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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesThe Tylwyth Teg are the fairy people of Welsh tradition, encountered in dancing companies, hidden households and unsettling visits to human homes.
Also recorded as Y Tylwyth Teg, Fair Family, Fair Folk
Two farm servants are walking home at twilight when one hears a tune he knows. His companion hears nothing. Rhys runs toward the music, promising to catch up; Llewellyn goes home alone. [1]
Read the manuscriptTylwyth Teg names a people, not a single creature. Wirt Sikes translates it as the fair folk or family, sometimes with an added phrase identifying the woods or mines where they live. In his account, respectful speech is a precaution: harsh names provoke anger, while praise may secure a favour. The beautiful name offers no guarantee of a harmless meeting. Its bearers can bless a neighbour, lure a dancer away or upset the terms on which a household depends. [1]
Wirt Sikes tells the farm servants’ story in British Goblins. Llewellyn expects Rhys to return drunk before morning, but morning comes without him. Searches find nothing. Days become months, and suspicion settles on the last person known to have seen him. Llewellyn is accused of murder and put in prison. A farmer familiar with fairy lore suggests taking him and a group of neighbours back to the place where the companions parted. [1]
There Llewellyn hears harps, though the others still hear nothing. His foot rests on the outside edge of a fairy ring. He asks a neighbour to put a foot on his; the others follow, one after another. With that contact, the music becomes audible to them all. Inside a circle some twenty feet across, crowds of little people dance. Rhys is among them. As he whirls past, Llewellyn catches his smock-frock and pulls him out. [1]
Rhys asks where the horses are and wants to go on dancing. He insists he has been there less than five minutes. Llewellyn answers with the months of danger the absence has brought him: he has nearly been hanged. The company finally gets Rhys home, but Sikes gives the rescue a bleak ending. Rhys never becomes his former self and dies soon afterward. The neighbours have recovered the missing man, yet his return cannot make the lost time harmless. [1]
A second return ends at a mother’s door. Gitto Bach, or little Griffith, tends his father’s sheep on a Glamorgan mountain. He sometimes brings his brothers and sisters unusually white pieces of paper, shaped like crown coins and stamped with letters. Other children on the mountain have given them to him. Then one day Gitto does not come home. For two years his family hears nothing of him, although other children occasionally bring down similar paper money. [1]
These encounters belong to named Welsh places and to different collectors’ networks. Sikes announces a special interest in South Wales. Elias Owen gathers accounts around Ruthin and Llandrillo, naming schoolmasters, farmers and other correspondents. Scholar John Rhys records Pennant Valley material sent to him by the rector of Dolbenmaen, W. Evans Jones, in 1899. John Rhys is the collector, distinct from the farm servant called Rhys in the dance story. [1][3][2]
The hills offer company even where human houses are far apart. In material sent to John Rhys, people associate the marshes near Cwellyn Lake with fairy singing and dancing, and warn against approaching too closely. A named patch of wet ground becomes somewhere a familiar journey might turn into an absence. Other encounters begin inside farms or amid the business of a market: remoteness is not a condition of meeting the fair family. [2][3]
Sikes’s 1880 volume sorts Welsh fairies into five groups: elves, mining beings, household helpers, water-associated women and mountain beings. He presents these as a convenient arrangement, acknowledging that fairy traditions cannot be divided by fixed rules. The categories describe his arrangement of the material rather than an agreed Welsh division of supernatural life. His preface, dated at Cardiff in August 1879, identifies the book as a collector’s presentation with a particular geographical emphasis. [1]
Owen approaches the names differently. He quotes a Welsh stanza that uses Tylwyth Teg and Ellyll in the same warning about a dancing place, and takes it as evidence that the terms have become interchangeable. He acknowledges that the poet might have chosen the words for rhythm. The qualification matters: a verse can show names sharing a setting without settling every distinction speakers have made between them. [3]
Sikes pictures dancers in flowing blue, green, white or scarlet robes. Owen’s Llandrillo story begins less recognizably. Two otter hunters at Gwyn Pennant see something reddish run into a hole beside the river. Under tree roots they find two burrows. One man pushes a pole into one opening while the other holds a sack over the second, and their quarry rushes into it. [1][3]
On the way home, a voice from the sack announces that its mother is calling. The frightened men drop the bag. A little man dressed in red emerges and races into the riverside brushwood. Owen credits the account to E. S. Roberts, a schoolmaster at Llantysilio. Its surprise depends on mistaken recognition: colour and movement suggested an animal, but speech and clothing reveal someone with a family of his own. [3]
Fairy gifts need not dissolve to become a source of trouble. Sikes recounts Anne William Francis’s visits to a grove at Bassalleg. After hearing music and seeing the company dance, she brings them a pail of water. They give her a shilling on a later visit, and continue until she has twenty-one. Her mother discovers the money and fears it has been stolen. Pressed with a threat of punishment, Anne explains where it came from. The gifts then cease. Nothing is said to happen to the money already received; the loss is the end of a relationship. [1]
In Owen’s market accounts the advantage can belong to a whole crowd. Richard Jones remembers his mother returning from Ruthin and saying that the fairies had been absent: business was bad, and there would be no sweets for him. After a good day, their supposed presence meant treats for the children. Owen also quotes a Bala account in which invisible visitors make a great noise as trade improves. Here the busy sound is welcome, and its effect reaches home in the purchases a mother can afford. [3]
At Blaen Pennant, a farmer’s son marries a fairy and lives happily with her for years. One day he tries to catch a difficult horse. He throws its bridle to stop it passing, misses the animal and strikes his wife instead. The metal bit touches her, and she immediately disappears. John Rhys prints the account from W. Evans Jones, who adds that supposed descendants in the valley are taunted about their fairy ancestry during quarrels with neighbours. A story of vanished kin has become something people can use against living families. [2]
Another Pennant Valley visitor comes every evening to put the children to bed. Seeing her poor clothing, the mistress gives her a gown. In the morning it lies torn to shreds. This brief account records neither an explanation from the fairy nor another visit. John Rhys compares the rejected clothing with the Manx fenodyree, a supernatural helper, but says he knows no exact counterpart to the childcare. The service is ordinary and tender; the reply to the gift is violent and unexplained. [2]
Owen preserves several captured-fairy versions. A peat gatherer hears a father call to the creature in his bag; Snowdon hunters hear their prisoner answer a little figure on a rock. The Llandrillo captive calls attention to its mother instead. Some accounts come through named informants, while the Snowdon version is reproduced from Y Gordofigion. The voices differ, but each breaks the hunter’s assumption that he is carrying home an animal. [3]
The rejected gown has a close comparison in the Brownie entry, where servants offer livery and lose their helper. Other links lead to different household or family encounters. The Domovoi’s conduct toward a cat prompts a housewife’s rebuke; the Banshee’s cry interrupts an ordinary market errand. In the Māori account of Te Kanawa, visitors accept the shadows of ornaments and leave the objects behind. Gifts, voices and recognition connect these readings, while each encounter has its own obligations and outcome.
Ifan Gruffydd’s recollection, published by Museum Wales, gives childhood fairy fear a human ending. Warned away from Henblas Woods and Peter Green’s Cave, he crosses the forbidden boundary one Christmas and finds a family eating beside a tent. They welcome and feed him. Friendship with Juliana and her brother overcomes his fear and his neighbours’ racial prejudice; when the family leaves, he grieves. Years later, at the end of the First World War, he supervises soldiers’ meals at Dunkirk. A woman and her daughter ask for space to sell goods. He lends tables, brings tea and talks with them about languages and Welsh places. At Christmas dinner the daughter recognizes him: she is Juliana. The feared strangers have become friends, separated and reunited across years. [4]
Hugh Evans carried the name into illustrated Welsh children’s literature. The National Library of Wales dates his Y Tylwyth Teg to its posthumous publication in 1935 and records several later editions. Evans had founded Gwasg y Brython in Liverpool in 1897. The book therefore belongs to Welsh publishing beyond Wales as well as to the literary afterlife of the fair family. [5]
John Rhys preserves an encounter that refuses to become a complete adventure. An old woman from Garn Dolbenmaen crosses the Red Rock and finds a fairy sitting beside a great quantity of gold. She remarks on the stranger’s wealth. The fairy directs her attention elsewhere and vanishes. Rhys suspects that W. Evans Jones has heard only part of a longer story. No surviving continuation in that account explains the gold or rewards the woman. The sudden disappearance belongs as much to the fragment’s condition as to its fairy. [2]
British Goblins contains the two altered-time returns and Anne’s gifts. John Rhys preserves the Pennant encounters and the incomplete gold story; Owen supplies the hunters, markets and terminology. Museum Wales publishes Gruffydd’s recollection. The National Library identifies Evans’s illustrated book.
Wirt Sikes · Project Gutenberg · 1880
Preface; Book I, pp. 11–13, 70–72 and 119–121
Checked 2026-10-11
John Rhys · Project Gutenberg
Volume I, pp. 107–110
Checked 2026-10-09
Elias Owen · Project Gutenberg
Names Given to the Fairies, pp. 2–5; Fairy Men Captured and Fairies in Markets and Fairs, pp. 104–109
The Y Gordofigion accounts are followed through Owen’s reproductions.
Checked 2026-10-09
Ifan Gruffydd, with museum editorial notes · Amgueddfa Cymru / Museum Wales
Complete published English transcript and Notes; tape MWL 1635
The published English transcript is used here. Its byline dates Gruffydd to 1896–1971, but the tape is dated 14 September 1976; that discrepancy remains unresolved.
Checked 2026-10-11
National Library of Wales
Exhibition introductory paragraph
The library’s introductory account establishes publication history; the underlying book is not examined here.
Checked 2026-10-09
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑One morning his mother opens the door and finds him sitting there, dressed exactly as when he vanished, with a small bundle under his arm. He thinks he went away only yesterday. The mountain children have given him fine clothes for dancing to their harps, he explains. He opens the bundle to show her. The handsome dress is paper too. Sikes leaves the mother and son at that discovery; unlike the dancer’s account, this story supplies no death after the homecoming. [1]