Book review: Gwrachod Cymru / Welsh Witches by Efa Lois

Desmond Clifford

Witchcraft isn’t what it used to be, although there’s a vivid sub-culture devoted to the topic now living on as a branch of folklore.

For centuries it was a rather more serious business. Throughout history, people looked for explanations for misery and ill-fortune and convinced themselves that certain people – men and women, but usually women – were endowed with malicious magical powers to create misfortune either for individuals or communities.

Scotland, for reasons which are obscure, became the witchcraft centre of Europe with a massive number of prosecutions, trials and executions.

Witchcraft was a serious criminal offence, and many hundreds of mostly women were executed.  In 2022, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon apologised officially for those prosecutions (rather oddly, I think).

The belief in witchcraft was famously transported to America, of course, along with the social hysteria and score-settling malevolence that often went hand-in-hand with it.

As Juliette Wood’s introduction explains, Wales was largely spared the worst experiences of the witchcraft trials. The sources of the Scottish mania – an adversarial legal system, a puritanical church and polity – were, happily, absent or less virulent in Wales.

She cites Gerald of Wales mentioning, in the twelfth century, “awenyddyion”, people with the gift of prophecy – a widespread literary trope, recalling the soothsayer in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”.  Many of Wales’ witches are connected with literature, especially romantic and gothic tales of the nineteenth century, long after the concept of criminal witchcraft had died down (although, remarkably, Britain’s last witchcraft trial was held as late as 1944, relating to fears about war secrets; a Scot, Helen Duncan, was sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison).

The generic term “witch” covers a wide range of women – this book is about women – with characteristics which drew attention to them in their community.

The common factor was the perception that they had some sort of power, whether acquired through a devilish pact, innate quality, or acquired through study and cultivation of magic.

Potions

Potions were widely used in former times – recall the Friar in Romeo & Juliet – and the frontier between witchcraft and medical practice was porous.

This is a picture book as much as a textual one.  The author, Efa Lois, is an artist and writer. She has unearthed more than a hundred witches from all over Wales and has produced, for each one, a short text and an original picture to go with it.

The pictures are charming but distinctly modern. They are cartoonish in form, colourful, and owe something to the aesthetic of 1990s clubbing posters.

There are witches from every corner and crevice of the country.  For example, “Mallt” inspired fear among the villagers of Llanfrothen in Gwynedd, so people would give her anything she wanted to avoid bewitchment.

One household didn’t get the memo and refused her request for a free bucket of milk. A spell was placed on the man’s milk churns. When he went to see a witch-whisperer (“dyn hysbys” – “a man who knows”) he was advised to hide in a holly bush in a particular field until Mallt turned up.  When she did, she was struck by pain and disappeared, apparently having been defeated by the magical properties of the holly bush.

Elegent

Like pretty much all the witches in the book, Mallt is presented as a coolly elegant clubbing girl – more Soho on Saturday than a wet Tuesday in eighteenth century Llanfrothen.

If nothing else, the illustrations reclaim Wales’ witches from the traditional garb and pointy hats sheltering outsize hooked noses.  There’s not a broom in sight.

These are witches for the Instagram generation, dressed for the dating app rather than the town stocks.

Against my better judgement (was I spellbound?) I found myself drawn towards Elen Dal, a particularly striking shapeshifter from Biwmaris, Ynys Mon. Like many of the women in this volume, she went about demanding free food and goodies which people were, generally, too afraid to refuse.

She also offered a service cursing customers’ enemies for silver – so very much my kind of girl.

The inversion of the usual stereotype where the witches, instead of being ugly, are pretty, made-up like Kim, and fashionable, creates a Mean Girls effect.

We have a book full of nice-looking witches behaving unpleasantly when they don’t get their own way.

That said, few of these Welsh witches seem to behave with extremity or truly badly.

The nearest tale to my locality is set at the Cow & Snuffers pub in Llandaff North, Cardiff, of all places.

A witch acting as a banshee went into the pub and never came out – although the landlord was found dead next morning. Frankly, that’s a bit more like it and closer to the malevolence I expect from a self-respecting witch.

This is a fun book and is intended to be.  It’s not a collection of horror tales, more an anthology of folk memories garnered from different parts of the country. There’s no heavy theorising, just local stories as nuggets of interest.

The John Lewis advert is out, the poor goose’s days are numbered. This book would make a colourful stocking filler.

Gwrachod Cymru/ Welsh Witches by Efa Lois is published by Seren and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops.