The Fairy Bride Legend in Wales

Abstract

ON a recent visit to a Cardiff bookshop specialising in Welsh publications, the writer of the present article counted eleven different published versions of the story of the fairy from Llyn Y Fan Fach. The tale, which first appeared in print in the nineteenth century, tells the story of a fairy woman from the depths of Llyn y Fan Fach in Carmarthenshire who married a mortal. She returned to her supernatural realm when her husband violated conditions she herself had laid down, but her children became the famous doctor-magicians, the Physicians of Myddfai.' The published versions, both Welsh and English, currently gracing the shelves of the bookshop at the time of this little ad hoc field exercise all contained suitably romantic illustrations ' la Arthur Rackham. The tale has become firmly fixed in the canon of 'Welsh folktales'. Somehow it seems so typically Welsh with its otherworld fairy bride, poignant sense of lost love, and its doctor-magician sons. Very few printed collections of 'Welsh Folktales' are without it, which presents the interesting situation, in regards to the variant associated with Llyn Y Fan Fach, of a Welsh tale having to be translated back into its original language.2 Print is of course the important word. The Llyn y Fan Fach story appeared in 1861 in the introduction to The Physicians of Myddfai which contained a translation of the medical texts associated with this family and an introduction containing a long, printed English version of the tale.3 This is the first time this story of an otherworld bride was attached to the quite genuine, but presumably independent, traditions and medieval medical texts associated with this family of famous physicians.4 The printed version is long, and rather over-written. The lake lady's hair 'flows gracefully in ringlets over her shoulders ... whilst the glassy surface of her watery couch served for the purpose of a mirror'. The sun 'gilds with its rays the peaks of the Fan' and the young man vainly 'strains his eyeballs' over the lake looking for the 'enchanting vision'.5 Although the elements of the tale are probably genuine and were collected by the Welsh publisher and antiquary William Rees, native of Tonn, which is not far from Llyn Y Fan Fach, the version is given here in English. Once again the Celtic Twilight seems about to cast its roseate and distorting glow on the folklore itself. Fortunately Llyn y Fan Fach is not the only source for information about the Welsh Lake Lady. About three dozen variants of the tale dating from the tenth to the twentieth century are known, and the very fact that the tale has attained such a curious, almost icon-like status, tells us much about perceptions of Welsh tradition in and outside Wales. The study of folklore is not simply a matter of disentangling the purely oral from the literary and fictitious. The strands intertwine, and despite the comparatively small numbers, the Welsh versions of the Otherworld Bride allow us to chart the development of the tale in a changing cultural context. The tale is part of a widely distributed supernatural legend tradition in which an otherworld woman marries a mortal, but eventually returns to her world leaving him and their children. The tale is widespread, particularly in northern and western European countries where the woman is sometimes in animal form and the loss and recovery of her animal skin motivate her marriage and return. Sometimes she

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