Ep 50: Welsh Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends with Claire Fayers
Why does the Welsh flag have a dragon on it? In episode 50 with fairy tale author Claire Fayers, we explore this and more Welsh folklore mysteries. In our discussion, Claire, author of ‘Welsh Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends’, gives us insights into Welsh language revival efforts and the resurgence of interest in Celtic traditions. Claire was born and brought up in South Wales and has built a successful writing career, including her award-winning children’s book The Accidental Pirates: Voyage to Magical North. We explore the darker themes of traditional fairy tales, her creative writing process, and how fairy tale retellings are adapted for modern audiences. Other questions we discuss based off her fairy tale adaptations include, should you ever trust the magical Tylwyth Teg and how did the town of Beddgelert get its name? Don’t miss this fun episode!
Links: https://clairefayers.com/
Notes:
📚 Claire’s Writing Career
- She built a successful writing career, including the award-winning children’s book “The Accidental Pirates Voyage to Magical North.”
- Claire has written eight books, including “Fairy Tales, Myths, and Legends.”
🗣 Language Preservation
- Importance of language in preserving culture and identity discussed.
- Bilingual programs and changing attitudes towards speaking multiple languages mentioned.
📖 Research Methods
- Claire collects information by talking to people and research
- Stories are often passed down through generations with variations.
📚 Story Selection
- Claire carefully selects stories that are relatable for children and can connect with them.
- Some stories needed adjustments to make them more suitable for younger audiences.
🔍 Challenges of Retelling Stories
- Adapting stories to be more relatable for children was a challenge.
- Making the stories engaging and suitable for schools and storytimes.
🌟 Impact of Storytelling
- Sharing stories helps in connecting people and preserving cultural heritage.
- Stories reflect the values and experiences of different cultures.
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Fabric of Folklore website
Vanessa Rogers: 0:05
Welcome, folksy folks. Welcome to fabric of Folklore. I am your hostess, Vanessa Y. Rogers, and this is a podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. Folklore is so much more than folk tales. It’s mythology, language, folk art, traditions. When we think of pirates, for instance, we think of it during the golden age of piracy in the 17th and 18th century. Although it has been around since the dawn of maritime trade and still exists in waters today, piracy folklore continues to captivate audiences in movies and literature, although so much of what we’ve been exposed to is part tall tales and legends that usually hold some truths, but also exaggerated fabrications. What this podcast is attempting to do is to find truths, defined origins, the heart of folklore that we’ve grown up with. Understanding our own folklore helps us to understand our truth, our history and our origins, and that of other cultures as well. When we dive deep into folklore, we’re participating in shaping our own identities and building bridges to people within our own culture and that of other cultures. So that sounds like a podcast that you want to continue to follow. Make sure you hit that subscribe button whether you’re watching on YouTube or you’re listening on your favorite podcasting platform. So you get notifications every week when our podcast drops. And if you’re a long time listener, please consider us. Consider giving us reviews because that is so helpful for indie podcasts like ourselves to be found by new listeners. We have a fun, fantastic show for you today, all about welsh fairy tales. Our author, Claire Fayers asks the questions, why does the welsh flag have a dragon on it? How did the town of Bethlehurt, I probably butchered that get its name? And how and should you ever trust a magical tall teg? Clay Fayers was born and brought up in south Wales. She studied English at Canterbury Christchurch University, where she built a successful writing career, including the children’s book the Accidental Pirates Voyage to Magical north, which has won several children’s awards in 2017 and 2016. Claire has written eight books, including the book we’ll be discussing today, fairy tales, myths and legends. So thank you so much for joining us, Claire.Claire Fayers: 2:31
Hi, Vanessa. Which means good evening in Welsh.Vanessa Rogers: 2:36
Oh, yes, because we’re in completely different time zones. It’s the mid afternoon for us and it’s evening for you.Claire Fayers: 2:45
Yes.Vanessa Rogers: 2:48
Well, how did you get started as an author? And were you always interested in welsh fairy tales?Claire Fayers: 2:58
I’ve always been interested in fairy tales, I think for growing up, actually, if it’s not growing up in South Wales, we didn’t do anything about welsh stories, so I came to them quite late and part of my english degree was myths and legends and the oral tradition of storytelling. But again, we did a lot of european folklore with that. Didn’t do any celtic, didn’t do anything welsh at that point. And so it wasn’t until quite a while after I’d written my first couple of books, and then people kept saying, oh, you’re a welsh author, so how does living in Wales inspire your writing? And I suddenly thought, it really should. I need to look up more of this. And then once I started discovering the stories, there were just so many fascinating. Wow. Stories around and utterly bizarre ones as well, and I just completely fell in love with them.Vanessa Rogers: 3:59
So you didn’t grow up hearing welsh fairy tales, then?Claire Fayers: 4:05
Not at all. In fact, the town I grew up in the south of Wales was very anglicized at the time. We thought that Welsh was spoken by a few funny people up north. And the only couple of books I ever read that had a welsh setting were some Enid Blyton ones where the famous five went to Wales. And it wasn’t actual Wales, it was some sort of made up Wales where people spoke a bit funny. And there was a mountain, I’m not sure. Yeah, I think he’d probably been to Wales at some point, but, yeah, it didn’t feel like it.Vanessa Rogers: 4:44
So did you not grow up speaking Welsh?Claire Fayers: 4:47
No, not at all. No. I grew up in the. In the seventies and there was still quite a lot of antagonism towards the welsh language. There have been efforts to actually stamp out the welsh language for quite a while and then people had started to fight back and I think a lot of people felt that money was being wasted on a language that really hardly anybody spoke. But it’s surprising that in the past 1015 years, there’s been a real resurgence in popularity because I learned Welsh as an adult and a lot of people are doing that now. And schools will teach if the kids can only say hello, goodbye, and count up to ten, at least they learn a little bit in the primary schools so that they can at least do a smarter ring.Vanessa Rogers: 5:45
And where. Where is Welsh actually spoken natively? Is there. Is there anyone in Wales that speak it as their first language?Claire Fayers: 5:56
There are a few places where people do, mainly further up north in Wales and out towards the west coast a little bit. I think that as you get a bit further away from the english border, some people do. A lot of people now will grow, kids will grow up bilingual because there are quite a lot of welsh schools now.Vanessa Rogers: 6:19
That’s nice.Claire Fayers: 6:20
The parents, you might have. The parents speak English, but because the welsh school has got a good reputation, they want the children to go. The children will learn Welsh in school then, and they grow up with the two languages, which I think it’s a great advantage for them, just being able to express yourself in two ways. It really does seem to help.Vanessa Rogers: 6:43
And is the language itself, is it related at all to Gaelic? Because that’s what’s spoken in Ireland. Was it spoken in Scotland as well?Claire Fayers: 6:54
In Scotland, yes. And you’ve also got manks on the Isle of Man and Cornish as well. I’m probably mixing up my regional languages now. I’m terribly sorry to people in the island, but there are a few sort of regional languages that are still spoken. And I think in Ireland, there are efforts to sort of promote the. The irish language now. And, yeah, I think more people. More people are, and I think more people are getting interested in learning because it’s so much connected into the culture and the history of the country as well, that people are now gaining an appetite for it, for their own stories, for their own national history. And the language plays a big part in that.Vanessa Rogers: 7:45
I feel that, too. I am in Texas, and Texas is especially where I’m in south Texas. There’s a lot of Spanish spoken, and I know that generation, a generation just behind me, you know, they were discouraged from speaking Spanish. And so there were a lot of people in, like, public education settings that were, like, Spanish was beaten out of them, like, they weren’t allowed to speak in school. And now today, you see bilingual programs popping up everywhere. So there’s been a. I feel like a general change of attitude towards, speaking.Claire Fayers: 8:27
Yeah.Vanessa Rogers: 8:27
Speaking languages, and rather than just having a mono language that everybody in the world speaks, that there’s value in.Claire Fayers: 8:35
Yes.Vanessa Rogers: 8:35
Learning.Claire Fayers: 8:37
Learning, yes, that sounds very similar. There was an infamous thing in welsh schools at one point called the welsh knot, which is a thing that would be hung around the child’s neck, and if a child is heard speaking Welsh, this thing would be hung around their neck, and then it would be moved on to the next child if another child is heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had it on at the end of the day would beaten and. Yes. Am I not. Yeah. And again, I don’t know how much that was actually used and how much the teachers brought into it, but it is a thing that everyone would be aware of that there really was an effort to. It was felt that speaking Welsh held people back. So, yeah, people would, obviously, with good intentions, trying to stop the children from speaking it right. I guess it’s the same sort of thing, but yeah.Vanessa Rogers: 9:31
So because you didn’t grow up with welsh fairy tales? What fairy tale was your. Do you remember having a favorite fairy tale growing up?Claire Fayers: 9:40
I remember those. I think I had so many favorites because I read at Top Street, I still read about three times faster than most people, and people don’t believe, and I taught, I tour through books. We live close to the library. And I can remember the first time I came across a greek myths for kids. And I was absolutely entranced with the ideas of flying horses and monsters with snakes for hair and all the great epic tales and loved those. And then I went right through all the brothers Grimm and I. I loved all those. I loved the darkness in those stories.Vanessa Rogers: 10:19
Interesting. Even as a child.Claire Fayers: 10:21
Interesting, yeah, even as a child, I think I was drawn to that sort of slightly dark edge that some of them had. And there is often a natural justice in the stories that I really loved. The youngest one, who got kicked by the family would come out on top, and. Which is not. I was the oldest and I did the kicking, so I can’t claim to feel any solidarity for that. But there was this sense of. Sense of justice to the story, to the stories, and the sense that there was stuff lurking in the shadows that we generally don’t notice. And I think a lot of the wow stories draw on that as well.Vanessa Rogers: 11:05
So you don’t feel like it scared you or scarred you at all to read those really dark stories growing up.Claire Fayers: 11:14
Only in it made me obsessed with them for the rest of my life. I think that’s actually a good thing. But no, I enjoyed that slightly scary quality to them.Vanessa Rogers: 11:27
I’m glad to hear that because I’m doing a collaborative program with Donna Lee Fields, and it’s called Fairytale Flip. And were just discussing this about one of the. We did it live, and one of the listeners said she read a few of the original Grimm stories to her grandchild, and they were kind of shocked at the harshness. And so we had a discussion about, you know, whether or not it’s appropriate to read them to our children today. And, you know, we just had, like, you know, a conversation about that. So I am glad to hear that you were really intrigued by it and not, you know, damaged by.Claire Fayers: 12:06
Yeah, yes. I was certainly not put off or damaged by that. I mean, yeah, children are different, and when I was retelling mine for children, I had tone down some of it. And, yeah, absolutely.Vanessa Rogers: 12:21
Even my two kids yeah. Yes, absolutely. One of them. I don’t want to tell scary stories too, because her imagination is way too active, but she imagines everything. And one of the things I read in your bio was that you. You. You said that you attribute a lot to your local library. And I really love that because I personally have. Love that we have libraries and that we have access to all of these books. And I just find that libraries are so. Such blessings. And so I just wanted to ask you a little bit about your library experience.Claire Fayers: 13:02
Oh, completely, yeah. Our library was. I remember it as being huge. It was a single room, so it was probably very small, but we. It was walking distance from our house. My mother didn’t work, and there were four of us kids. And so, yeah, we didn’t have much money in the house to actually buy books. But almost every Saturday when were little, I remember that she would round up between me and my two sisters. I think my brother got out of it, but she would just take us down the library and let us loose on the shelves. And it was still when we had little cardboard tickets, which are great, so that there was no electronic system. You had these little things, little cardboard things, and there’d be a little slip of paper in the book and you take the book out, the librarian with stick paper into the ticket and then file it away. And she would rifle through these tickets so fast, it was like something magical that she could find the tickets again for you. And I just really loved it. And part of it was just being allowed to spend time there and look at books, find things that I liked, find things I didn’t like, make my own decisions about what I wanted to read. I think as long as I was reading something, my parents didn’t look too closely at what I was reading a lot of the time, so I was free to just really. Yeah, read what I wanted. I think that just had a big effect on me as a child.Vanessa Rogers: 14:40
Absolutely. I think books are, you know, monumental in a child’s life, so. Yeah, I agree. So let’s get into your book, the Welsh Fairy tales, myths and legends. How do your research for these books?Claire Fayers: 14:55
Okay, well, this one. Yeah, that’s a copy of it there. It was actually my lockdown project. This one, I had started doing some research on welsh stories for a previous book I’d written, which was a fantasy that was set in Wales. And then lockdown happened. All my work got cancelled and my agent called to say, there’s a publisher wanted to find a welsh author to write the set of myths and legends. And would I be interested? Because I leapt on it. And normally for something like that, I would travel, I would want to go to the places that were mentioned in the stories. I would actually want to talk to people and collect information that way. But all my research for it was done online. And so I started off in very broad terms, just looking up different myths and legends. I already knew about the mabinogion in Welsh, the main to the most best known welsh collection. And then I just looked up folktales of different place names, different counties through Wales. And when I found something I liked the look of, I would then find every single version of it that existed online. And there’s one very interesting one in here. It’s called the leaves that hung but never grew. And I found that because my husband went on a conference in mid Wales at some point a long time ago, and the first page of it was hung up as a print in the room. And he knows that I collect stories. He took the photo of it and sent it to me and said, oh, do you know this story? I said, never heard of that one. And I eventually, I was working in the Cadaver University library at the time. I eventually managed to track the thing down through the library, set an interlibrary loan service, and got hold of this copy of a book which was hundred odd years old and pages falling out of it. And yes, I actually managed to see the original story, but it took me a good six months to find it.Vanessa Rogers: 17:06
Oh, wow. And it made the cut.Claire Fayers: 17:10
It must have been that one made the cut. Yeah, I had found. I’d already got that one when I started writing the book. And so I thought, well, I’ve got to put that one in because it was so interesting and actually hunting it down and finding the original and then trying, because the original is an odd little thing and it’s very half finished that a girl is sent on this quest to find the leaves that hung but never grew. And then along the road she meets a dwarf and she says, I’m going to find the leaves that hung that never grew. And the dwarf tells her to go away, and so she does. And then you never see the dwarf again. So I’m then trying to turn it into a story that has a proper causality and trade of events in it.Vanessa Rogers: 17:54
So that one in particular, that one was a retelling. So you changed it a little bit.Claire Fayers: 18:00
Yes. Yes, I did. Have my little dwarf man come back at the end and actually have some point in the story. Yeah, why did she meet him? He didn’t do anything.Vanessa Rogers: 18:12
Yeah. What was the point of him?Claire Fayers: 18:15
Yeah. And I think part of that, I think, is that the. A lot of the stories come from the oral tradition originally, and so they’d have been told around campfires and then the pub, whatever. Somebody would tell a bit of a story to somebody who would half remember it, tell it to somebody else and so on. So I think when they were written down, then they were written as they were told.Vanessa Rogers: 18:43
Now, in Wales, is there an equivalent to the Grimm’s brothers? The Grimm’s brothers, who went around to different towns and collected oral storytelling, oral folktales, and put them in a compilation and, you know, presented the world a book of fairy tales. Is there an equivalent in Wales of that?Claire Fayers: 19:04
Not quite so much, but there were several gen. Victorian gentlemen who, when the late victorian times, people got very interested in local culture and traditional stories and the whole gothic movement. And there were several people who travelled around in Wales, talked to people, collected the stories, possibly didn’t write them down entirely accurately because they were trying to make them sound a bit better sometimes. So you take some of them with a pinch of salt as to when they say, this thing definitely happened, you think, yeah, it probably didn’t. But a lot of those are. They’re not collections in the same way as the Brothers Grimm. There’s a collection of british goblins by the chocolate Wirt Sykes, who is often quoted. And they tend to be more sort of chapters on the different types of folklore, with more talk about the people that they met, things with, some of the stories thrown in. So they’re not collections of polished stories like the Grimm ones, but they are very interesting to look at, especially if you’re looking up where some of these stories come from.Vanessa Rogers: 20:20
And what was that book called?Claire Fayers: 20:23
So it’s. Fitz Sykes is the. The author and it’s just british goblins.Vanessa Rogers: 20:31
And so a lot of these stories that you tell in your books, are they only in Wales or some of the stories shared within the different countries that are close to you?Claire Fayers: 20:43
Yeah, you do get some overlap. You tend to get motifs that pop up in different places rather than the actual stories. So the notion of the. The welsh, other world, welsh realm of Annwn, which is, sometimes it’s the realm of the dead, sometimes it’s the realm of magic. You’ve got a similar thing in irish folklore with the magic realm that’s just out of sight. Yeah. Beth Gellert, you mentioned at the beginning, and the basic pattern of that story is the sort of faithful animal that ends up getting killed because of a horrible mistake. And that one crops up in quite a few storytelling traditions.Vanessa Rogers: 21:32
Oh, why don’t you tell it to us? Yeah.Claire Fayers: 21:35
Okay, so. So Gellert is the faithful dog of Llywelyn Valer, who was when the most. The last Prince of Wales and the most famous. And the story goes that Llewelyn had a baby son who he loved more than anything in the world apart from his dog. And so he took this son on a hunting trip and then promptly proceeded to leave the baby unattended while he went out hunting all day, apart from the dog looking after him. And when you look at the details of the story, then you think, now hang on a minute. But he basically leaving his faithful hound Gellert to look after the baby every day. Then he comes back from hunting one day, finds the cradle has been overturned, there’s blood all over the place. And Gellert is standing there with blood dripping from his mouth. And so Llewelyn draws his sword, kills the dog, at which point hears the baby crying and realizes there’s a dead wolf in the room, which he’s completely failed to notice until that moment. Yeah. And it’s thought that the story was probably invented by an innkeeper who was trying to drum up the tourist trade at some point.Vanessa Rogers: 22:54
That’s funny. Although. From the town.Claire Fayers: 22:58
Yeah, from the town. But you can actually go and visit the gelert’s grave in the town now.Vanessa Rogers: 23:04
Oh, wow.Claire Fayers: 23:05
And it’s because the town is called Beth Gelert, which is. Which means Gelert’s grave. And there’s a monument to this, to the dog there now. But that. That story pattern appears in a few indian stories. It appears in a few different cultures. And it’s the notion of the sort of the faithful animal, the faithful servant who is mistakenly killed.Vanessa Rogers: 23:34
Did any other stories surprise you that you came across?Claire Fayers: 23:40
I think a surprising. Was it? But the welsh devil is quite surprising.Vanessa Rogers: 23:46
Okay.Claire Fayers: 23:47
I started finding stories about the welsh devil and in fact, there is a book that I have yet to read on the whole note, the whole history of sort of folklore, the devil in Wales, which I really must get on and read at some point. But a lot of the devil stories, he’s more of a sort of sprite or goblin originally. And I think then the welsh religious revival happened and the devil got attached to a lot of the stories. But he’s more of a mischievous trickster type character than the actual devil in the Bible. And he likes to make bets with people and he’s not very bright. And so a lot of the time, a lot of the stories are about people getting the better of the devil in some bet that they’ve made, but those ones are quite fun and it’s. Yeah, it’s a very different character from the sort of biblical devil that you might expect.Vanessa Rogers: 24:50
And did you. So was that, did that make your story list in your book?Claire Fayers: 24:57
Yeah, I’ve got quite a few. This devil’s bridge, which is a cheek. The story happens not that far from where I live, where somebody, I think the bridge has fallen in because of a storm. And the main character, who’s an old woman in the original life material, into a younger girl, she needs to get across to rescue one of the cows that’s got stuck on the other side of the river. And up pops the devil. I’ll build you a bridge across if you give me the first living soul that crosses it. It’s a, it’s a. It’s another fairly common story motif. So she says, okay, and once the bridge is built, she throws a bone or a stick or something for the dog to run across and the devil basically says, oh, what do I want a dog for? And disappears in half. So. So that’s that one. And there’s another with, there’s a. Yeah, there’s a mountain called Mount Skirrid and the. The name comes from the welsh word uskwyd, which means split, because the top of the mountain is split. A bit of it slid off of the ice age, probably, but there’s three or four different stories as to how it got split. And a couple of them involve the devil having a bet with a local giant called Giant Jack the wizards and a giant and a sorcerer. And in one of them he bets the giant that he can’t jump from the top of that mountain across to the top of the next one. And he does, but he kicks a big lump out of the mountain.Vanessa Rogers: 26:33
Oh, I love that.Claire Fayers: 26:35
Yeah. So there. So I’ve got. Yeah, I’ve got a couple of those in there.Vanessa Rogers: 26:42
So was it hard deciding which stories it would make the cut and what stories would go in or did it?Claire Fayers: 26:52
Yeah, it really was hard, actually, because there are so many good stories. I wanted to have some from the mabanagi. That’s the. The best known collection. I wanted to have at least one King Arthur, because King Arthur is strongly associated with Wales. And then. Yeah, it was a case of lining them all up and thinking, which ones do I think? Which ones can I tell best, really? And because it’s a collection for children. It’s which ones are going to work best for kids? Which ones will the children be able to connect with?Vanessa Rogers: 27:33
What age group is this book intended for?Claire Fayers: 27:38
It’s about sort of nine to twelve, but in a lot of. It’s on the syllabus in a lot of the welsh schools now. And they will also use it for the younger, sort of five, six years up, where the teacher will read them a story. I’ve had some lovely sessions in schools with the younger children where I’ll tell them a story or two and then get them to draw me pictures of monsters and dragons and so, yeah, so it’s good. The stories take about ten minutes to read. So it stood. It’s been very good for story times in schools. This one, I think.Vanessa Rogers: 28:16
Oh, perfect. And you said that. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges of retelling stories? Because some of the stories you said needed a little bit of work.Claire Fayers: 28:29
Yes. Some of it is to make them more relatable for children. So some of the stories in here, for example, this one called the fairy Harp, where somebody acquires a magical harp which he then misuses and it breaks the original story, it’s an old man who gets the harp from a fairy. In this one, we, there’s a tradition of our schools of I Stateford and I steadfoot is a sort of festival competition thing of arts and music. And so the kids will write poems and stories. And I said for a day they’ll all go up and they’ll sing a song or play a bit and an instrument they’re learning just to show the kinds of things they’re doing. And so I just decided to set it during one of them. The boy is wanting to win the est Edward and he gets hold of the fairy harp. So that one actually fell. Once I decided on that, the story came together quite nicely, I think.Vanessa Rogers: 29:32
Yeah.Claire Fayers: 29:33
And, trying to think of other ones now. Which other ones did I have to change it? Well, there were a few like that, where I changed the ages of the characters and just tried to tell them with children at the center instead. There is one, yeah, we’ve got the boy who asked questions, which. It’s a story of Cerwidwyn the sorceress and a magic potion she’s trying to make. And she hires a young boy to stir the potion for her. And so I’ve told it from his point of view instead of hers.Vanessa Rogers: 30:13
Oh. Huh. Is that kind of like this dragonona book, this dragon on a story. Are you familiar with that one?Claire Fayers: 30:24
I’m not sure if I know that one.Vanessa Rogers: 30:27
It’s one that I think it’s. It was written. Well, at least the folktale retelling was written by Tommy de Paula, I believe. And there’s, I think, four or five more that he’s written, and it’s based. I think it’s from Italy, but it’s basically what you were describing. She has a magical pot, and she hires a boy, and she goes away. She says, whatever you don’t mess with my pot. But he decides to make pasta, but he doesn’t know the how to stop the pasta from. Stop the pot from making pasta. He only knows how to make. And then it just continues until it, like, flows throughout the entire sort of.Claire Fayers: 31:09
Like, sorceress apprentice style. Yeah, this one’s slightly different in that the boys got to stir this magic potion every day for a year, and then it’ll create these sort of couple of drops of very intense magic that will give you the knowledge of pretty much everything. And at the end of the year, when he’s stirring, the hot liquid spits onto his hand, and he licks it off, and, of course, he’s then got all the magic.Vanessa Rogers: 31:42
Oh, wow.Claire Fayers: 31:42
And then you have this big shape shifting duel happening then with the. The witch comes in and tries to catch him, and he turns into a hare, and so she turns into a greyhound, and then he turns into a salmon, and she turns into an otter, I think. And, you know, this is a thing trying to escape to it, but it ends, actually, with he turns into a grain of corn, she turns into a hen and eats him, and then she gives birth to him. Nine months later, she gives birth to a baby.Vanessa Rogers: 32:17
And it’s him.Claire Fayers: 32:19
And the baby is him, or sort of him, but him sort of transformed into a sorcerer.Vanessa Rogers: 32:28
Oh, wow. That’s a really cool story.Claire Fayers: 32:32
Yeah, that one is quite nice.Vanessa Rogers: 32:35
So what would you say is your favorite story from this. From this collection, or do you have one?Claire Fayers: 32:40
Oh, gosh, I’ve got so many. I think that story of Cerridwen and the boy is. That’s the first one I wrote as my sample. Berrish. And I do like that one. There is another one called flower face of Plydy, with which comes from the Mabanagian, which has got the silliest murder plot in any. There’s a prince who’s called sleigh slow gyps, and he’s protected with a whole load of magical spells that he cannot be killed by day or night, whether on foot or on horseback, whether dressed or undressed, whether indoors or out of doors. And he can only be killed by a cursed weapon that’s been made on Sundays through the year where the person skipped church to make it, which is obviously the height of evil in those days.Vanessa Rogers: 33:37
Right.Claire Fayers: 33:38
But there’s a curse on him that he can’t marry any mortal woman. And so he goes to his uncle, the sorcerer, and his uncle makes him a wife out of flowers, which is all very nice. And they go and live happily for about five minutes until she gets bored and falls in love with somebody else.Vanessa Rogers: 33:57
Oh, no.Claire Fayers: 33:58
And then they. Then they need to kill him. And to get around this magic protection he’s got, she builds a little outdoor hot tub, effectively with a roof over it, so when he’s sitting in the water, he’s neither indoors nor out of doors because he’s got the shelter over him. Then she gives him a towel to wrap around himself, so he’s neither dressed or undressed. And then at sunset, he’s stepping out of the bath and she gets him to put his foot onto a goat. I’m not entirely sure how she persuaded him to do this, but he’s standing there with 1ft on the edge of the bath, the other foot in the goat, rocked in the towel, and her lover leaps out with this cursed spear and throws it at him, at which point he turns into an eagle and flies away, which nobody expected. Yeah. Which is typical of the things I love about the welsh stories, because you. You just have these weird twists that happen and things where you think, why on earth is he turned into an eagle? But then, anyway, the uncle then finds the eagle and turns him back into the prince again, and he ends up killing the lover by throwing a spear at him. And he throws it through a standing stone that’s there. So the man is hiding on the other side and he hurls the spear so hard that it goes straight through this, the stone. And you can still see the actual stone somewhere in Wales as well, that’s still there. And then the before woman gets turned into an owl.Vanessa Rogers: 35:38
An owl?Claire Fayers: 35:40
An owl, yes. So if you’ve ever read or heard of Alan Garner’s the Owl service, which is. That was probably my first experience of welsh folklore, actually. I remember reading that and thinking, what on earth is this? It’s a really weird book, but it’s. Yeah, it’s drawn from the. The actual story of blood eye with. Where she’s this woman who sort of partly flowers, so innocent and delicate, but also owl so she’s the huntress and wanting revenge on the. The people who’ve wronged her. But. But, yeah, that one is well worth looking up, because if you want strange murder plots.Vanessa Rogers: 36:32
Well, it seems like there’s a connection with birds in that story. Like, there’s an eagle and there’s an owl, and is there, like, some history with birds? And where are they?Claire Fayers: 36:44
There were quite a few welsh folktales that reference them are Branwyn, which I don’t have in the book. And I’ve just finished writing another collection, and I had to leave. I tried to put Branwyn in and left it out because it’s this big war in between Wales and Ireland, which ends with, I think, only about seven women, seven pregnant women are left alive because they hide in a cave. And in the end, it was just too bloodthirsty to put in and too problematic. But that story centers around Bran the giant and his sister Branwen, who marries the king of Ireland. And once she gets to Ireland, she’s beaten and mistreated, and she trains the birds to take a message back. And so then once the brother gets the message, he raises the army, and the whole thing ends in this Game of Thrones style between the two countries. But the birds are very important in that one as well. And there’s one in which three sisters are captured by one of the kings of the. One of the gods of the sea, and they end up becoming seagulls. So there are a few where birds come in.Vanessa Rogers: 38:06
That’s so interesting. Do you have any idea why there is such a strong connection to birds and welsh fairy tales?Claire Fayers: 38:14
Yeah, I am really not sure. In fact, now you’ve mentioned birds, I’m gonna go after that and do a bit more study on that. But there are certain motifs that do tend to recur, and the notion of shape shifting is one. And yet birds in various forms.Vanessa Rogers: 38:38
Well, shifting into a bird seems like the right option because it’s hard to catch a bird in the air.Claire Fayers: 38:45
Yeah.Vanessa Rogers: 38:47
One of the books stories that you mentioned as your favorite on your bio with my brother, the fairy, which tells you exactly what to do if someone in your family is kidnapped and replaced by a fairy. I would like to hear this one because it sounds similar to, like, a changeling story.Claire Fayers: 39:04
It is. And that’s another. Another motif of welsh stories are the welsh fair folk, the tulwith teg, which literally means fair folk or fair family. And they can sometimes appear as human. They sometimes appear as sort of a small people, and they. They tend to hide in the corners of our world. So they’ll be in the forest or lurking in swamps and places. And sometimes they were, sometimes they can be quite friendly and they can actually come in and do your housework for you. Other times they can just be malicious for no reason. It’s, it’s that thing of you. It’s almost representative of nature, because sometimes things work in your favor and sometimes they don’t and you don’t really know why. And in my brother, the fairy, the girl’s brother, her baby brother, is replaced. And she is the only one who actually believes that this is no longer her brother. There in the cot all day. And there is a legend that if one of the ways to get rid of the fairy changeling is to make them admit what they are again, if you can get one of them to actually sort of speak and admit their true nature, and then they’ve got to give your baby back. And so she, there are various ways you do it. There are a few different versions of the story. And I think I’m going to have to check this one again now to see which one I used. She makes a teaspoon of porridge in half an eggshell, which she says she’s going to use to feed all of the farm workers who’ve come in for the harvest. And the baby is watching her in the kitchen doing this. And then the baby then says, well, I’m older than the oldest tree on this farm and I have never seen anything like that before. She says, ha. Got you.Vanessa Rogers: 41:12
And so then does he switch back?Claire Fayers: 41:14
And so then he has to switch back. And then she, yeah. She basically says, yes, give me my brother back or I’m going to just throw you in the duck pond. And so they return the brother, but there’s no, there’s never any reason given as to why the changelings are taken.Vanessa Rogers: 41:31
Huh.Claire Fayers: 41:32
I think a lot in these changeling stories, it just happens that the baby’s been taken and suddenly there’s a fairy child in its place. So I think it’s another things where the stories can be quite ambiguous.Vanessa Rogers: 41:44
Yeah. The same discussion I was talking about before on the fairy tale flip. We were discussing Rumpelstiltskin, and that was one of the burning questions I had. Why does he want her baby? Like, why did, why does he.Claire Fayers: 41:57
Yes.Vanessa Rogers: 41:58
But that’s a common motif in a lot of fairy tales, is they are wanting babies. Yeah, it’s very interesting.Claire Fayers: 42:08
Rapunzel. Yes. I guess you ate lettuce. I’ll take your daughter. And look, exactly.Vanessa Rogers: 42:17
Why. So why do you feel like it’s important that we continue to tell these. These tales? Are our. Our culture’s fairy tales or fairy tales in general?Claire Fayers: 42:32
Oh, any fairy. Fairy tales. You have the. This, our famous GK Chesterton quote which says they’re important not because they say that dragons exist, but. But the dragons can be defeated. And I think that is one thing for children to say, that the world does have dangers. The world is not all nice. You will not always be safe and protected, but you can come through things. I think a lot of the fairy tales are full of those sorts of archetypes of going into danger and coming through it. And the way that we tell them from one generation to the next, I think, tells us something about our own world, the way it is now. Because obviously, when we retell these stories, we’re retelling them for ourselves and for children who are alive today. And so you’ve got the sort of the motifs and the archetypes and the bits of the stories that don’t change, but then you see the other bits that we can change to actually say what it’s like to be alive today. And I think that’s important. And I think especially because I grew up without any of these, it really is such a joy now to go into schools and see them telling, well, stories and actually using the book that I wrote as well. So it’s a case of children reconnecting with their own landscape and culture and history as well. And by becoming interested in their own stories, then they become interested in other people’s as well. And, of course, once we start to share our stories, we connect as people, which is an important thing.Vanessa Rogers: 44:23
Absolutely. I love that. So for those that are not familiar with where Wales is or what the landscape of Wales looks like, can you kind of paint us a picture?Claire Fayers: 44:37
Yeah, sure. I actually, I wrote some statistics on this just to make sure I get it right. So I love, basically, first of all, if you look at a map of the United Kingdom, you have Ireland and Northern Ireland, which is the separate bit, and then you’ve got the main body of Great Britain with Scotland at the top, England coming down the bottom bit, and then coming down into little leg into the normal, and then there’s a bump on the side, and that bump on the side on the left is Wales. And we’ve currently. The current population is about 3.3 million across the country, with most people being in the. In the south. The capital is Cardiff, which has got all 360,000 people or thereabouts at the moment. And then there’s another. It is still. Yeah, I mean, it’s our capital city, but it’s still there. Yes. We could probably fit several Wales into Texas. I don’t know what the relevant sizes are.Vanessa Rogers: 45:49
Yes, and then.Claire Fayers: 45:51
Yeah, and as you go up Wales, then, so you’ve got the coastal area where you’ve got a few big cities and so, yes, really lovely beaches and coastal bits. And then you go up, it gets hilly and you get mountains, and you tend to have more smaller communities. I used to live in Cardiff in the city I’ve now moved about. It’s about 20 miles north, but I’m now in a village of a couple of thousand people with a field of sheep opposite me, which is really lovely.Vanessa Rogers: 46:21
Yes, that sounds lovely.Claire Fayers: 46:23
Yeah.Vanessa Rogers: 46:26
And what about the weather? What does the weather look like?Claire Fayers: 46:29
The weather for the past, I think, about four weeks, it’s been raining almost non stop. It’s been horrible. But, yeah, we do tend to. We do complain that we get a lot of rain, but, I mean, the summer is lovely. You can get some really. Yeah, really nice, warm, sunny days, but, yes, we do get a lot of rain and, of course, you will get snow up in the mountains and it can get quite cold in the winter, but it’s not so much where we are now, unfortunately, because I do like a good snowfall.Vanessa Rogers: 47:06
But, yeah, I feel like if you have to deal with really cold weather, you should at least be blessed with some snow.Claire Fayers: 47:15
Right, yes, it’s generally. Yes, it is just been. Yes, very cold and very wet for quite a while here now. Yeah, we’re not far from the river here, so when we get too much rain, the river floods and then the road is blocked. You can’t go anywhere.Vanessa Rogers: 47:33
Oh, wow. And what would you say is the culture of the welsh people? How are they different from the surrounding areas? From, like, from England or from Cornwall or from Ireland or North Ireland? How are you different or distinct?Claire Fayers: 47:58
I’m just thinking where to start with that. I mean, obviously we’ve got our own language and that makes a big difference, but there’s always been this sort of, well, this sort of friction between Wales and England, partly because were native. Wales was conquered by England in the Middle Ages and we’ve never forgotten the fact. So you’ve always got this rivalry between Wales and England. We’ve got here. I’ve talked about the icetair throdi schools will have. There is a big cultural thing in Wales of poems and poetry, music, literature. We got the dragon on our flag, obviously, which is rather cool.Vanessa Rogers: 48:48
Yes.Claire Fayers: 48:48
Yes. I was telling my story about that as well.Vanessa Rogers: 48:52
I would love to hear that. I was telling my son about that. I was going to interview you, and I said, you know, whales has a dragon on their flag. And he was just so impressed. He was like, so there really are dragons in Wales? And I was like, well, there’s stories of them. So.Claire Fayers: 49:11
Yes. Yeah. So the dragon one is. The story goes back to roman times, where there was a king of Britain called Vortigern who was trying to build a castle. And every day they were building at the walls, and every night, everything fell down again. And after a while, he called his wise men together and asked for advice, and they couldn’t tell him the answer. They said, if you can find a boy who doesn’t have a human father, then he’ll both tell you. So, yeah, Vortigern thought they would be ridiculous, but sent word out. And then a few weeks later, this boy turns up at his camp and says he’s the boy that they want. And he tells them to go up the hill and dig. And when they dig through it, they find there’s a cave inside the hill. And while they’re looking, a pair of dragons go out and start fighting. One of them’s red, one of them’s white. And then the red dragon wins. The white dragon flies off, defeated. The red dragon goes back to sleep in the bottom of the cave, and they cover it over, and they go and build their castle. And the boy turns out to be Merlin. So that’s one of the early arthurian connections. And that’s. That’s probably the earliest story there is about why the red dragon then becomes the emblem of Wales. They say that the red dragon represents the Welsh. The white dragon represented the English. And then there’s a. There’s another story in the Mabinogue of how the dragons got there, okay, which was another pair of kings. One was the king of England, and one was the king of France. And the king of England was having trouble because they were a pair of dragons who were fighting in Oxford or Oxfordshire, so right in the middle of England and causing a load of trouble. And so the king of France told him to get a load of mead, which is a fermented wine made from honey. And they basically filled this giant pit with mead. And the dragons drink it and get so drunk, they just fall asleep and shrink down to the size of little piglets. Because for four reasons, of story. And then while they’re both sleeping off the effects of the mead, they cut them over to this cave in Wales and dump them in. The. Dump them in the cave and leave them there.Vanessa Rogers: 51:41
Oh, my goodness.Claire Fayers: 51:43
Yeah. That is apparently how they. Yes. How they ended up there in the first place. And then they would just wake up every night and have a fight. Yeah.Vanessa Rogers: 51:57
I mean, if you’re going to get drunk, Mead seems like the right way to go.Claire Fayers: 52:01
Is a good one. Yeah.Vanessa Rogers: 52:04
So you mentioned Merlin before, so I was not familiar. I did not realize the King Arthur stories came from Wales. Is that. Is it disputed at all?Claire Fayers: 52:15
Amongst other places there are. Pretty much any part of Britain will lay claim to having King Arthur being there and some story from King Arthur, so. But Wales is one of the places and there’s a roman, old roman town called Caerleon, which is. Yeah. Not. Not far from where I live. And that is supposed to be the origins of Camelot, but also King Arthur came from Cornwall and he also came from the east of England. So they were. He’s one of those. Those mobile heroes that people will just point at a nearby rock and say, oh, that was King Arthur, who was right.Vanessa Rogers: 53:01
Exactly.Claire Fayers: 53:04
But there are. Yeah, there are several stories that there were secret caves hidden where King Arthur and all his knights are still sleeping. And there would be, if you believe the stories, there are at least 16 of them scattered across Wales and a good few in England as well.Vanessa Rogers: 53:23
And they’re still sleeping.Claire Fayers: 53:25
And apparently they’re still sleeping. Yes. Waiting for. For something so they can wake up and fight again.Vanessa Rogers: 53:34
How did they fall asleep?Claire Fayers: 53:37
Nobody ever mentions that in the stories. They just. They’re just all there asleep. Magic.Vanessa Rogers: 53:47
Yes, magic. Magic answers a lot of questions. You said a lot of the stories are based in true places and you were mentioning that, you know, when you were talking about King Arthur. Can you. Can you tell us about any others that are based in a true location?Claire Fayers: 54:04
Yeah, they were probably at least half the ones in my book are, if not more than that. There’s a whole area of suppose. Yeah. An area of coast that was supposed to be a separate land which has flooded. And there were a few of those.Vanessa Rogers: 54:27
Cardigan Bay.Claire Fayers: 54:29
That’s Cardigan Bay. Yes. Where it was supposed to be like the rich pasture land, but there was a big sea wall because it was so low lying. And then they forgot to shut the gates one day and it all flooded. The story of the boy who asked questions and the witchcraft one happens in a. Near a lake up in north Wales. What other ones have we got the. Oh, the Avanc. There’s a feature, the Avanc in Welsh actually just means beaver or possibly otter. Yes. Welsh speakers. Please tell me which one it is. I forgot something out of my head. But, yeah, there’s this supposed monster that. There’s one that lived in the river Conwy in north Wales and another one in the river taff down in Cardiff, which can be put to sleep if you sing. So you can sing them to sleep and then tie them up in iron chains, because iron always traditionally defeats and any sort of fairy magic, and you can actually sort of point to. And the one in north Wales was taken out of the river and then put into another lake, and that lake also exists. So there are a lot. And I think that people used to, I think, just point at whatever nearby landmark there was and say, oh, sort of. Yeah, you see that mountain or you see that lake? And then they would attach the story to it.Vanessa Rogers: 56:02
Huh. There was one black mountains of south Wales where there’s a giant.Claire Fayers: 56:09
Yes, that’s the devil and giant jack one, which is. Yeah. Only a couple of miles from where I live.Vanessa Rogers: 56:17
Oh, cool.Claire Fayers: 56:19
Yeah, that’s the mount skirt with the bit broken out at the top.Vanessa Rogers: 56:25
And then you mentioned the most famous ones, and I don’t remember how you pronounced it starts with an M.Claire Fayers: 56:33
The Mabinogion or mabinogi. Nobody.Vanessa Rogers: 56:37
Can you tell us about that?Claire Fayers: 56:39
Yeah, yeah. Nobody quite agrees what the word actually means. Mab is Welsh, the sun. So they think it could. It could be sort of the tales of the suns, but it was sort of just a made up word for the collection it came from. It’s one of the oldest prose writings in Britain, which was called the Red Book of Hurghist. It was found in Hurgus court and it’s got a red cover, so they ended up calling it. And the mabinogium was in there, along with a lot of other writings. And it’s a collection of old, the epic tales from Wales. And you’ve got. There are four distinct branches, as they call, which follow. Each one follows a different character through then a set of arthurian tales that go with them. And there was a woman called Charlotte Guest, who was born. She was born in 1812, Charlotte Bertie as an english woman, and her family seemed to be just expecting her to sort of look after the house and be a companion to elderly relatives and then try marry her off to somebody rich. But then she fell in love with the welsh member of parliament and moved across to Merthyr in south Wales. And she was a. She’d already learned about eight or nine different languages by then anyway. And so, of course, coming into Wales, she immediately started learning Welsh. And somebody lent her a copy of this red book of Hergist and she decided she was going to translate Babino again. And there had been somebody else had done one or two of the stories previously translated into English, but she made a complete translation of them, brought them out at one a year for several years, and given the victorian interest in that kind of thing at the time, they proved extremely popular. And then. But I think, yeah, then her husband then died. The husband was a lot older. She caused a family scandal when she got married because they married within about three months of having met. And he was much older than her. And then when he died, she married somebody, was about 20 years younger than her, of course. Another scandal.Vanessa Rogers: 59:02
Wow.Claire Fayers: 59:03
And in her old age, she collected china cups and saucers and teapots and stuff. And there’s a huge collection which is still in the British Museum now of the things she’s collected.Vanessa Rogers: 59:17
Oh, wow.Claire Fayers: 59:17
She was, yeah, she was a fascinating woman because she. She managed, helped her husband with managing the ironworks and the whole industry, because the iron steel industry in Wales at the time was huge and the entire town would have been employed there. And she set up schools and libraries and had education programs for the children and I think had about seven or eight children of her own and then also taught herself Welsh and translated these things from a very old sort of. They had not currently spoken Welsh into English.Vanessa Rogers: 1:00:01
What an incredible woman.Claire Fayers: 1:00:03
And, yeah. So, I mean, it’s entirely possible that we would have ended up with translations if she hadn’t done that. Somebody else might have done them. But, I mean, she. Yeah, without her, we certainly wouldn’t have it in the current form.Vanessa Rogers: 1:00:19
Mm. That’s amazing.Claire Fayers: 1:00:22
And you got. Yeah, and that one, of course, you can find her if you just look up Charlotte guest and Mabanagi online. The entire film translation is free online now. Of course, you can just download it.Vanessa Rogers: 1:00:38
One of the things, when I was reading in your book, you said, giants, enchanters, when whales were ruled by kings who were often at war. And it made me wonder, do you feel like war increases folk tales and fairy tales?Claire Fayers: 1:00:54
That’s an interesting question, and I’m. Yeah, I’m not sure about the answer. I think it might increase our need for them because you can symbolize what’s going on in the war by having giants and enchanters and monsters that get defeated. So you might not be able to verbalize the. The sort of things that you’re having to live through at the time. But you can. You can defeat the evils symbolically, maybe. And maybe if people are feeling that they are under threat and their way of life is under threat, then the traditional stories become even more important because that’s a link back to the things that they know and their way of life.Vanessa Rogers: 1:01:42
Yeah. It gives them some sense of control a little bit.Claire Fayers: 1:01:46
Yeah.Vanessa Rogers: 1:01:49
Well, what have we missed?Claire Fayers: 1:01:51
What have we missed? Wow. Probably loads. One of the things I actually loved when I was researching, and I’ve done more research since because I’ve got another collection of, actually, giants, ghosts and goblins coming out this summer, and I did travel for that. But you’ve got these sort of traditional epic style things in the Mabanagi and you’ve got other stories that are quite well formed and people have obviously told many times, and then you’ve got these odd little snippets of things which are sort often fragments of stories on things that people half remember that have been passed down. There’s a. There’s a legend locally, and I only came across it because I managed to find a reference to it in one book. So I’m not even sure, yes, how accurate it is. But apparently there’s a river on the south Wales coast where if you’d been the type of greedy person who’d hoarded all your wealth all your life when you died, in order for your spirit to rest, somebody had to take your hidden stash of money and go chuck it downriver. And it had to be downriver, not upriver, which is a really curious little detail. And I’ve. Yeah, I’ve tried to explain that in the new book that I wrote, but you get these little tiny details and things that you don’t know why they’re there. And because you’ve lost the context, they don’t completely make sense anymore. But they’re just fascinating little bits, and they seem to exist under the surface of the better known stories. And you can find bits like that all over the place if you go digging.Vanessa Rogers: 1:04:01
I know. I love those. I love those little tiny details. I think that there’s so much there, and it’s so helpful when we have the context, but we don’t always have it, and a lot of times it’s lost in translation.Claire Fayers: 1:04:14
Yeah. And of course, if you don’t. If for people like me, writing, it’s a real gift then, because if you haven’t got the context, of course you’re free to, invent something around it to make sense of the details.Vanessa Rogers: 1:04:27
Right, exactly. Well, what’s next for you? I know that you said you’re writing another book about got ghosts and goblins.Claire Fayers: 1:04:37
Yeah. That’s going to be out this summer, which is welsh giants, ghosts and goblins.Vanessa Rogers: 1:04:43
And will that one. But that will be available outside of Wales or mostly just in Wales.Claire Fayers: 1:04:50
It’s, it’s been published by welsh publishers. It’ll be mainly. You’ll be able to get it through the UK. Throughout the UK. You couldn’t get them electronically on Amazon, internationally, but yes, if you wanted to buy an actual paperback copy, you would have to order it from the UK, unfortunately. Yeah. They might manage to find a publisher in the states. Would be nice if they did.Vanessa Rogers: 1:05:15
Yes.Claire Fayers: 1:05:16
But, yeah, that’s good. Yeah, but that one’s coming out this year. Yeah. And, yeah, that one was a lot of fun to do. Yes. And it was a very different one, actually, because the welsh fairy tales Miss legends. It was mainly retellings. And I changed some of the details and I changed the characters and things, but tried to keep to the actual details of the stories. The editor I had in this new collection was saying, well, why don’t you go off and tangent. She said, use this. Use the original story as inspiration to write a different story. And then. So I’ve got a lot of spin off stories in it. I have one nice one where all the lady ghosts in Wales, because a lot of places in Wales are haunted by ladies in different colour dresses. And I thought, wouldn’t it be fun if they all got together somewhere for a Jane Austen style tea party? So there’s a story with all the lady ghosts come together for the annual Lady Ghost conference.Vanessa Rogers: 1:06:22
That’s so fun.Claire Fayers: 1:06:26
Yeah. But I will put some of that onto my website close to the time. So if anyone’s interested in them and in some of the original stories I’ve used, they can always check out my website for that.Vanessa Rogers: 1:06:38
Yes. And we will definitely be adding that to our website in the show notes. We’ll put your website up there. And that’s the clairfayers.com, right?Claire Fayers: 1:06:50
That’s the one, yeah.Vanessa Rogers: 1:06:52
Well, thank you, Claire, so much for joining us today.Claire Fayers: 1:06:54
Thank you. It’s been great fun.Vanessa Rogers: 1:06:57
And thank you, folksy folks, for joining us on this fairy tale myth and legend journey. And we want to hear from you. We want to hear what your thoughts are. Like I was saying before, all the links will be added onto www.fabricafolklore.com as well as the show notes. But we encourage our listeners to follow us on Facebook. And we have a Facebook group and a Facebook page, and we ask questions on the Facebook group to encourage the continuation of this conversation because there’s so much to discuss about these conversations. What do you have a favorite welsh fairy tale? Do you have a favorite fairy tale that influenced your life growing up? We want to hear your thoughts after these shows. We’re also on Instagram, some on Twitter, a little bit on LinkedIn, so you can find us in all of those places. Thank you so much for listening to Fabrica folklore. Once again, I’m Vanessa y. Rogers. And until next time, keep the folk alive.