals around them. There is, however, one well-known exception, namely, the story of Eliodorus, already mentioned, p. 117, as recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, who relates how Eliodorus, preferring at the age of twelve to play the truant to undergoing a frequent beating by his teacher, fasted two days in hiding in the hollow of a river bank, and how he was then accosted by two little men whoinduced him to follow them to a land of sports and other delights. There he remained long enough to be able, years later, to give his diocesan, the second Menevian bishop named David30, a comprehensive account of the people and realm of Faery. After Eliodorus had for some time visited and revisited that land of twilight, his mother desired him to bring her some of the gold of the fairies. So one day he tried to bring away the gold ball with which the fairy king’s son used to play; but he was not only unsuccessful, but subjected to indignities also, and prevented from evermore finding his way back to fairyland. So he had to go again to school and to the studies which he so detested; but in the course of time he learned enough to become a priest; and when, stricken in years, he used to be entreated by Bishop David to relate this part of his early history, he never could be got to unfold his tale without shedding tears. Among other things which he said of the fairies’ mode of living, he stated that they ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived for the most part on various kinds of milk food cooked after the fashion of stirabout, flavoured as it were with saffron31. But one of the most curious portions of Eliodorus’ yarn was that relating to the language of the fairies; for he pretended to have learnt it and to have found it to resemble his ownBritannica Lingua, ‘Brythoneg, or Welsh.’ In the words instanced Giraldus perceived a similarity to Greek32, which he accountedfor by means of the fabulous origin of the Welsh from the Trojans and the supposed sojourn made in Greece by those erring Trojans on their way to Britain. Giraldus displays quite a pretty interest in comparative philology, and talks glibly of theLingua Britannica; but one never feels certain that he knew very much more about it than the author of theGermania, the first to refer to it under that name. Tacitus, however, had the excuse that he lived at a distance and some eleven centuries before the advent of Gerald the Welshman.Giraldus’ words prove, on close examination, to be of no help to us on the question of language; but on the other hand I have but recently begun looking out for stories bearing on it. It is my impression that such are not plentiful; but I proceed to subjoin an abstract of a phantom funeral tale in point fromYstên Sioned(Aberystwyth, 1882), pp. 8–16.Ystên Sioned, I ought to explain, consists of a number of stories collected and edited in Welsh by the Rev. Chancellor Silvan Evans, though he has not attached his name to it:—The harvest of 1816 was one of the wettest ever known in Wales, and a man and his wife who lived on a small farm in one of the largest parishes in the Hundred of Moeđin (see p. 245 above) in the Demetian part of Cardiganshire went out in the evening of a day which had been comparatively dry to make some reaped corn into sheaves, as it had long been down. It was a beautiful night, with the harvest moon shining brightly, and the field in which they worked had the parish road passing along one of its sides, without a hedge or a ditch to separate it fromthe corn. When they had been busily at work binding sheaves for half an hour or more, they happened to hear the hum of voices, as if of a crowd of people coming along the road leading into the field. They stopped a moment, and looking in the direction whence the sounds came, they saw in the light of the moon a number of people coming into sight and advancing in their direction. They bentthenagain to their work without thinking much about what they had seen and heard; for they fancied it was some belated people making for the village, which was about a mile off. But the hum and confused sounds went on increasing, and when the two binders looked up again, they beheld a large crowd of people almost opposite and not far from them. As they continued looking on they beheld quite clearly a coffin on a bier carried on the shoulders of men, who were relieved by others in turns, as usual in funeral processions in the country. ‘Here is a funeral,’ said the binders to one another, forgetting for the moment that it was not usual for funerals to be seen at night. They continued looking on till the crowd was right opposite them, and some of them did not keep to the road, but walked over the corn alongside of the bulk of the procession. The two binders heard the talk and whispering, the noise and hum as if of so many real men and women passing by, but they did not understand a word that was said: not a syllable could they comprehend, not a face could they recognize. They kept looking at the procession till it went out of sight on the way leading towards the parish church. They saw no more of them, and now they began to feel uneasy and went home leaving the corn alone as it was; but further on the funeral was met by a tailor at a point in the road where it was narrow and bounded by a fence (clawđ) on either side. The procession filled the roadfrom hedge to hedge, and the tailor tried to force his way through it, but such was the pressure of the throng that he was obliged to get out of their way by crossing the hedge. He also failed to understand a word of the talk which he heard. In about three weeks after this sham funeral33, there came a real one down that way from the upper end of the parish.Such, in brief, is the story so charmingly told by Silvan Evans, which he got from the mouths of the farmer and his wife, whom he considered highly honest and truthful persons, as well as comparatively free from superstition. The last time they talked to him about the incident they were very advanced in years, and both died within a few weeks of one another early in the year 1852. Their remains, he adds, lie in the churchyard towards which they had seen thetoelislowly making its way. Fortoeliis the phonetic spelling inYstên Sionedof the word which isteuluin North Cardiganshire and in North Wales, for Old Welshtoulu. The word now means ‘family,’ though literally it should mean ‘house-army’ or ‘house-troops,’ and it is practically a synonym fortylwyth, ‘family or household,’ literally ‘house-tribe.’ Now thetoeliortouluis such an important institution in Demetian Cardiganshire and some parts of Dyfed proper, that the word has been confined to the phantom, and for the word family in its ordinary significations one has there to have recourse to the non-dialect formteulu34. In North Cardiganshire and North Wales thetoeliis called simply aclađedigaeth, ‘burial,’ oranglađ, ‘funeral’; in the latter alsocynhebrwngis a funeral. I may add that when I was a child in the neighbourhood of Ponterwyd, on the upper course of the Rheidol, hardly a year used to pass without somebody or other meeting a phantom funeral. Sometimes one got entangled in the procession, and ran the risk of being carried off one’s feet by the throng. There is, however, one serious difference between our phantom funerals and the Demetiantoeli, namely, that we recognize our neighbours’ ghosts as making up the processions, and we have no trouble in understanding their talk. At this point a question of some difficulty presents itself as to thetoeli, namely, what family does it mean?—is it the family and friends of the departed on his way to the grave, or does it mean the family in the sense ofTylwyth Teg, ‘Fair Family,’ as applied to the fairies? I am inclined to the latter view, but I prefer thinking that the distinction itself does not penetrate very deeply, seeing that a certain species of theTylwyth Teg, or fairies, may, in point of origin, be regarded as deceased friends and ancestors of thetylwyth, in the ordinary sense of the word. In fact all this kind of rehearsal of events seems to have been once looked at as friendly to the men and women whom it concerned. This will be seen, for instance, in the Demetian account of thecanwyỻ gorff, or corpse candle, as granted through the intercession of St. David to the people of his special care, as a means of warning each to get ready in time for his death; that is to say, to prevent death finding him unprepared. It is hard to guess why it was assumed that thecanwyỻ gorffwas unknown in other parts of Wales. One or two instances in point occur in Owen’sWelsh Folklore, pp. 298–301; and I have myself heard of them being seen in Anglesey, while they were quite well known to members of Mrs. Rhys’ mother’s family, who lived in the parish of Waen Fawr, in the neighbourhood of Carnarvon. Nor does it appear that phantom funerals were at all confined to South Wales. Proof to the contrary is supplied to some extent in Owen’sFolklore, p. 301; but there is no doubt that in recent times the belief in them, as well as in thecanwyỻ gorff, has been more general and more vivid in South Wales than in North Wales, especially Gwyneđ.I have not been fortunate enough to come across anything systematic or comprehensive on the origin and meaning of ghostly rehearsals like the Welsh phantom funeral or coffin making. But the subject is an interesting one which deserves the attention of our leading folklore philosophers, as does also the cognate one of second sight, by which it is widely overlapped.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 theTylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin y Wig: the mother had heard that theTylwyth Tegexchanged 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 throughPwỻheli. 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 themWi, and that the latter repliedWi Weior 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 Carnarvonshire35. Now what are we to make of such a story? I recollectreading 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 Swncwl36: 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 andlistened, 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 theTylwyth Teg.In the story of the Moeđin funeral the language of thetoeliwas 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 wasGwyđeligor 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 RhitaGawr, ‘Rhita the Giant’; and it is possible that in the Keiri ofTre’r Ceiriwe have no other race than that of mixed Goidels and Picts whom the encroaching Brythonsfound in possession of the west of our island. Nay, one may say that this is rendered probable by the use made of the wordceiriin 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 Ceûri37.The Crown of the Giants’ Island.HereYnys y Ceûriinevitably recalls the fact that Britain is calledYnys y Kedyrn, or Island of the Mighty, in theMabinogion, 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.This last surmise is countenanced by the fact that in the Kulhwch story, the British Isles as a group are called Islands of the Mighty. The words areTeir ynys y kedyrn ae their rac ynys; that is, the Three Islands of the Mighty and their Three outpost Islands. That is not all, for in the same story the designation is varied thus:Teir ynys prydein ae their rac ynys38, orPrydain’s Three Islands and Prydain’s Three outpost Islands; and the substantial antiquity of the designation ‘the Islands of Prydain,’ is proved by its virtual identity with that used by ancient Greek authors like Ptolemy, who calls both Britain and Ireland aνῆσος Πρετανική, wherePretanicandPrydainare closely related words. Now ourPrydainhad in medieval Welsh the two formsPrydeinandPrydyn. But some time or other there set in a tendency to desynonymize them, so as to makeYnys Prydein, ‘the Picts’ Island,’ mean Great Britain, andPrydynmean the Pictland of the North. But just asCymrymeant the plural Welshmenandthe singular Wales, soPrydynmeant Picts39andthe country of the Picts. Now the pluralPrydynhas its etymological Goidelic equivalent in the vocableCruithni, which is well known to have meant the Picts or the descendants of thePictiof Roman historians. Further, this last name cannot be severed from that of thePictones40in Gaul, and it is usually supposed to have referred to their habit of tattooing themselves. At all events this agrees with the apparent meaning of the namesPrydynandCruithni, fromprydandcruth, the words in Welsh and Irish respectively forformorshape, the designation being supposed to refer to the forms or pictures of various animals punctured on the skins of the Picts. So much as to the practical identity of the termsPrydyn,Cruithni, and the Greeks’Pretanic; but how couldCedyrnandPrydeincorrespond in the termsYnys y KedyrnandYnys Prydein? This one is enabled to understand by means ofceûriorceirias a middle term. Nowcadarnmeans strong or valiant, and makes the pluralcedyrn; but there is another Welsh wordcadr41which has also the meaning of valiant or powerful, and may have yielded some such a medieval form asceidyrin the plural. Now thiscadris proved by its cognates42not to have always had the meaning of valiant or strong: its original signification was more nearly ‘fine, beautiful, or beautified.’ Thus what seems to have happened is, thatcadarn, ‘strong, powerful, mighty,’ influenced the meaning ofcadr, ‘beautiful,’ and eventually usurped its place in the name of the island, which from beingYnys y CeidyrbecameYnys y Cedyrn. But the former meant the ‘Island of the fine or beautiful men,’ which was closely enough the meaning also of the words Prydain, Cruithni, and Picts, as names of a people who delighted to beautify their persons by tattooing theirskins and making themselvesdistinguéin that savage fashion. That is not all, for on examination it turns out that the wordceiri, which has been treated up to this point as meaning giants, is but a double, so to say, of the wordcadrin the plural, both as to etymology and original meaning of beautiful. It is a word in constant use in Carnarvonshire, where it is ironically applied to pretentious men fond of showing themselves off, especially in the matter of clothes.’D ydi nhw ’n geiri!‘Aren’t they swells!’Dyna i ch’i gawr!‘There’s a fine fellow for you!’ and so also with the femininecawres. Of course thecawrof standard Welsh is familiar enough in the sense of giant to Carnarvonshire people, so the meaning can be best ascertained in the case of the pluralceiri, which they hardly ever meet with in print; and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, byceirithey mean—in an ironical sense it is true—fine fellows, with reference not to great stature or strength but to their get-up. Thus one arrives at the true interpretation of the nameTre’r Ceirias the Town of thePrydynorCruithni; that is to say, the Town of the Picts or the Aborigines, who showed themselves off decorated with pictures. So far also fromYnys y Ceiribeing an echo ofYnys y Cedyrn, it turns out to be really the more original of the two. Such names, when they are closely examined, are apt to prove old beyond all hastily formed expectation.

Before closing this chapter, I wish to touch on the question of the language of the fairies, though fairy tales hardly ever raise it, as they usually assume the fairies to speak the same language as the mortals around them. There is, however, one well-known exception, namely, the story of Eliodorus, already mentioned, p. 117, as recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, who relates how Eliodorus, preferring at the age of twelve to play the truant to undergoing a frequent beating by his teacher, fasted two days in hiding in the hollow of a river bank, and how he was then accosted by two little men whoinduced him to follow them to a land of sports and other delights. There he remained long enough to be able, years later, to give his diocesan, the second Menevian bishop named David30, a comprehensive account of the people and realm of Faery. After Eliodorus had for some time visited and revisited that land of twilight, his mother desired him to bring her some of the gold of the fairies. So one day he tried to bring away the gold ball with which the fairy king’s son used to play; but he was not only unsuccessful, but subjected to indignities also, and prevented from evermore finding his way back to fairyland. So he had to go again to school and to the studies which he so detested; but in the course of time he learned enough to become a priest; and when, stricken in years, he used to be entreated by Bishop David to relate this part of his early history, he never could be got to unfold his tale without shedding tears. Among other things which he said of the fairies’ mode of living, he stated that they ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived for the most part on various kinds of milk food cooked after the fashion of stirabout, flavoured as it were with saffron31. But one of the most curious portions of Eliodorus’ yarn was that relating to the language of the fairies; for he pretended to have learnt it and to have found it to resemble his ownBritannica Lingua, ‘Brythoneg, or Welsh.’ In the words instanced Giraldus perceived a similarity to Greek32, which he accountedfor by means of the fabulous origin of the Welsh from the Trojans and the supposed sojourn made in Greece by those erring Trojans on their way to Britain. Giraldus displays quite a pretty interest in comparative philology, and talks glibly of theLingua Britannica; but one never feels certain that he knew very much more about it than the author of theGermania, the first to refer to it under that name. Tacitus, however, had the excuse that he lived at a distance and some eleven centuries before the advent of Gerald the Welshman.

Giraldus’ words prove, on close examination, to be of no help to us on the question of language; but on the other hand I have but recently begun looking out for stories bearing on it. It is my impression that such are not plentiful; but I proceed to subjoin an abstract of a phantom funeral tale in point fromYstên Sioned(Aberystwyth, 1882), pp. 8–16.Ystên Sioned, I ought to explain, consists of a number of stories collected and edited in Welsh by the Rev. Chancellor Silvan Evans, though he has not attached his name to it:—The harvest of 1816 was one of the wettest ever known in Wales, and a man and his wife who lived on a small farm in one of the largest parishes in the Hundred of Moeđin (see p. 245 above) in the Demetian part of Cardiganshire went out in the evening of a day which had been comparatively dry to make some reaped corn into sheaves, as it had long been down. It was a beautiful night, with the harvest moon shining brightly, and the field in which they worked had the parish road passing along one of its sides, without a hedge or a ditch to separate it fromthe corn. When they had been busily at work binding sheaves for half an hour or more, they happened to hear the hum of voices, as if of a crowd of people coming along the road leading into the field. They stopped a moment, and looking in the direction whence the sounds came, they saw in the light of the moon a number of people coming into sight and advancing in their direction. They bentthenagain to their work without thinking much about what they had seen and heard; for they fancied it was some belated people making for the village, which was about a mile off. But the hum and confused sounds went on increasing, and when the two binders looked up again, they beheld a large crowd of people almost opposite and not far from them. As they continued looking on they beheld quite clearly a coffin on a bier carried on the shoulders of men, who were relieved by others in turns, as usual in funeral processions in the country. ‘Here is a funeral,’ said the binders to one another, forgetting for the moment that it was not usual for funerals to be seen at night. They continued looking on till the crowd was right opposite them, and some of them did not keep to the road, but walked over the corn alongside of the bulk of the procession. The two binders heard the talk and whispering, the noise and hum as if of so many real men and women passing by, but they did not understand a word that was said: not a syllable could they comprehend, not a face could they recognize. They kept looking at the procession till it went out of sight on the way leading towards the parish church. They saw no more of them, and now they began to feel uneasy and went home leaving the corn alone as it was; but further on the funeral was met by a tailor at a point in the road where it was narrow and bounded by a fence (clawđ) on either side. The procession filled the roadfrom hedge to hedge, and the tailor tried to force his way through it, but such was the pressure of the throng that he was obliged to get out of their way by crossing the hedge. He also failed to understand a word of the talk which he heard. In about three weeks after this sham funeral33, there came a real one down that way from the upper end of the parish.

Such, in brief, is the story so charmingly told by Silvan Evans, which he got from the mouths of the farmer and his wife, whom he considered highly honest and truthful persons, as well as comparatively free from superstition. The last time they talked to him about the incident they were very advanced in years, and both died within a few weeks of one another early in the year 1852. Their remains, he adds, lie in the churchyard towards which they had seen thetoelislowly making its way. Fortoeliis the phonetic spelling inYstên Sionedof the word which isteuluin North Cardiganshire and in North Wales, for Old Welshtoulu. The word now means ‘family,’ though literally it should mean ‘house-army’ or ‘house-troops,’ and it is practically a synonym fortylwyth, ‘family or household,’ literally ‘house-tribe.’ Now thetoeliortouluis such an important institution in Demetian Cardiganshire and some parts of Dyfed proper, that the word has been confined to the phantom, and for the word family in its ordinary significations one has there to have recourse to the non-dialect formteulu34. In North Cardiganshire and North Wales thetoeliis called simply aclađedigaeth, ‘burial,’ oranglađ, ‘funeral’; in the latter alsocynhebrwngis a funeral. I may add that when I was a child in the neighbourhood of Ponterwyd, on the upper course of the Rheidol, hardly a year used to pass without somebody or other meeting a phantom funeral. Sometimes one got entangled in the procession, and ran the risk of being carried off one’s feet by the throng. There is, however, one serious difference between our phantom funerals and the Demetiantoeli, namely, that we recognize our neighbours’ ghosts as making up the processions, and we have no trouble in understanding their talk. At this point a question of some difficulty presents itself as to thetoeli, namely, what family does it mean?—is it the family and friends of the departed on his way to the grave, or does it mean the family in the sense ofTylwyth Teg, ‘Fair Family,’ as applied to the fairies? I am inclined to the latter view, but I prefer thinking that the distinction itself does not penetrate very deeply, seeing that a certain species of theTylwyth Teg, or fairies, may, in point of origin, be regarded as deceased friends and ancestors of thetylwyth, in the ordinary sense of the word. In fact all this kind of rehearsal of events seems to have been once looked at as friendly to the men and women whom it concerned. This will be seen, for instance, in the Demetian account of thecanwyỻ gorff, or corpse candle, as granted through the intercession of St. David to the people of his special care, as a means of warning each to get ready in time for his death; that is to say, to prevent death finding him unprepared. It is hard to guess why it was assumed that thecanwyỻ gorffwas unknown in other parts of Wales. One or two instances in point occur in Owen’sWelsh Folklore, pp. 298–301; and I have myself heard of them being seen in Anglesey, while they were quite well known to members of Mrs. Rhys’ mother’s family, who lived in the parish of Waen Fawr, in the neighbourhood of Carnarvon. Nor does it appear that phantom funerals were at all confined to South Wales. Proof to the contrary is supplied to some extent in Owen’sFolklore, p. 301; but there is no doubt that in recent times the belief in them, as well as in thecanwyỻ gorff, has been more general and more vivid in South Wales than in North Wales, especially Gwyneđ.

I have not been fortunate enough to come across anything systematic or comprehensive on the origin and meaning of ghostly rehearsals like the Welsh phantom funeral or coffin making. But the subject is an interesting one which deserves the attention of our leading folklore philosophers, as does also the cognate one of second sight, by which it is widely overlapped.

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 theTylwyth Teg. Never afterwards was the little girl allowed to go to Pin y Wig: the mother had heard that theTylwyth Tegexchanged 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 throughPwỻheli. 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 themWi, and that the latter repliedWi Weior 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 Carnarvonshire35. Now what are we to make of such a story? I recollectreading 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 Swncwl36: 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 andlistened, 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 theTylwyth Teg.

In the story of the Moeđin funeral the language of thetoeliwas 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 wasGwyđeligor 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 RhitaGawr, ‘Rhita the Giant’; and it is possible that in the Keiri ofTre’r Ceiriwe have no other race than that of mixed Goidels and Picts whom the encroaching Brythonsfound in possession of the west of our island. Nay, one may say that this is rendered probable by the use made of the wordceiriin 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 Ceûri37.The Crown of the Giants’ Island.

Coron ynys y Ceûri37.

Coron ynys y Ceûri37.

The Crown of the Giants’ Island.

The Crown of the Giants’ Island.

HereYnys y Ceûriinevitably recalls the fact that Britain is calledYnys y Kedyrn, or Island of the Mighty, in theMabinogion, 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.

This last surmise is countenanced by the fact that in the Kulhwch story, the British Isles as a group are called Islands of the Mighty. The words areTeir ynys y kedyrn ae their rac ynys; that is, the Three Islands of the Mighty and their Three outpost Islands. That is not all, for in the same story the designation is varied thus:Teir ynys prydein ae their rac ynys38, orPrydain’s Three Islands and Prydain’s Three outpost Islands; and the substantial antiquity of the designation ‘the Islands of Prydain,’ is proved by its virtual identity with that used by ancient Greek authors like Ptolemy, who calls both Britain and Ireland aνῆσος Πρετανική, wherePretanicandPrydainare closely related words. Now ourPrydainhad in medieval Welsh the two formsPrydeinandPrydyn. But some time or other there set in a tendency to desynonymize them, so as to makeYnys Prydein, ‘the Picts’ Island,’ mean Great Britain, andPrydynmean the Pictland of the North. But just asCymrymeant the plural Welshmenandthe singular Wales, soPrydynmeant Picts39andthe country of the Picts. Now the pluralPrydynhas its etymological Goidelic equivalent in the vocableCruithni, which is well known to have meant the Picts or the descendants of thePictiof Roman historians. Further, this last name cannot be severed from that of thePictones40in Gaul, and it is usually supposed to have referred to their habit of tattooing themselves. At all events this agrees with the apparent meaning of the namesPrydynandCruithni, fromprydandcruth, the words in Welsh and Irish respectively forformorshape, the designation being supposed to refer to the forms or pictures of various animals punctured on the skins of the Picts. So much as to the practical identity of the termsPrydyn,Cruithni, and the Greeks’Pretanic; but how couldCedyrnandPrydeincorrespond in the termsYnys y KedyrnandYnys Prydein? This one is enabled to understand by means ofceûriorceirias a middle term. Nowcadarnmeans strong or valiant, and makes the pluralcedyrn; but there is another Welsh wordcadr41which has also the meaning of valiant or powerful, and may have yielded some such a medieval form asceidyrin the plural. Now thiscadris proved by its cognates42not to have always had the meaning of valiant or strong: its original signification was more nearly ‘fine, beautiful, or beautified.’ Thus what seems to have happened is, thatcadarn, ‘strong, powerful, mighty,’ influenced the meaning ofcadr, ‘beautiful,’ and eventually usurped its place in the name of the island, which from beingYnys y CeidyrbecameYnys y Cedyrn. But the former meant the ‘Island of the fine or beautiful men,’ which was closely enough the meaning also of the words Prydain, Cruithni, and Picts, as names of a people who delighted to beautify their persons by tattooing theirskins and making themselvesdistinguéin that savage fashion. That is not all, for on examination it turns out that the wordceiri, which has been treated up to this point as meaning giants, is but a double, so to say, of the wordcadrin the plural, both as to etymology and original meaning of beautiful. It is a word in constant use in Carnarvonshire, where it is ironically applied to pretentious men fond of showing themselves off, especially in the matter of clothes.’D ydi nhw ’n geiri!‘Aren’t they swells!’Dyna i ch’i gawr!‘There’s a fine fellow for you!’ and so also with the femininecawres. Of course thecawrof standard Welsh is familiar enough in the sense of giant to Carnarvonshire people, so the meaning can be best ascertained in the case of the pluralceiri, which they hardly ever meet with in print; and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, byceirithey mean—in an ironical sense it is true—fine fellows, with reference not to great stature or strength but to their get-up. Thus one arrives at the true interpretation of the nameTre’r Ceirias the Town of thePrydynorCruithni; that is to say, the Town of the Picts or the Aborigines, who showed themselves off decorated with pictures. So far also fromYnys y Ceiribeing an echo ofYnys y Cedyrn, it turns out to be really the more original of the two. Such names, when they are closely examined, are apt to prove old beyond all hastily formed expectation.

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