So this is one of the books that I bought as a souvenir of my 2022 trip to England and Wales! Though we never made it up to Snowdonia (the train up the mountain wasn’t running, so we didn’t really feel like driving some more), I love folk tales and thought this would make a good souvenir of our day trip to Conwy.

As expected, I really enjoyed this book! One nice thing about folklore collections that are specific to a particular area (e.g. Forgotten Yorkshire Folk and Fairy Tales) is that you get to read lots of new stories and Snowdonia Folk Tales were no different. I knew some of the Arthurian legends, though I didn’t know they were from Wales, but most of the stories were new to me. The book is divided into the following sections:

• Mythic roots: druids, dragons, and Taliesin
• Legends of Arthur
• The Lives of the Saints
• The Tylwyth Teg: stories about the fairies
• Folk Tales
• Historic Legends

All the sections come with an introduction, which I felt really helped to place things in context. Most of the stories seem fairly old too – there is only one new story, and that is based on archaeological evidence and speculation about the Lindow Man, the preserved body found in the peat bog, and I found that to be an interesting take on what could have happened.

The only thing I didn’t like about the book was that there were some issues with the typesetting – certain words had odd spaces between them and that looks pretty bad visually. It doesn’t affect the content, but it seems to be a strange error. I’ll post a picture of this soon – I forgot to take a photo and I’ve started backing to move back.

Overall, I really like this book and it’s going to be a great addition to my small collection of books on fairy and folk tales from different places. Plus, it’s a nice trip souvenir for me too!