About the book
In June 1876 the United States sent a consul to Cardiff. Wirt Sikes was a New York journalist of thirty-nine who had written two novels and, by one account, used as many as thirty pseudonyms. He spent seven years in Wales as consul, and in 1880 — after the first three of them — he published the largest book on Welsh folklore in English — the book most of what English speakers know about the tylwyth teg still comes through, usually without their knowing it. This edition prints all four Books and all thirty-two chapters entire, with twenty of T. H. Thomas’s drawings. Book I is the fairies and Sikes’s five kinds of them; Book II is the spirit-world, where the book is at its strangest and its best — the corpse-candle, the cyhyraeth, the gwrach y rhibyn, the hounds of Annwn; Book III is the customs, from courtship to burial, including the most-quoted passage he ever wrote, on the sin-eater; Book IV is the bells, wells, stones and dragons. Richard Dorson called it the most substantial book of Welsh legendry in English and said in the same assessment what is wrong with it: Sikes leans on earlier compilations — above all on Edmund Jones’s Monmouthshire collection of 1780 — and although he names them he almost never gives a page and never gives a date, so four hundred pages arrive in one voice and a reader cannot tell eighteenth-century Monmouthshire from the countryside he was living in. John Rhŷs and E. S. Hartland said the same in the 1880s, and cited him anyway. So the apparatus here does the marking for him: a head-note before every chapter ending in READING AGAINST HIM; an introduction to each of the four Books; a REGISTER OF EVIDENCE AND INFERENCE, by Book, separating what he watched from what he was told and what he read; a Welsh glossary and a register of the beings, some sixty terms between them, with how to say them; a descriptive list of every plate; a gazetteer of the parishes; a who’s-who; the six airs named and placed; and a plain account, claim by claim, of what has been established since 1880. That account is not flattering and is not meant to be: the collection held and the argument did not. The sharpest instance is one he watched with his own eyes — the Druidic rites at the Pontypridd rocking stone, which he reports as an ancient survival and which had been started in about 1853 by Myfyr Morganwg, a living Welsh romantic, in a tradition invented a generation earlier by Iolo Morganwg. 390 pages.
