Celtic Lore & Legend by Bob Curran

son should suffer cold,
    Him in his father’s coal infold.
    Lest cold should seize my darling fair,
    For her, her mother’s robe prepare”.
    These children and their descendants, they say, were called Pellings ; a word corrupted from their mother’s name Penelope.
    Williams proceeds thus with reference to the descendants of this union:
    “The late Thomas Rowlands Esq., of Caeran in Anglesey, the father of the late Lady Bukeley, was a descendant of this lady if it be true that the name Pellings came from her; and there are still living several opulent and respectable people who are known to have sprung from the Pellings . The best blood in my own veins is this Fairy’s.”
    This tale was chronicled in the last century but it is not known whether every particular incident connected therewith was recorded by Williams. Glasynys , the Rev. Owen Wynne Jones, a clergyman, relates a tale in the Brython which he regards as the same tale as that given by Williams, and he says that he heard it scores of times when he was a lad. [ Editor’s Note : Glasynys was the pen name used by another celebrated Welsh folklorist and antiquarian: Owen Wynne Jones, who contributed to the Brython , a Welsh journal of history, tradition and folklore, to which Elias Owen alludes.] Glasynys was born in the parish of Rhostryfan in Carnarvonshire in 1827,and as the place of his birth is not far distant from the scene of this legend, he may have heard a different version of Williams’s tale and that too of equal value with Williams’s Possibly, there are not more than from forty to fifty years between the time when that older writer heard the tale and the time when it was heard by the younger man. An octogenarian or even a younger person could have conversed with both Williams and Glasynys. Glasynys tale appears in Professor Rhys’s Welsh Fairy Tales, Cymmrodor , vol iv, p. 188 . It originally appeared in the Brython for 1863 p. 193 . It is as follows:
    “One fine sunny morning, as the young heir of Ystrad was busied with his sheep on the side of Moel Eilio, he met a very pretty girl, and when he got home he told the folks there of it. A few days afterwards, he met her again, and this happened several times, when he mentioned it to his father, who advised him to seize her when he next met her. The next time he met her he proceeded to do so, but before he could take her away, a little fat old man came to them and begged them to give her back to him, to which the youth would not listen. The little man uttered terrible threats, but he would not yield, so an agreement was made between them that he was to have her to wife until he touched her skin with iron, and great was the joy both of the son and his parents in consequence. They lived together for many years, but once on a time, on the evening of Bettws Fair, the wife’s horse got restive, and somehow as the husband was attending to the horse, the stirrups touched the skin of her bare leg, and that very night, she was taken away from him. She had three or four children and more than one of their descendants, as Glasynys maintains, were known to him at the time he wrote in 1863”.
    No Welsh Taboo story can be complete without the pretty tale of the Van Lake Legend or, as it is called “The Myddfai Legend”. Because of its intrinsic beauty and worth and for sake of comparison with the preceding stories, I will relate this legend. There are various versions. [ Editor’s Note : For comparativepurposes I have chosen a version to which Elias Owen alludes and recounts in his Notes and which appeared in a volume of the Cambro-Briton in 1821.]
3. The Myddvai Legend
    “A man who lived in the farmhouse called Esgair-Ileathdy, in the parish of Myddvai in Carmarthenshire, having bought some lambs in a neighbouring fair, brought them to graze near Llyn a Van Voch on the Black Mountains. Whenever he visited the lambs, three most beautiful female figures presented themselves to him from the lake and often made