Note 10 — Chapter II · The Fairies’ Revenge

The latter part of this tale, the mention of Ceridwen, invoked by the bards as the genius presiding over their profession, and of Tegid remaining on his father’s grave, is evidently a reference to Ỻyn Tegid, or Bala Lake, and to the legend of Taliessin in the so-called Hanes or history of Taliessin, published at the end of the third volume of Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion. So the story has undoubtedly been pieced together, but not all invented, as is proved by the reference to the curious cap which the husband was to keep out of the sight of his mermaid wife. In Irish legends this cap has particular importance attached to it, of which Glasynys cannot have been aware, for he knew of no use to make of it. The teaching of the song to the wife is not mentioned after the marriage; and the introduction of it at all is remarkable: at any rate I have never noticed anything parallel to it in other tales. The incident of the tempest, when the mermaid spoke to somebody by the side of the boat, reminds one of Undine during the trip on the Danube. It is, perhaps, useless to go into details till one has ascertained how much of the story has been based on genuine Welsh folklore. But, while I am on this point, I venture to append here an Irish tale, which will serve to explain the meaning of the mermaid’s cap, as necessary to her comfort in the water world. I am indebted for it to the kindness of Dr. Norman Moore, of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, who tells me, in a letter dated March 7, 1882, that he and the Miss Raynells of Killynon heard it from an old woman named Mrs. Dolan, who lived on the property of the late Mr. Cooke of Cookesborough, in Westmeath. The following was her tale:—‘There was a man named Mahon had a farm on the edge of Loch Owel. He noticed that his corn was trampled, and he sat up all night to watch it. He saw horses, colts and fillies rather, come up out of the lake and trample it. He chased them, and they fled into the lake. The next night he saw them again, and among them a beautiful girl with a cap of salmon skin on her head, and it shone in the moonlight; and he caught her and embraced her, and carried her off to his house and married her, and she was a very good housewife, as all those lake people are, and kept his house beautifully; and one day in the harvest, when the men were in the fields, she went into the house, and there she looked on the hurdle for some lard to make colcannon10 for the men, and she saw her old cap of fish skin, and she put it on her head and ran straight down into the lake and was never seen any more, and Mahon he was terribly grieved, and he died soon after of a decline. She had had three children, and I often saw them in the Mullingar market. They were farmers, too, on Loch Owel.’