Note 22 — Chapter I · Undine’s Kymric Sisters

Just as I was engaged in collecting these stories in 1881, a correspondent sent me a copy of the Ystrad tale as published by the late bard and antiquary, the Rev. Owen Wyn Jones, better known in Wales by his bardic name of Glasynys22, in the Brython23 for 1863, p. 193. I will not attempt to translate Glasynys’ poetic prose with all its compound adjectives, but it comes to this in a few words. One fine sunny morning, as the young heir of Ystrad was busied with his sheep on the side of Moel Eilio, he met a very pretty girl, and when he got home he told the folks there of it. A few days afterwards he met her again, and this happened several times, when he mentioned it to his father, who advised him to seize her when he next met her. The next time he met her he proceeded to do so, but before he could take her away, a little fat old man came to them and begged him to give her back to him, to which the youth would not listen. The little man uttered terrible threats, but the heir of Ystrad would not yield, so an agreement was made between them, that the latter was to have the girl to wife until he touched her skin with iron, and great was the joy both of the son and his parents in consequence. They lived together for many years; but once on a time, on the evening of the Bettws Fair, the wife’s horse became restive, and somehow, as the husband was attending to the horse, the stirrup touched the skin of her bare leg, and that very night she was taken away from him. She had three or four children, and more than one of their descendants, as Glasynys maintains, were known to him at the time he wrote in 1863. Glasynys regards this as the same tale which is given by Williams of Ỻandegai, to whom we shall refer later; and he says that he heard it scores of times when he was a lad.