Ellyllon

Also Known As: Welsh, plural of ellyll, a word that covers elf, goblin, sprite, phantom and evil spirit; the female form is ellylles; the small elves of the Welsh groves and valleys
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Welsh Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Tiny elves of hollows and dingles who eat toadstools, wear foxglove bells for gloves and can do a household’s whole work in a night.
Role in Mythos: They are the elves proper of Wales, set first among the five kinds of Welsh fairy in Wirt Sikes’s British Goblins of 1880.
Relation to Humans: They will take up the work of a struggling house and make it prosper, asking only a lit candle and to be left unwatched. Spy on them or laugh at them and they leave for good.

Late on market day, with the light going and the road dropping into a wooded dip, a Welsh farmer walking home would slow a little and look sideways into the hollow. Damp leaves, the smell of rotting wood, a ring of pale toadstools at the foot of an oak, foxgloves standing in the bracken with their bells hanging open. He was looking for the people who used those things. He did not see them. Nobody on that road ever seemed to.

They were the Ellyllon, the elves of Wales. The word is the plural of ellyll, and it is old and broad: Welsh dictionaries give it as elf, goblin and sprite, then as phantom and spectre, then as an evil spirit outright. The country kept the gentlest sense. Its Ellyllon were very small, lived in groves and little valleys, and left their housekeeping lying about in plain sight. Toadstools were bwyd ellyllon, elf food. Foxglove bells were menyg ellyllon, elf gloves. A soft yellowish stuff that lead miners found deep in cracks in the limestone was put down as fairy butter.

The picture of them as a tidy tribe comes mostly from one man. Wirt Sikes, an American journalist who served as United States consul at Cardiff, published British Goblins in 1880 and sorted the Welsh fairies into five kinds: the Ellyllon in the dells, the Coblynau in the mines, the Bwbachod in the house, the Gwragedd Annwn in the lakes and the Gwyllion on the mountains. The names were all Welsh and all in use. The neat filing was his. He also had a theory about their word, tying it to a Welsh root for spirit and to a Hebrew term for idols, and no later dictionary has followed him there.

The word itself needed no help from him. A set of triads copied into the Red Book of Hergest around the year 1400 lists three bull-spectres of the Island of Britain and three wild spectres, each one an ellyll with a name attached: the spectre of Gwidawl, of Llyr Marini, of Gyrthmwl Wledig, of Banawg, of Ednyfedawg, of Melen. No story survives to explain any of them. And about 1340 the poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, lost in fog on his way to meet a girl, complained that every hollow on the moor held a hundred wry-mouthed elves. That crooked mouth is the only feature anyone ever gave them. Size, yes: Sikes calls them pygmies. But no telling says what they wore besides the gloves, what colour they were, or whether they had faces a person would care to see twice.

What they did is better recorded. Sikes took down the tale of Rowli Pugh, a Glamorgan farmer whose luck was so steadily bad that he had made up his mind to sell what he had and leave the country. He was sitting thinking it over when a small figure came up and asked what was wrong. Rowli was too surprised to give much of an answer. The ellyll told him not to go, and to have his wife leave a candle burning when she went to bed.

His wife was Catti Jones, and she did as she was told. Each night she swept the hearth, set the candle and went up. Each night, once the house was quiet, the kitchen filled with small busy workers who baked and brewed, washed and mended, and sometimes carried in their own tools to do it. In the morning the bread was made and the linen was clean. Rowli’s shirts had never been so well kept. The cattle fattened, the crops came in, and the farm that had been a byword for failure turned into a good one. This went on for three years.

Then Catti wanted to see. One night she crept down and put her eye to a crack in the door. The whole company was there in the candlelight, hard at work and laughing as they went, and it was so merry a sight that she laughed too. That was the end of it. The candle went out, there was a rush of small feet, and the kitchen was empty. They never came back. The luck, at least, stayed behind, and the farm went on doing well without them.

They had a queen, according to Sikes, though the wider fairy nation of Wales had none. He pointed to the tiny creature Mercutio describes in Romeo and Juliet, small enough to ride across a sleeper’s nose, and claimed her for Wales on the strength of her name, which he read as mab, the Welsh for a child or son. It is his argument and should be taken as that. No Welsh tale he prints shows her ruling anything.

Their strength is quiet and domestic. They can enter a shut house, finish a week of labour before dawn and turn a failing holding around, and they seem to enjoy it. They can find a man at the exact hour he is ready to give up. In Dafydd’s poem they can also fill a mist with jeering faces, which suggests the helpful sort were not the only sort.

Their limits are few and strict. They work only at night, and only where a light has been left for them. They will not be looked at. They cannot stand being laughed at, even kindly, even by someone who meant no harm, and once they have gone no candle brings them back. The old tellings give them no birth and no origin at all: they are simply there in the hollow, and then they are not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Ellyllon?

The Ellyllon are the small elves of Welsh folklore, said to live in groves, hollows and little valleys. Wirt Sikes described them in British Goblins in 1880 as the first of five kinds of Welsh fairy. They eat toadstools, wear foxglove bells as gloves and sometimes do housework for people at night.

What does the word ellyll mean?

Ellyll is a Welsh word with several senses: elf, goblin or sprite, then phantom or spectre, then evil spirit. Ellyllon is its plural. The word is old, and triads in the Red Book of Hergest, copied around 1400, use it for named spectres of the Island of Britain.

What do the Ellyllon eat and wear?

The Ellyllon eat toadstools, which are called bwyd ellyllon, or elf food, in Welsh. They wear the bells of the foxglove as gloves, called menyg ellyllon. A butter-like substance found in limestone cracks by lead miners was known as fairy butter.

What happens in the story of Rowli Pugh?

Rowli Pugh was an unlucky Glamorgan farmer who planned to leave the country until an ellyll told him to stay and have his wife, Catti Jones, leave a candle burning at night. The Ellyllon then did the household’s baking, brewing, washing and mending every night for three years, and the farm prospered. When Catti spied on them and laughed, they fled and never returned, though the farm stayed prosperous.

Do the Ellyllon have a queen?

Wirt Sikes said the Ellyllon have a queen and identified her with the tiny fairy Mercutio describes in Romeo and Juliet. He connected her name, Mab, to the Welsh word for a child. This is Sikes’s own argument, and no Welsh tale he printed shows her ruling the Ellyllon.