Brewery Of Eggshells

This legend is set in the Welsh parish of Treneglwys, at a shepherd’s cottage called Twt y Cymrws. The tale connects the name with the quarrel that follows.

A man and his wife once lived there with their twin babies, and the mother looked after them lovingly. One day she had to go to a neighbour’s house some distance away. She did not like leaving the little ones alone in a lonely cottage, because she had heard that the fair folk were often seen nearby.

She went and came back as fast as she could. But on the way home, even though it was the middle of the day, she was frightened to see some old elves in blue petticoats crossing the path in front of her. She ran the rest of the way, but when she got in, her two babies were lying in the cradle and everything looked just as she had left it.

After a while, though, the family began to suspect that something was wrong, because the twins did not grow at all.

“They are not ours,” said the man.

“Then whose else could they be?” said the woman.

They argued about it so much that the neighbours named the cottage after the quarrel. The woman grew very unhappy, and one evening she decided to visit the Wise Man of Llanidloes, whom she believed would know what to do.

She went to Llanidloes and told him the whole story. The harvest of rye and oats was coming soon, so the Wise Man said, “When you are making dinner for the reapers, scrape out an empty hen’s eggshell and cook some soup in it. Then carry it to the door as if it were the reapers’ dinner, and listen to see whether the twins say anything. If you hear them talking about things no baby could know, go back in, pick them up and throw them into the waters of Lake Elvyn. But if you hear nothing strange, do them no harm.”

When harvest day came, the woman did exactly as the Wise Man had told her. She set the eggshell on the fire, took it off, carried it to the door and stood there listening. And she heard one of the babies say to the other:

I knew the acorn before the oak,

The egg before the hen,

But never saw an eggshell cook

A meal for harvest men!

Now she knew. She went back into the house, seized the two strange babies and threw them into the lake. At once the goblins in their blue trousers came rushing up and pulled their own little ones out of the water and away. And the mother got her own children back, safe and sound, and that was the end of the great quarrel.

Where this story comes from

This Welsh changeling legend is “Brewery of Eggshells” in Joseph Jacobs’s Celtic Fairy Tales (1892). Jacobs names the Cambrian Quarterly Magazine of 1830, volume II, page86, as his source and points to other European parallels.

In this kind of legend, a changeling is a fairy child secretly substituted for a human baby. The trick is to make the changeling so surprised that it gives away its great age. Here the fairy children are rescued from the lake and the human twins return. That magical rescue does not make throwing children into water safe or acceptable.

Read the original: Joseph Jacobs, Celtic Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg)

Best for older readers with an adult — includes suspected child replacement and children deliberately thrown into a lake. Differences in growth or behavior are not evidence that a child is a changeling.

Reading the story closely

The eggshell creates an absurd mismatch: a vessel too small to feed harvest workers produces a speech that sounds too old for infants. Within the fantasy, that speech resolves the parents’ dispute. The ending depends on magical substitutions and rescue; those events cannot justify mistreating a real child.

Read the four-line verse and identify the pairs that reverse normal order: acorn and oak, egg and hen. Then separate the tale’s three kinds of information—what the parents notice, what they suspect, and what the supernatural ending asserts. Notice how quickly the Wise Man’s advice turns a suspicion into permission for violence.

Talk about it

• What made the parents think the twins were not really theirs?
• How did the eggshell trick make the changeling give itself away?
• Why do you think the Wise Man said not to harm the babies if they said nothing strange?

Related stories

• The Shepherd of Myddvai — another Welsh tale of the fair folk
• The Horned Women — an Irish tale of a clever trick against fairy visitors
• The Field of Boliauns — an Irish fairy story from Jacobs