Tales and Creatures from English Folklore

Y Tylwyth Teg (Welsh Fairies)

The Welsh Tylwyth Teg, or Fair Family, have much in common with the fairies of other cultures but also have some important differences. Most strikingly they look like beautiful humans in miniature, no wings, no flying, no fairy dust. They do their best to avoid humans, preferring the dark, out of the way places to dance and make their rings on the ground.

Welsh fairies, like their counterparts elsewhere in Britain, often feature in stories in which they steal people away. Supposedly having difficulty in reproducing themselves, fairies often steal human children and leave ugly changelings in their place; they frequently summon human midwives to help with the birth.

The theme of the swapped child is common in medieval literature and modernly reflects concern over infants thought to be afflicted with unexplained diseases, disorders, or developmental disabilities.

One such tale centres on a skilled Welsh midwife who had a servant named Eilian, whose mind was never on her work. "Away with the fairies," some folk would say, and indeed, one day she vanished. Shortly after Eilian's disappearance, a late-night knock at the door summoned the midwife to assist a woman in labour. She helped the mother deliver the child in a richly furnished room with carpets, tapestries, and handsomely carved furniture. The mother asked her to rub some ointment on the newborn's eyes, and so the midwife tried a little of it on her own eyes.

Immediately she saw that the splendid room was only a cave with straw on the floor and moss on the walls, and that the mother lying on the bare bedframe was the missing Eilian. Eilian begged her to say nothing and to go; there was no helping her, and so the midwife accepted her reward, a bag of fairy gold, and made her way home.

Welsh Fairies not only looked like their human counterparts but infrequently married them, producing children who were part fairy, part human. The most famous offspring of a human and fairy were the Physicians of Myddfai, the sons of a farmer and a fairy mother. The fairy eventually left the farmer and returned to the lake she came from, but before she did, she shared all her knowledge of the local plants with her two or, according to some, three young sons.

The boys grew up to be famous in the medieval world for cures they were able to achieve with plants. They were given lands by the local Prince so that Myddfai became an international centre for herbalism and medicine in the twelfth century, and the tradition was maintained up to 1739 when John Jones, the last physician died.