Ok. I’m tired of the typical vampire, werewolf and fairy.I’m also tired of the occidental-centrism in mythology. Hence, this list.
I tried to included as many cultural variants as I could find and think of. (Unfortunately, I was restricted by language. Some Russian creatures looked very interesting but I don’t speak Russian…) Please, add creatures from your culture when reblogguing (if not already present). It took me a while to gather all those sites but I know it could be more expansive. I intend on periodically editing this list.
Of note: I did not include specific legendary creatures (Merlin, Pegasus, ect), gods/goddesses/deities and heroes.
(I have stumbled upon web sites that believed some of these mythical creatures exist today… Especially dragons, in fact. I just had to share the love and scepticism.)
Yes hello friends I am here to add all Welsh stuff and that although apologies for the ones I can’t add sources to - it means I can’t find an internet-based source in English. Soz.
Welsh Dragon
Wikipedia has some okay-if-limited information here, which does include the how-to-catch-a-dragon-by-getting-it-drunk bit. There are additional draconic beasties that turn up all over the place though, including one in the First Branch of the Mabinogi which keeps screaming every Calan Mai and causing all pregnant creatures to miscarry, among other things. The important thing to really note with the Welsh dragon, though, is that, unusually for a European mythology, dragons aren’t considered evil here; my ancestors apparently thought of them as just being a wild animal like any other, maybe a bear or wolf. Plus, they didn’t symbolise Evil. They symbolise us. This is therefore the most important fictional creature to mention from the Welsh pantheon.
Faeries
The two links above for Welsh faeries - ‘Bendith y Mamau’ and ‘Welsh fairies’ - are really, really not good. Avert thine eyes. The latter actually mis-spells very nearly every single damn faerie it tries to report, and a lot isn’t right.
Best English-language link I can find is here - that covers a huge variety of stuff concerning Welsh faeries, and the whole book is available free online there. Concerning the naming, ‘Bendith y Mamau’ (lit. ‘the blessing of the mothers’, ‘Mothers’ in this case probably referring to the Celtic Matrones; triple mother deities) is a regional variant on the more common ‘Tylwyth Teg’ (lit. ‘fair folk’; although actually, 'tylwyth’ is the old Welsh word cognate with the Scottish 'clan’, so a better translation might be 'fair clan’ to get the family nuances into the term). 'Bendith y Mamau’ turns up a lot in the south; which, to be fair, was always the main area for faerie activity, so that’s probably why the name stuck. But most people would use 'Tylwyth Teg’. Especially these days. It means the same thing.
Anyway, that link I’ve just provided covers a fuck-ton - Gwyllion, Ellyllon, Coraniaid (which are also explicitly in the Mabinogi), Coblynau (Welsh equivalent of the Knocker spirits, but again; we considered them good-if-mischevous rather than evil), Bwbachod (the house elves, basically, including the Pwca whom Shakespeare based the character of Puck on) and a fuck load of others. The list really goes on, it’s very comprehensive. And it also covers 'supernatural faerie music’ in huge detail, and Pembrokeshire’s faerie markets, and the accepted method of looking inside a faerie ring without getting caught by the music and crumbling to dust, and so on and so forth. Oh, and a bit on vampire furniture IIRC. It’s an excellent book. Well worth a read.
The Ceffyl Dŵr is horribly misspelled up there and in the link, and whoever wrote the article clearly didn’t understand how to pluralize it (it should be ceffylau dŵr), but the information within isn’t bad. Bit incomplete, but gives a fairly good grounding.
For sea creatures, we’ve got the Morgen, a sort of siren that also turns up in Breton mythology (you know the sort - eternally young and beautiful, drowns people with its beauty or by giving them visions, floods places at a moment’s notice, etc); and we’ve got a collection of weird-ass freshwater things. The Afanc is a sort of beaver-crocodile-dwarf thing, right, which we reckon lives in Llyn Tegid, or Bala Lake. We therefore call her Teggie. Myths report others dotted about the place, mind. Llamhigyn y Dŵr is a favourite of mine - that’s a sort of frog with bat’s wings and a stinger on its tail that tangles fishing lines and eats livestock and fishermen. Um… what else, what else, let’s see…
Back on land again; Giants. Giants are a bit weird in Wales, because they weren’t necessarily evil, either (a pattern emerges); although most were just big bastards who kept getting in the way of heroes by setting them odd quests involving haircare products, or defeating kings and making cloaks out of their beards (I swear I’m not making these up). They also weren’t always male, but there’s an odd pattern whereby male giants would often get it on with female hags, so I think sometimes they’re considered to be equivalents. Giants use mountains for chairs or, alternatively, graves. An awful lot of Welsh mountains have some sort of giant-myth attached.
Adar Llwch Gwin were giant birds capable of understanding human speech (probably a Cymricised version of harpies); Adar Rhiannon were the sacred birds of the goddess Rhiannon who could, among other things, raise the dead with their singing (look into Welsh mythology for too long and you really start to understand why we still care so much about singing). These are particularly awesome because you’ll never come across a better goddess than Rhiannon and I will take you all on, singly or in groups, to defend that assertion. She was the Welsh version of the pan-Celtic horse goddess Epona. 'Badass’ doesn’t begin to cover it. Her birds had a similar sort of position to Odin’s ravens, sort of thing. But could do rad shit. I wish I could find a decent English language source for this.
Aaaaaannnd who could forget the magnificence of the Twrch Trwyth? This was a giant wild boar - in the Greek mold of giant animal, almost, except that the Twrch Trwyth had a comb and a pair of scissors literally growing between his ears, and to use them the damn thing had to be alive when you pulled them off, and then you can give a giant a haircut LOOK YOU SHOULD ALL JUST READ THE MABINOGI OKAY IT’S FUCKING EPIC IN ITS WEIRDNESS I tell you this is the history of my people.
Bonus Round!
Mountains. Fuck aye do they get their own entry. In Gwent - my neck of the woods, down in the south east - the mountains themselves had powers. If you went up one alone overnight, it was said that what came down in the morning would be a poet, a madman or dead, because they’d get into your head. This has links to a further concept we have all across Wales, called hiraeth. Hiraeth is where, if you’re away from Wales for too long, you start being called back; you get a steadily growing urge to go home and stand on a mountaintop and just… look down at it all. I read an interview with Anthony Hopkins once where he said that the day he renounced his Welsh citizenship and became American, that very night he dreamed of Port Talbot, his home town, and the dreams just wouldn’t stop. That’s hiraeth. It comes from the mountains.
I could go on at length here about the analysis of all of this but it would honestly become just a rewording of my dissertation from my first degree so I shan’t. Instead, I shall say that the best sources you can read for this stuff are the book on faeries I linked above, and to read the Mabinogi for yourself (particularly the Sioned Davies translation, that’s very good; you can find a good annotated translation of the Four Branches themselves here, but that doesn’t include any of the additional texts.)
this is all well and good but uhh. please god if you’re not indigenous do not fucking write native legendary creatures as your shitty fucking monster of the week. literally beyond disrespectful. especially regarding a specific algonquian spirit that’s listed here.
Can all the tumblr homosexuals agree to stop buying chick fil a. It’s so depressing that across the board lgbt people and supporters are indifferent to chick fil a and feel fine buying it. Can we at least stigmatize it here
For those who actually like chick fil a sauce and refuse to boycott because of that:
It’s ranch dressing, honey mustard, and barbecue sauce. Now free yourself
Fuck Chick-fil-A. That homophobic chicken isn’t even that good, y'all are literally simping over chicken that tastes like it was made at a White cookout
used to be for an OC, but now I just shitpost... ADHD-PI. Biromantic asexual, Agender/non binary (she/her and they/them). My interests are: stories (whatever shape or form: books, tv-series, movies, etc.), animals.
