Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins by Claire Fayers

Summary:

A wealth of Welsh myths, legends and ghost stories are reimagined for contemporary younger readers in Claire Fayers’s Welsh Giants, Ghosts & Goblins. Meet Idris, the teenage giant king on a quest to collect stories. As he travels across Wales in this anthology, readers encounter a vengeful house goblin, a ghost that steals life from the living, dwarves that have moved in beneath someone’s garden, a tea party of Lady ghosts, a furry trickster goblin and many other fascinating and devious fairy folk besides!

I’m pleased to welcome author Claire Fayers to Scope for Imagination with a brilliant guest post about the giants who inspired her fascinating book.

Giants

Wales as a country has its fair share of giants.

There’s Bran the Blessed, King of Briton, who waded across the Irish Sea to start a war with Ireland and his head is supposed to be buried somewhere in London. I didn’t have space to include his story but you can find it in the Mabinogion. I recommend Sophie Anderson’s retelling of Branwen in The Mab, edited by Matt Brown and Eloise Williams.

There’s Jack O’Kent, who appears in my Welsh Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends, making bets with the devil. I didn’t want to use him again in Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins but I pinched one of his stories and gave it to Idris, my story-hunting giant.

Then there’s John o’ the Thumbs, who kills a dragon at Denbigh Castle. In the original legend, he really does kill the dragon and then has to display its head as proof, but I like dragons so I came up with a happier ending in Sir John and the Dragon.

The same giant story appears in two parts of Wales – a burial mound on Ynys Mȏn and Hay Castle in Powys are both there thanks to giantesses who carried stones in their aprons.

There aren’t many evil giants, but Olwen’s father in Culwch and the Giant’s Daughter is one. Ysbaddaden Pencawr (Chief Gianthead in my version) won’t let Culwch and Olwen marry until Culwch carries out a long list of impossible tasks including retrieving a pair of scissors from the head of a magic and very angry giant boar.

And that brings me to Idris, my teenage giant king who leaves his home in search of stories. The people he meets on his journey form a thread through the whole book.

Cadair Idris (Idris’s Chair) is a mountain in north Wales. According to the legend, Idris was a giant and astronomer who sat on top of the mountain to watch the stars. The boulders at the bottom of the mountain are stones that he shook out of his shoe, and anyone brave enough to spend a night on the mountain now will end up a poet, mad or dead.

The legend doesn’t say anything about Idris’s early life so I was free to make it all up. But he’s just as real to me as all the other giants in my book.

~ Claire Fayers

Thank you to Firefly for this fantastic book! Don’t miss the rest of the stops on this blog tour!