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Free material for Wirt Sikes's 1880 book: the Welsh words it uses without explaining them, a scorecard of which of his claims survived, a sheet that marks his sources where he does not, and a gazetteer of the parishes the stories come from.
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The Welsh Words
PDF · US Letter · 3 pages
Twenty-six terms with how to say them and what they mean — tylwyth teg, ellyllon, gwragedd annwn, coblynau, canwyll corff, cyhyraeth, gwrach y rhibyn, cwn Annwn. Sikes glosses a word once and then uses it for a hundred pages as though the reader had it. This is the card to keep beside the book, with the letters that catch people out — w and y are vowels, dd is the th of this, ll has no English equivalent.
Open PDF66 KBRight, Wrong, Still Open
PDF · US Letter · 1 page
Eleven claims and what became of each. The collection held — the tales, the customs and the death-portent system are all confirmed by later Welsh collectors working in Welsh. The argument did not: the sourcing was condemned within a decade, the fairy-origin theories have no evidential support, and the rites he watched at Pontypridd and called Druidic had been started in about 1853 by a living Welshman.
Open PDF60 KBWho Told Him
PDF · US Letter · 2 pages
The book's central defect is that it names a source once and then stops marking it, so four hundred pages arrive in one voice. This sheet does the marking for him, chapter group by chapter group — what is Edmund Jones's Monmouthshire of 1780, what is Giraldus, what is Lady Charlotte Guest, and the much smaller amount that is Sikes standing in a room watching.
Open PDF62 KBWhere the Stories Are
PDF · US Letter · 2 pages
The parishes, valleys, lakes and wells the book names, with the county and what happens there — St Dogmell's, Cwm Llan, Llyn Barfog, the Pontypridd rocking stone, Holywell. Sikes gives a parish more often than he gives a source, and a parish is the best evidence in the book that a real person told him something.
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About this material
Wirt Sikes lived 1836–1883 and the book was published in London in 1880, so the text is in the public domain on two independent grounds. The illustration layer was assessed separately and cleared: the twenty-one drawings are T. H. Thomas's (1839–1915), published in the same volume, and the edition sets twenty of them. The six music engravings in the Project Gutenberg transcription are NOT Thomas's — they were set in 2010 by Lesley Halamek, who transcribed the music — and this edition does not reproduce them. Each air is named and placed in the apparatus instead.