Chapter I · Undine’s Kymric Sisters (continued 2)

At times one of the fairies was in the habit, as I was told by more than one of my informants, of coming out of Ỻyn Corwrion with her spinning-wheel (troeỻ bach) on fine summer days and betaking herself to spinning. While at that work she might be heard constantly singing or humming, in a sort of round tune, the words sìli ffrit. So that sìli ffrit Leisa Bèla may now be heard from the mouths of the children in that neighbourhood. But I have not been successful in finding out what Liza Bella’s ‘silly frit’ exactly means, though I am, on the whole, convinced that the words are other than of Welsh origin. The last of them, ffrit, is usually applied in Cardiganshire to anything worthless or insignificant, and the derivative, ffrityn, means one who has no go or perseverance in him: the feminine is ffriten. In Carnarvonshire my wife has heard ffrityn and ffritan applied to a small man and a small woman respectively. Mr. Hughes says that in Merioneth and parts of Powys sìli ffrit is a term applied to a small woman or a female dwarf who happens to be proud, vain, and fond of the attentions of the other sex (benyw fach neu goraches falch a hunanol a fyđai hoff o garu); but he thinks he has heard it made use of with regard to the gipsies, and possibly also to the Tylwyth Teg. The Rev. O. Davies thinks the words sìli ffrit Leisa Bèla to be very modern, and that they refer to a young woman who lived at a place in the neighbourhood, called Bryn Bèla or Brymbèla, ‘Bella’s Hill,’ the point being that this Bella was ahead, in her time, of all the girls in those parts in matters of taste and fashion. This however does not seem to go far enough back, and it is possible still that in Bèla, that is, in English spelling, Bella, we have merely a shortening of some such a name as Isabella or Arabella, which were once much more popular in the Principality than they are now: in fact, I do not feel sure that Leisa Bèla is not bodily a corruption of Isabella. As to sìli ffrit, one might at first have been inclined to render it by small fry, especially in the sense of the French ‘de la friture’ as applied to young men and boys, and to connect it with the Welsh sil and silod, which mean small fish; but the pronunciation of silli or sìli being nearly that of the English word silly, it appears, on the whole, to belong to the host of English words to be found in colloquial Welsh, though they seldom find their way into books. Students of English ought to be able to tell us whether frit had the meaning here suggested in any part of England, and how lately; also, whether there was such a phrase as ‘silly frit’ in use. After penning this, I received the following interesting communication from Mr. William Jones, of Ỻangoỻen:—The term sìli ffrit was formerly in use at Beđgelert, and what was thereby meant was a child of the Tylwyth Teg. It is still used for any creature that is smaller than ordinary. ‘Pooh, a silly frit like that!’ (Pw, rhyw sìli ffrit fel yna!). ‘Mrs. So-and-So has a fine child.’ ‘Ha, do you call a silly frit like that a fine child?’ (Mae gan hon a hon blentyn braf. Ho, a ydych chwi’n galw rhyw sìli ffrit fel hwnna’n braf?) To return to Leisa Bèla and Belenë, it may be that the same person was meant by both these names, but I am in no hurry to identify them, as none of my correspondents knows the latter of them except Mr. Hughes, who gives it on the authority of the bard Gutyn Peris, and nothing further so far as I can understand, whereas Bèla will come before us in another story, as it is the same name, I presume, which Glasynys has spelled Bella in Cymru Fu.

These tales are brought into connexion with the present day in more ways than one, for besides the various accounts of the bwganod or bogies of Corwrion frightening people when out late at night, Mr. D. E. Davies knows a man, who is still living, and who well remembers the time when the sound of working used to be heard in the pool, and the voices of children crying somewhere in its depths, but that when people rushed there to see what the matter was, all was found profoundly quiet and still. Moreover, there is a family or two, now numerously represented in the parishes of Ỻandegai and Ỻanỻechid, who used to be taunted with being the offspring of fairy ancestors. One of these families was nicknamed ‘Simychiaid’ or ‘Smychiaid’; and my informant, who is not yet quite forty, says that he heard his mother repeat scores of times that the old people used to say, that the Smychiaid, who were very numerous in the neighbourhood, were descended from fairies, and that they came from Ỻyn Corwrion. At all this the Smychiaid were wont to grow mightily angry. Another tradition, he says, about them was that they were a wandering family that arrived in the district from the direction of Conway, and that the father’s name was a Simwch, or rather that was his nickname, based on the proper name Simwnt, which appears to have once been the prevalent name in Ỻandegai. The historical order of these words would in that case have been Simwnt, Simwch, Simychiaid, Smychiaid. Now Simwnt seems to be merely the Welsh form given to some such English name as Simond, just as Edmund or Edmond becomes in North Wales Emwnt. The objection to the nickname seems to lie in the fact, which one of my correspondents points out to me, that Simwch is understood to mean a monkey, a point on which I should like to have further information. Pughe gives simach, it is true, as having the meaning of the Latin simia. A branch of the same family is said to be called ‘y Cowperiaid’ or the Coopers, from an ancestor who was either by name or by trade a cooper. Mr. Hughes’ account of the Smychiaid was, that they are the descendants of one Simonds, who came to be a bailiff at Bodysgaỻan, near Deganwy, and moved from there to Coetmor in the neighbourhood of Corwrion. Simonds was obnoxious to the bards, he goes on to say, and they described the Smychiaid as having arrived in the parish at the bottom of a caweỻ, ‘a creel or basket carried on the back,’ when chance would have it that the caweỻ cord snapped just in that neighbourhood, at a place called Pont y Ỻan. That accident is described, according to Mr. Hughes, in the following doggerel, the origin of which I do not know—

E dorai ’r arwest, ede wan,

Brwnt y ỻe, ar Bont y Ỻan.

The cord would snap, feeble yarn,

At that nasty spot, Pont y Ỻan.

Curiously enough, the same caweỻ story used to be said of a widely spread family in North Cardiganshire, whose surname was pronounced Massn and written Mason or Mazon: as my mother was of this family, I have often heard it. The caweỻ, if I remember rightly, was said, in this instance, to have come from Scotland, to which were traced three men who settled in North Cardiganshire. One had no descendants, but the other two, Mason and Peel—I think his name was Peel, but I am only sure that it was not Welsh—had so many, that the Masons, at any rate, are exceedingly numerous there; but a great many of them, owing to some extent, probably, to the caweỻ story, have been silly enough to change their name into that of Jones, some of them in my time. The three men came there probably for refuge in the course of troubles in Scotland, as a Frazer and a Francis did to Anglesey. At any rate, I have never heard it suggested that they were of aquatic origin, but, taking the caweỻ into consideration, and the popular account of the Smychiaid, I should be inclined to think that the caweỻ originally referred to some such a supposed descent. I only hope that somebody will help us with another and a longer caweỻ tale, which will make up for the brevity of these allusions. We may, however, assume, I think, that there was a tendency at one time in Gwyneđ, if not in other parts of the Principality, to believe, or pretend to believe, that the descendants of an Englishman or Scotsman, who settled among the old inhabitants, were of fairy origin, and that their history was somehow uncanny, which was all, of course, duly resented. This helps, to some extent, to explain how names of doubtful origin have got into these tales, such as Smychiaid, Cowperiaid, Pellings, Penelope, Leisa Bèla or Isabella, and the like. This association of the lake legends with intruders from without is what has, perhaps, in a great measure served to rescue such legends from utter oblivion.

VI.

Here, for the sake of comparison with the Northwalian stories in which the fairy wife runs away from her husband in consequence of his having unintentionally touched or hit her with the iron in the bridle, the fetter, or the stirrup, as on pp. 35, 40, 46, 50, 54, 61. I wish to cite the oldest recorded version, namely from Walter Mapes’ curious miscellany of anecdotes and legends entitled De Nugis Curialium Distinctiones Quinque. Mapes flourished in the latter part of the twelfth century, and in Distinctio ii. 11 of Thomas Wright’s edition, published in the year 1850, one reads the following story, which serves the purpose there of giving the origin of a certain Trinio, of whom Mapes had more to say:—

Aliud non miraculum sed portentum nobis Walenses referunt. Wastinum Wastiniauc secus stagnum Brekeinauc [read Brecheinauc], quod in circuitu duo miliaria tenet, mansisse aiunt et vidisse per tres claras a luna noctes choreas fæminarum in campo avenæ suæ, et secutum eum eas fuisse donec in aqua stagni submergerentur, unam tamen quarta vice retinuisse. Narrabat etiam ille raptor illius quod eas noctibus singulis post submersionem earum murmurantes audisset sub aqua et dicentes, ‘Si hoc fecisset, unam de nobis cepisset,’ et se ab ipsis edoctum quomodo hanc adepta [read -us] sit, quæ et consensit et nupsit ei, et prima verba sua hæc ad virum suum, ‘Libens tibi serviam, et tota obedientiæ devotione usque in diem illum prosilire volens ad clamores ultra Lenem [read Leueni] me freno tuo percusseris.’ Est autem Leueni aqua vicina stagno. Quod et factum est; post plurimæ prolis susceptionem ab eo freno percussa est, et in reditu suo inventam eam fugientem cum prole, insecutus est, et vix unum ex filiis suis arripuit, nomine Triunem Uagelauc.

‘The Welsh relate to us another thing, not so much a miracle as a portent, as follows. They say that Gwestin of Gwestiniog dwelt beside Brecknock Mere, which has a circumference of two miles, and that on three moonlight nights he saw in his field of oats women dancing, and that he followed them until they sank in the water of the mere; but the fourth time they say that he seized hold of one of them. Her captor further used to relate that on each of these nights he had heard the women, after plunging into the mere, murmuring beneath the water and saying, “If he had done so and so, he would have caught one of us,” and that he had been instructed by their own words, as to the manner in which he caught her. She both yielded and became his wife, and her first words to her husband were these: “Willingly will I serve thee, and with whole-hearted obedience, until that day when, desirous of sallying forth in the direction of the cries beyond the Ỻyfni, thou shalt strike me with thy bridle”—the Ỻyfni is a burn near the mere. And this came to pass: after presenting him with a numerous offspring she was struck by him with the bridle, and on his returning home, he found her running away with her offspring, and he pursued her, but it was with difficulty that he got hold even of one of his sons, and he was named Trinio (?) Faglog.’

In the Brython for 1863, pp. 114–15, is to be found what purports to be a copy of a version of the Legend of Ỻyn Syfađon, as contained in a manuscript of Hugh Thomas’ in the British Museum. It is to the effect that the people of the neighbourhood have a story that all the land now covered by the lake belonged to a princess, who had an admirer to whom she would not be married unless he procured plenty of gold: she did not care how. So he one day murdered and robbed a man who had money, and the princess then accepted the murderer’s suit, but she felt uneasy on account of the reports as to the murdered man’s ghost haunting the place where his body had been buried. So she made her admirer go at night to interview the ghost and lay it. Whilst he waited near the grave he heard a voice inquiring whether the innocent man was not to be avenged, and another replying that it would not be avenged till the ninth generation. The princess and her lover felt safe enough and were married: they multiplied and became numerous, while their town grew to be as it were another Sodom; and the original pair lived on so astonishingly long that they saw their descendants of the ninth generation. They exulted in their prosperity, and one day held a great feast to celebrate it; and when their descendants were banqueting with them, and the gaiety and mirth were at their zenith, ancestors and descendants were one and all drowned in a mighty cataclysm which produced the present lake.

Lastly may be briefly mentioned the belief still lingering in the neighbourhood, to the effect that there is a town beneath the waters of the lake, and that in rough weather the bells from the church tower of that town may be heard ringing, while in calm weather the spire of the church may be distinctly seen. My informant, writing in 1892, added the remark: ‘This story seems hardly creditable to us, but many of the old people believe it.’

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