British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and TraditionsSikes, Wirt
History
British Goblins: Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions
Sikes, Wirt
Folklore -- Wales; Goblins -- Wales; Mythology, Celtic -- Wales; Mythology, Welsh; Wales -- Social life and customs
The Gwrach y Rhibyn recently appeared, according to an account given
me by a person who claimed to have seen it, at Llandaff. Surely, no
more probable site for the appearance of a spectre so ancient of
lineage could be found, than that ancient cathedral city where some
say was the earliest Christian fane in Great Britain, and which was
certainly the seat of the earliest Christian bishopric. My narrator
was a respectable-looking man of the peasant-farmer class, whom I met
in one of my walks near Cardiff, in the summer of 1878. 'It was at
Llandaff,' he said to me, 'on the fourteenth of last November, when I
was on a visit to an old friend, that I saw and heard the Gwrach y
Rhibyn. I was sleeping in my bed, and was woke at midnight by a
frightful screeching and a shaking of my window. It was a loud and
clear screech, and the shaking of the window was very plain, but it
seemed to go by like the wind. I was not so much frightened, sir, as
you may think; excited I was--that's the word--excited; and I jumped
out of bed and rushed to the window and flung it open. Then I saw the
Gwrach y Rhibyn, saw her plainly, sir, a horrible old woman with long
red hair and a face like chalk, and great teeth like tusks, looking
back over her shoulder at me as she went through the air with a long
black gown trailing along the ground below her arms, for body I could
make out none. She gave another unearthly screech while I looked at
her; then I heard her flapping her wings against the window of a house
just below the one I was in, and she vanished from my sight. But I
kept on staring into the darkness, and as I am a living man, sir, I
saw her go in at the door of the Cow and Snuffers Inn, and return no
more. I watched the door of the inn a long time, but she did not come
out. The next day, it's the honest truth I'm telling you, they told me
the man who kept the Cow and Snuffers Inn was dead--had died in the
night. His name was Llewellyn, sir--you can ask any one about him, at
Llandaff--he had kept the inn there for seventy years, and his family
before him for three hundred years, just at that very spot. It's not
these new families that the Gwrach y Rhibyn ever troubles, sir, it's
the old stock.'
IV.
The close resemblance of this goblin to the Irish banshee (or benshi)
will be at once perceived. The same superstition is found among other
peoples of Celtic origin. Sir Walter Scott mentions it among the
highlands of Scotland.[96] It is not traced among other than Celtic
peoples distinctly, but its association with the primeval mythology
is doubtless to be found in the same direction with many other
death-omens, to wit, the path of the wind-god Hermes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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