Welsh Folklore and Legends: Twenty-Four Tales of the Tylwyth Teg, Retold

In 1188 a churchman rode through Wales and wrote down what people told him. Seven hundred years later a professor of Celtic walked the same valleys with a notebook, taking down names, ages and dates.This book is what lies between them.Twenty-four Welsh folk tales, retold from the collectors who went to the farms and the firesides while there was still somebody there to ask - Wirt Sikes, Elias Owen, Sir John Rhŷs, Jonathan Ceredig Davies, Marie Trevelyan and P. H. Emerson.A lake maiden whose sons founded a real dynasty of physicians, with land granted by a prince who died in 1234. A shoemaker's son who steps out of a fairy ring and works out, from the thickness of a hedge, how long he has been gone. A midwife who rubs an ointment into her own eye and sees the room she is standing in. A greyhound, a grave, and a village named after both. A herd of white cattle called home by name, and a slaughtered calf that comes down off the hook to follow them.And at the end of every tale, a note. Which book the story came from. Who put it there. What was changed in the retelling. And, where it applies, what is wrong with it - because some of what now reads as ancient Welsh lore was written by Victorians with a publisher waiting, and a reader is entitled to know which parts.The most famous version of the sleeping-warriors legend in this book reaches us through the greatest forger in Welsh literary history. The four obscure versions beside it do not. That contrast is the argument of the whole collection: some of this was made, some of it was carried mouth to mouth for seven centuries, and the difference is knowable.Includes a full source note for all twenty-four tales and a further reading section pointing to every collection used - all of them free to read online.Tales of the Celtic Lands, Book Two. Volume One is Irish Folklore and Legends.