The story is the one people repeat. Llywelyn ab Iorwerth comes in from the hunt. The cradle is turned over. The hound's mouth is red. He kills Gelert. Then the child cries, and a wolf is dead by the crib. After that, the tale says, the prince does not smile.
The story is older than this village's claim on it. Folklorists file it as Aarne-Thompson-Uther 178A, the faithful animal killed by a mistake. In India the animal is a mongoose. D. L. Ashliman keeps the Welsh greyhound on that same shelf. I read his shelf. I am not retelling his texts.
Beddgelert is a real village in Gwynedd, and a stone stands in the meadow south of it. The name means a grave. Whose grave is the fight.
A place-name book from 1986 reads it as Saint Gelert, an early saint, not the dog: W. F. H. Nicolaisen, Margaret Gelling, and Melville Richards, The Names of Towns and Cities in Britain (Batsford, 1986), p. 49. I have not opened that page. The citation is the one the Gelert article carries, and I mark it secondary.
What I did open is D. E. Jenkins, Bedd Gelert: Its Facts, Fairies, and Folk-lore (Portmadoc: Llewelyn Jenkins, 1899), the Cornell scan. Jenkins is arguing with Joseph Jacobs, and he quotes a man of the place.
William Jones, called Bleddyn, wrote in 1859 and was printed in Y Brython for 1861. Jenkins does not set the name beside the paragraph. He calls the writer a native of the village. His preface says the book rests on Jones's 1861 articles, and on Jones's essay on the antiquities and folklore of Beddgelert. I am joining those two, and I say so.
Jones's point, as Jenkins gives it in English: the tale had no place in the folklore of that part until David Prichard of the Goat Hotel, a South Wales man, brought it. Prichard, William Prichard the parish clerk, and Richard Edwards tried to lift a large stone on the north side of the hillock. They failed. They carried the stone that stands there from somewhere else. The spot was called the dog's grave afterwards.
So the hillock was already there. What the hotel men raised was the marker. The 1899 scan prints Edwards's farm-name in a way I will not correct by guess, so I leave him as Richard Edwards of Pen y Bont.
John Prichard, a later landlord of the Goat, dug the hillock. He found no walls. He found stones that had once been in a river. Jenkins thinks they were carried there to make a cairn. Asked whose grave it was, he floats a genealogy with an ancestor named Celert, and then he says he cannot vouch for the list. That guess stays a guess.
Jenkins also notes two silences. Nicholas Owen's 1792 sketch of Caernarfonshire does not mention the legend. William Williams deals with the name Bedd Gelert in Observations on the Snowdon Mountains (1802) and does not mention the legend either. I have not opened those books. Jenkins did, and the silence is his report.
The ballad people know is William Robert Spencer's Beth Gêlert, about 1800. Jenkins says Spencer heard the tale from David Prichard that year, on a visit with W. A. Madocks, while they talked of building the hotel. By 1801, Jenkins says, Bingley found the hotel going up. I have not opened Spencer's printing. The visit is Jenkins's account.
The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales (University of Wales Press, 2008), p. 306, is cited for a harder line: that David Prichard made the mound itself, late in the eighteenth century, to draw travellers. I have not read page 306. Jones, closer to the parish memory, talks about a stone set on a hillock, not a hill three men built. Until I open that page, I keep Jones.
The dog in the tale can stay. The mistake is the point, and it is a good point. The stone in the meadow is three men's work, on ground that was already raised, under a name that was not his.