Grippiach greppiach Grippiach Greppiach, Dal d'afel yn y wrach, Keep thy hold on the hag. Hi aeth yn rhowyr 'faglach-- It got too late, thou urchin-- Mi eis i ir mwthlach [45].' I fell into the....
In spite of the obscurity of these words, it is quite clear that it was thought the most natural thing in the world to return the fairies to the river, and no sooner were they dropped there than the right infants were found to have been sent home.
The same thing may be learned also from the story of the Curse of Pantannas, pp. 187-8 above; for when the time of the fairies' revenge is approaching, the merry party gathered together at Pantannas are frightened by a piercing voice rising from a black and cauldron-like pool in the river; and after a while they hear it a second time rising above the noise of the river as it cascades over the shoulder of a neighbouring rock. Shortly afterwards an ugly, diminutive woman appears on the table near the window, and had it not been for the rudeness of one of those present she would have disclosed the future to them, but, as it was, she said very little in a vague way and went away offended; but as long as she was there the voice from the river was silent. Here we have the Welsh counterpart of the ben síde, pronounced banshee in Anglo-Irish, and meaning a fairy woman who is supposed to appear to certain Irish families before deaths or other misfortunes about to befall them. It is doubtless to some such fairy persons the voices belong, which threaten vengeance on the heir of Pantannas and on the wicked prince and his descendants previous to the cataclysm which brings a lake into the place of a doomed city: witness such cases as those of Llynclys, Syfadon, and Kenfig.
The last mentioned deserves some further scrutiny; and I take this opportunity of referring the reader back to pp. 403-4, in order to direct his attention to the fact that the voice so closely identifies itself with the wronged family that it speaks in the first person, as it cries, 'Vengeance is come on him who murdered my father of the ninth generation!' Now it is worthy of remark that the same personifying is also characteristic of the Cyhiraeth [46]. This spectral female used to be oftener heard than seen; but her blood-freezing shriek was as a rule to be heard when she came to a cross-road or to water, in which she splashed with her hands. At the same time she would make the most doleful noise and exclaim, in case the frightened hearer happened to be a wife, Fy ngwr, fy ngwr! 'my husband, my husband!' If it was the man the exclamation would be, Fy ngwraig, fy ngwraig! 'my wife, my wife!' Or in either case it might be, Fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn, fy mhlentyn bach! 'my child, my child, my little child!' These cries meant the approaching death of the hearer's husband, wife, or child, as the case might be; but if the scream was inarticulate it was reckoned probable that the hearer himself was the person foremourned. Sometimes she was supposed to come, like the Irish banshee, in a dark mist to the window of a person who has been long ailing, and to flap her wings against the glass, while repeating aloud his or her name, which was believed to mean that the patient must die [47]. The picture usually given of the Cyhiraeth is of the most repellent kind: tangled hair, long black teeth, wretched, skinny, shrivelled arms of unwonted length out of all proportion to the body. Nevertheless it is, in my opinion, but another aspect of the banshee-like female who intervenes in the story of the Curse of Pantannas. One might perhaps treat both as survivals of a belief in a sort of personification of, or divinity identified with, a family or tribe, but for the fact that such language is emptied of most of its meaning by the abstractions which it would connect with a primitive state of society. So it is preferable, as coming probably near the truth, to say that what we have here is a trace of an ancestress. Such an idea of an ancestress as against that of an ancestor is abundantly countenanced by dim figures like that of the Dôn of the Mabinogion, and of her counterpart, after whom the Tribes of the goddess Donu or Danu [48] are known as Tuatha Dé Danann in Irish literature. But the one who most provokes comparison is the Old Woman of Beare, already mentioned, pp. 393-4: she figures largely in Irish folklore as a hag surviving to see her descendants reckoned by tribes and peoples. It may be only an accident that a poetically wrought legend pictures her not so much interested in the fortunes of her progeny as engaged in bewailing the unattractive appearance of her thin arms and shrivelled hands, together with the general wreck of the beauty which had been hers some time or other centuries before.