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
In the legends of the two shepherds of Cwm Llan and their experience
with the fairies, the first deals with the secrecy feature, while the
second reproduces the often-impressed lesson concerning the money
value of kindness. The first is as follows: One evening a shepherd,
who had been searching for his sheep on the side of Nant y Bettws,
after crossing Bwlch Cwm Llan, espied a number of little people
singing and dancing, and some of the prettiest damsels he ever set
eyes on preparing a feast. He went to them and partook of the meal,
and thought he had never tasted anything to equal those dishes. When
it became dusk they pitched their tents, and the shepherd had never
seen before such beautiful things as they had about them there. They
provided him with a soft feather-bed and sheets of the finest linen,
and he retired, feeling like a prince. But on the morrow, lo and
behold! his bed was but a bush of bulrushes, and his pillow a tuft of
moss. He however found in his shoes some pieces of silver, and
afterwards, for a long time, he continued to find once a week a piece
of silver placed between two stones near the spot where he had lain.
One day he divulged his secret to another, and the weekly coin was
never placed there again.
There was another shepherd near Cwm Llan, who heard some strange noise
in a crevice of a rock, and turning to see what it was, found there a
singular creature who wept bitterly. He took it out and saw it to be a
fairy child, but whilst he was looking at it compassionately, two
middle-aged men came to him and thanked him courteously for his
kindness, and on leaving him presented him with a staff as a token of
remembrance of the occasion. The following year every sheep he
possessed bore two ewe lambs. They continued to thus breed for years
to come; but one very dark and stormy night, having stayed very late
in the village, in crossing the river that comes down from Cwm Llan,
there being a great flood sweeping everything before it, he dropped
his staff into the river and saw it no more. On the morrow he found
that nearly all his sheep and lambs, like his staff, had been swept
away by the flood. His wealth had departed from him in the same way as
it came--with the staff which he had received from the guardians of
the fairy child.
IV.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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