#bwbach

[alt-illustrations]

Another Welsh folklore drawing, Bwbach (boo-bach) - A small, mischievous but friendly household fairy creature. You can bribe them with cream in exchange for some help with chores around the house - but if you offend them they'll cause mischief to drive away unwanted guests.

[archivist-crow]

BWBACH

The Bwbachod (plural) are the Welsh equivalent of the brownie. The Bwbach shares the same friendly temperament in keeping house and good order. They clearly have a vested interest in preserving the old pagan ways, for they have a particular hatred of teetotallers and dissenting ministers. A story tells how a Bwbach pulled away the stool against which a Baptist minister was praying so that he sprawled to the ground. When he returned to his prayers, the Bwbach began clattering the fire irons and gurning through the window. The minister persisted at his prayers, whereat the Bwbach shapeshifted into the minister's double—a fearful sign of impending death, whereat the minister took himself speedily elsewhere from that parish.

Text from The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures by John and Caitlin Matthews (HarperElement, 2005)

[lailoken]

The Bwbachod

“The Bwbach, or Boobach [plural Bwbachod,] is the good-natured goblin which does good turns for the tidy Welsh maid who wins its favour by a certain course of behaviour recommended by long tradition. The maid having swept the kitchen, makes a good fire the last thing at night, and having put the churn, filled with cream, on the whitened hearth, with a basin of fresh cream for the Bwbach on the hob, goes to bed to await the event. In the morning she finds (if she is in luck) that the Bwbach has emptied the basin of cream, and plied the churn-dasher so well that the maid has but to give a thump or two to bring the butter in a great lump. Like the Ellyll which it so much resembles, the Bwbach does not approve of dissenters and their ways, and especially strong is its aversion to total abstainers.

There was a Bwbach belonging to a certain estate in Cardiganshire, which took great umbrage at a Baptist preacher who was a guest in the house, and who was much fonder of prayers than of good ale. Now the Bwbach had a weakness in favour of people who sat around the hearth with their mugs of cwrw da and their pipes, and it took to pestering the preacher. One night it jerked the stool from under the good man’s elbows, as he knelt pouring forth prayer, so that he fell down flat on his face. Another time it interrupted the devotions by jangling the fire-irons on the hearth; and it was continually making the dogs fall a-howling during prayers, or frightening the farm-boy by grinning at him through the window, or throwing the maid into fits. At last it had the audacity to attack the preacher as he was crossing a field. The minister told the story in this wise: “I was reading busily in my hymn-book as I walked on, when a sudden fear came over me and my legs began to tremble. A shadow crept upon me from behind, and when I turned round — it was myself! — my person, my dress, and even my hymn-book. I looked in its face a moment, and then fell insensible to the ground.” And there, insensible still, they found him. This encounter proved too much for the good man, who considered it a warning to him to leave those parts. He accordingly mounted his horse next day and rode away. A boy of the neighbourhood, whose veracity was, like that of all boys, unimpeachable, afterwards said that he saw the Bwbach jump up behind the preacher, on the horse’s back. And the horse went like lightning, with eyes like balls of fire, and the preacher looking back over his shoulder at the Bwbach, that grinned from ear to ear.

The same confusion in outlines which exists regarding our own Bogie and Hobgoblin gives the Bwbach a double character, as a household fairy and as a terrifying phantom. In both aspects it is ludicrous, but in the latter it has dangerous practices. To get into its clutches under certain circumstances is no trifling matter, for it has the power of whisking people off through the air. Its services are brought into requisition for this purpose by troubled ghosts who cannot sleep on account of hidden treasure they want removed; and if they can succeed in getting a mortal to help them in removing the treasure, they employ the Bwbach to transport the mortal through the air.

This ludicrous fairy is in France represented by the gobelin. Mothers threaten children with him. ‘Le gobelin vous mangera, le gobelin vous emportera.’ In the English ‘hobgoblin’ we have a word apparently derived from the Welsh hob, to hop, and coblyn, a goblin, which presents a hopping goblin to the mind, and suggests the Pwca (with which the Bwbach is also confused in the popular fancy at times), but should mean in English simply the goblin of the hob, or household fairy. In its bugbear aspect, the Bwbach, like the English bogie, is believed to be identical with the Slavonic ‘bog,’ and the ‘baga’ of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, both of which are names for the Supreme Being, according to Professor Fiske. ‘The ancestral form of these epithets is found in the old Aryan “Bhaga,” which reappears unchanged in the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and has left a memento of itself in the surname of the Phrygian Zeus “Bagaios.” It seems originally to have denoted either the unclouded sun, or the sky of noonday illuminated by the solar rays.

...Thus the same name which to the Vedic poet, to the Persian of the time of Xerxes, and to the modern Russian, suggests the supreme majesty of deity, is in English associated with an ugly and ludicrous fiend, closely akin to that grotesque Northern Devil of whom Southey was unable to think without laughing.”

—

British Goblins,

Wirt Sikes, 1881

[gotojobin]

#Bwbach Bwbachod- Plural A Welsh Brownie- a household fairy. They are generally friendly and find themselves an owner. They live in the household of their owner and come out at night to set out on daily tasks. They are 3ft tall, have lots of shaggy hair and wear brown clothes. They hate being talked to directly so you must announce what you would like doing or any worries you have while engaged in mundane activity around the house. One must pay them for their work with a glass of milk, oats, cakes or a bowl of cream. If a Bwbachod gets offended then it turns into a Boggart- a spirit that causes a nuisance for people. Bwbachod tend to help by giving advice, attending cattle and other daily chores. The main difference between a Bwbach and a Brownie is that the Bwbach hate clerical people and those that do not drink alcohol and are a constant nuisance to them. They are also responsible for up keeping the pagan tradition in the house.