Welsh Folklore & Folk Magic: What's the Difference?
Welsh folklore and Welsh folk magic often meet in the same stories, customs and landscapes, but they are not quite the same thing. Understanding the difference helps us approach both with greater care.
It is easy to use folklore and folk magic almost interchangeably.
A story about a healing well may include instructions for how the water was used. An account of the Tylwyth Teg — the Fair Folk — might preserve both a supernatural tale and advice about how people should behave around particular places. A charm against witchcraft can tell us something about magical practice while also becoming part of the folklore gathered around the person who made or used it.
The boundaries are rarely tidy.
When I describe something as Welsh folklore, I am not necessarily saying that it was once part of a magical practice. When I discuss Welsh folk magic, I am making a narrower claim: that we have some evidence of people doing something intended to heal, protect, divine, counter harmful influences, or otherwise affect the circumstances around them.
And when I prepare a contemporary rite inspired by those traditions, that is another thing again.
Knowing which road we are travelling matters.
What do we mean by Welsh folklore?
Folklore is much broader than a collection of old stories.
It includes material carried within communities: legends, beliefs, customs, sayings, songs, seasonal traditions, supernatural encounters, explanations attached to particular places, healing traditions, household practices and stories told from one generation to another.
Some of it was written down. Much of it was transmitted orally before collectors recorded it.
Welsh folklore therefore contains everything from stories of the Tylwyth Teg and apparitions to local traditions surrounding wells, mountains, houses and stretches of road. It also includes customs that may have little or nothing to do with what we would now describe as magic.
The Mari Lwyd, for example, belongs to Welsh customary tradition. Its surviving forms involve a horse-skull figure, visiting, verse exchanges and seasonal community performance. Calling it “folk magic” simply because it looks strange or old would tell us very little about what the custom actually was.
The same caution applies elsewhere.
A supernatural story is not automatically evidence of worship. A custom is not automatically a ritual in the modern spiritual sense. A place associated with the Fair Folk is not necessarily evidence that everyone living nearby attempted to work magically with them.
Folklore tells us what people said, remembered, feared, celebrated, repeated and passed on.
Sometimes it also tells us what they did.
That is where the boundary begins to blur.
What, then, is folk magic?
“Folk magic” is a useful modern umbrella term rather than the name of a single organised Welsh magical system.
Historical Welsh practice did not arrive as a handbook called Welsh Folk Magic with a fixed set of beliefs, initiations and rules.
Instead, we find scattered practices.
There are written charms and protective texts. There are remedies and healing traditions. There are forms of divination and astrology. There are measures taken against witchcraft or perceived supernatural harm. There are people consulted because they were believed to possess particular knowledge or abilities.
Among the best-known of these figures are the dynion hysbys — literally “knowing people”, usually rendered in English as cunning folk or wise people.
The surviving record shows that some dynion hysbys prepared charms, diagnosed problems, offered remedies, practised divination or astrology, and were consulted when ordinary explanations seemed insufficient.
The National Library of Wales preserves, for example, a nineteenth-century written charm made by an unnamed dyn hysbys for a woman near Llanwnog who was suffering from illness. The charm survives with mystical symbols, its envelope and the small cloth bag in which it was kept.
Other surviving Welsh charms were intended specifically as protection against witchcraft. The National Library holds examples from areas including Towyn and Llanidloes, while its manuscript collections contain charms alongside instructions for drawing magical circles and material on palmistry.
These are more than stories about magic.
They are physical traces of practices people actually used.
The knowing people were not outside Welsh society
One reason I am cautious about presenting Welsh folk magic as a lost alternative religion is that the historical evidence does not support such a simple division.
The magical, medical and religious worlds of earlier centuries often overlapped.
The Harries family of Cwrtycadno in Carmarthenshire offers a particularly revealing example. Members of the family became famous as dynion hysbys, but the surviving papers associated with them do not contain only spells.
They include medical prescriptions, patient correspondence, horoscopes, astrological material, lecture notes and medical texts. A surviving book of incantations associated with the family also contains material copied from seventeenth-century ceremonial grimoires.
That is a much less tidy picture than the modern image of a village witch preserving an untouched pre-Christian tradition.
It is also considerably more human.
People drew upon the knowledge available to them. Medicine, prayer, astrology, written charms, Christian imagery, learned magical texts and local belief could exist beside one another without necessarily being understood as mutually exclusive categories.
If we remove the Christian elements because they do not fit a modern Pagan idea of folk magic, we do not make the tradition more Welsh.
We make it less historically recognisable.
A holy well shows why the boundary is difficult
Holy wells are a useful place to see folklore and practice meeting one another.
Across Wales, wells became associated with saints, healing, pilgrimage and local custom. The surviving traditions vary enormously from place to place.
In Flintshire alone, historical accounts identified dozens of wells, many dedicated to saints. Particular wells were associated with complaints such as sore eyes, warts and rheumatism.
Imagine, then, that we encounter an old account of a Welsh well.
The story of the saint associated with it may be folklore or hagiographic tradition.
A local tale explaining why the water heals may be folklore.
The belief that a particular illness could be helped there is also part of the folk belief surrounding the place.
But if an account tells us that a visitor had to approach the water in a particular manner, drink from it, wash an afflicted part of the body, leave something behind or perform another prescribed action, we are also looking at practice.
Should we call that folk magic?
Sometimes that term is useful, but at other times, “healing custom”, “religious practice” or simply “well tradition” may describe the evidence more accurately.
The important question is not which modern label wins.
It is what the source actually tells us happened.
Folklore can preserve magical practice
The relationship also runs in the opposite direction.
Much of what we know about folk practice survives because someone later recorded a story about it.
A collector might write down an elderly person's memory of a cunning practitioner. A local history might preserve an account of a charm. A family might remember that a particular object was kept near a doorway for protection without preserving a written explanation of why.
By the time such material reaches us, practice has become folklore.
That does not necessarily make it unreliable, but it changes the questions we should ask.
Who recorded it?
When?
Were they describing something they personally witnessed, something remembered from childhood, or something already regarded as belonging to an older generation?
Did the collector understand the practice in the same way as the person describing it?
These questions do not make folklore unusable. They are part of taking it seriously.
Not everything supernatural is folk magic
This is perhaps the simplest distinction, and one of the most important.
Welsh folklore is full of supernatural material.
There are fairies, ghosts, spectral animals, corpse candles, prophetic dreams, strange voices, ominous sounds and landscapes where ordinary rules seem briefly less certain.
That does not mean every story preserves a magical technique.
A tale warning someone not to intrude upon the Tylwyth Teg may tell us a great deal about attitudes towards the unseen, boundaries and proper behaviour. It does not necessarily provide instructions for contacting them.
Likewise, an account of a ghost tells us that a ghost was said to have appeared. It does not automatically tell us that anyone attempted necromancy.
One of the easiest ways to distort folklore is to read every supernatural story as a fragment of a hidden magical system.
Sometimes a story is simply a story.
That does not make it less valuable.
And not all Welsh folk magic was uniquely Welsh
There is another complication worth keeping.
Practices found in Wales did not exist behind an impermeable border.
People travelled. Books circulated. Religious ideas crossed languages and regions. Astrological and ceremonial texts moved through Britain and Europe. Healing practices could resemble those used elsewhere.
The Harries manuscripts make this particularly visible: material associated with famous Welsh cunning practitioners includes passages copied from learned magical texts circulating far beyond Wales.
So identifying something in a Welsh manuscript does not automatically mean it originated in Wales.
What can make the material distinctly Welsh is sometimes the language in which it was used, the landscape in which it was practised, the people who carried it, the local beliefs surrounding it, and the particular way outside influences were absorbed into Welsh life.
That is a quieter form of distinctiveness than claiming every practice to be uniquely ancient. I think it is also a more convincing one.
Where does modern practice belong?
This is the point at which my own work enters the conversation.
The rites I prepare today are contemporary rites.
They may draw upon Welsh folklore, surviving folk practices, Welsh mythology, landscape, language or older customs. Sometimes a historical practice can be adapted quite closely. At other times the source provides an image, relationship or principle from which something new grows.
I do not think that needs disguising.
If I create a modern ritual around a Welsh story, the existence of the story does not make the ritual itself medieval.
If I use a plant with a documented history in Welsh custom, that does not mean every action I perform with it was historically practised in Wales.
And if a rite reflects my own relationship with a figure from Welsh tradition, that relationship belongs to the present even when the story beneath it is much older.
There is room for inheritance and creation to exist together.
The important thing is to know when we have crossed from one into the other.
Why does the distinction matter?
Because different kinds of evidence allow us to say different things.
Welsh folklore suggests...
That may mean a belief, story or custom was recorded within Welsh tradition.
Historical sources record people doing...
That tells us we have evidence for a practice rather than only a story surrounding it.
In the rites I prepare today...
That makes clear that we have reached contemporary practice.
None of those needs to be more important than the others; they simply describe different relationships with the material.
I would rather leave a gap where the historical record leaves one than fill it with certainty because certainty sounds more impressive. Equally, I do not think modern practice has to apologise for being modern.
Tradition has always involved people carrying things forward.
What matters is how consciously we carry them.
Welsh folklore gives us an extraordinary record of story, landscape, memory and belief. Welsh folk magic allows us to look more closely at some of the things people actually did within that world. Contemporary practice gives us another question: what, if anything, do we choose to do with what has reached us?
Those paths meet frequently but they do not need to become the same road.
Sources & Further Reading
National Library of Wales, collections relating to charms and the dynion hysbys. The Library preserves surviving written charms, manuscripts and papers connected with Welsh cunning practitioners, including material associated with the Harries family of Cwrtycadno.
Elias Owen, Welsh Folk-Lore: A Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales. A nineteenth-century collection that remains useful as a historical source for traditions recorded during the period, while needing to be read with the usual care given to the methods and assumptions of early folklore collectors. The National Library of Wales also preserves Owen's unfinished manuscript work on the holy wells of North Wales.
Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. Its collections and folklore material preserve objects, customs and oral accounts connected with Welsh popular belief and tradition, illustrating how broad the category of folklore can be.
National Library of Wales, material on Welsh holy wells and seventeenth-century belief. Particularly useful for the local healing traditions attached to wells in Flintshire and for seeing religion, healing and supernatural belief existing alongside one another.