The Britons of Roman times spoke several languages, of which only Welsh and Breton, and, I am told, Cornish survive.  This is why the great wealth of myths and legends from ancient Britain has been mainly collected in Wales and Brittany.  A discussion of the sources and the history of collecting this folklore would fill a volume.  But even in the earliest written records the ancient myths have been Christianized.  That is why Merlin is here called the “son of the Devil.”

Before Christianity, Merlin was the god of the forest, which then covered most of Britain.  Merlin may thus be regarded as the protecting deity of Britain itself, that is, of Logres (the land now called England) and Wales.  The early missionaries, in their efforts to stamp out paganism, branded all native gods as dangerous devils and enemies of Christ.  Merlin’s divine nature is proven by his very immortality.  Whenever Britain is in danger, he will rise from his sleep in the deepest forest and come to its rescue.

When I was busy with my Celtic studies in 1953, I had an experience that determined forever after my viewing angle on ancient Celtic mythology.  In a small village called Llanwddyn, between Abertridwr and Pen-isar-Cwm, on the shores of lake Vyrnwy, I met Llewellyn Jones, whom a friend later described as a “grim philosopher.” Jones, who was then in his seventies, was a true repository of Welsh lore.  Being a philosopher, he had reflected for a long time on the value and original meaning of these traditions and had come to astonishingly original conclusions about these tales.

Although he was not anti-Christian, he had long since relinquished the church in which he had been brought up.  He had come to the conclusion that the “fairies” of Welsh folklore had once been gods, and were degraded to the rank of minor spirits by the teachings of the church.

This may not seem an epoch-making conclusion to a library-dwelling scholar who has read the endless debates of mythologists, but Jones had not read any of that.  He had spent his early life listening to the sagas and epic songs of the late-Victorian bards.  He was never a scholar, but spent his life farming.  What made his conclusions valuable was that he had an inexhaustible knowledge of Welsh folklore and based his entire philosophy on it.

Jones was widely recognized in his district as the expert on local folklore.  The following pages contain the few tales that I had the time to write down while I was staying in his village.