A major influence on John Rhŷs, the author of Celtic Folklore (1901), according to Rhŷs himself, was the the Welsh-language writer and folklorist Glasynys (Owen Wyn Jones) who, in the middle of the nineteenth century , wrote a series of accounts of the way festivals such as Calan Gaeaf were celebrated in rural areas in the mountains of North Wales, as well as tales about the Tylwyth Teg which were then still actively resonant in the imaginative life of these communities. His accounts were, in the words of one later commentator, shaped “in his own mould”[vii], seeking to recreate their essential core of the origins of the traditions he related. Here is the opening of his account of a Nos Galan Gaeaf Celebration:
“Whoever wishes to see and hear the traditional customs practised through the ages should come with me to Cwm Blaen y Glyn where they have been observed since time immemorial. There, in the quiet of the mountains, the young, adults and old folk gather together to celebrate Nos Galangaeaf.”
He describes how the evening begins with a large bonfire being lit on the hill above the valley. When the fire lighters have returned, the evening’s proceeding begin featuring the final fruits of the year’s harvest: apples and nuts. The apples are put in a tub of water and have to be removed by the younger attenders using only their teeth to pick them up, a custom known more generally as ‘apple bobbing’. A more adventurous version of this game for young adults was to stick a lit rush candle into the apple and players had to attempt to eat it without holding it in their hands, and without burning their cheeks! While this is going on oatcakes are cooked on a griddle on the fire and homemade mead is dispensed to the company.
The festival is also a time for divination. This is where the nuts come in. Those wishing to know if they will have good luck for the coming year put one of the nuts into the fire. Each one that cracks with a ‘clec’ means good luck. But if the nut burns without cracking it means bad luck.
At this point an awaited guest arrives: Rhydderch y Grythor who will provide music with his crwth or traditional fiddle. Traditional songs are sung, one such with a verse that may be translated something like this:
In the house there’s nuts to crack
For tonight is Calan Gaeaf;
In by the fire mead to drink,
Outside the Hwch Ddu Gwta.
The ‘Hwch Ddu Gwta’ or ‘Tailess Black Sow’ will chase anyone out after dark on this night, and woe betide anyone who is caught. Those within by the fire are safe for now. But for those whose nuts did not ‘clec’ in the fire, what may be their fate on their way home under the stars at the dark of the Moon beneath the far glitter of Orion’s belt where the Grey King haunts the skies?
As well as writing descriptive accounts such as this, he also incorporated traditional lore into short stories such as Y Fôr Forwyn (The Mermaid) where the traditional tale of a fisherman who meets and marries a mermaid is shaped into a more complex narrative where the Mermaid (Nefyn) is said to be the daughter of Nefydd Naf Neifion and the niece of both Gwydion ab Don and Gwyn ap Nudd, and in which the children of the marriage have to deal with its various consequences in both the human and the otherworld. Rhŷs recounts part of this tale in Celtic Folklore alongside others concerning the descendants of such mixed marriages including one where he states that “Glasynys maintains that [the descendants] were known to him at the time he wrote in 1863”.
Another appreciative account of his contribution to Welsh life records that he “…gave tongues to our old castles and our ruined forts, told the legends of our brave forbears and threw a magical aura over daily life through an expressive use of the Welsh language that was music to the souls of its speakers.” [xxiii]. Glasynys himself held this as a mission in a world where such things, he felt, were slowly being eroded from consciousness, saying in a essay of 1860 :
“The world has turned. Children are no longer raised to value such things. No care is taken to nurture an awareness of them so the result is that the world has shrunk, is weakened, is shrivelled and withered. The soul is not contained within the land and the life of the land, nor transformed in a view of the world which is its pattern or archetype.” [xxv]
This sense of the value of folklore as an expression of the spiritual health of society is an early identification of what, in our own time, has been described as ‘the disenchantment of the world’. But Glasynys, though he saw things were changing, still looked at rural life in Wales as an Arcadia, not only in the past, but still existing for him in the present.
Translated / paraphrased from the selection Straeon Glasynys ed. Saunders Lewis (1943) All quotations followed by roman numerals are references to the Introduction to this edition.
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