Little does the guidwife wot That my name is Marget Tot.
To come back to Wales, we have there the names Silly Frit and Silly go Dwt, which are those of females. The former name is purely English--Silly Frit, which has been already guessed (p. 66) to mean a silly sprite, or silly apparition, with the idea of its being a fright of a creature to behold: compare the application elsewhere to a fairy changeling of the terms crimbil (p. 263) and cyrfaglach or cryfaglach (p. 450), which is explained as implying a haggard urchin that has been half starved and stunted in its growth. Leaving out of the reckoning this connotation, one might compare the term with the Scottish habit of calling the fairies silly wights, 'the Happy Wights.' See J. Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary, where s. v. seily, seely, 'happy,' he purports to quote the following lines from 'the Legend of the Bishop of St. Androis' in a collection of Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1801), pp. 320-1:--
For oght the kirk culd him forbid, He sped him sone, and gat the thrid; Ane Carling of the Quene of Phareis, That ewill win gair to elphyne careis,
Through all Braid Albane scho hes bene, On horsbak on Hallow ewin; And ay in seiking certayne nyghtis, As scho sayis, with sur [read our] sillie wychtis.
Similarly, he gives the fairies the name of Seely Court, and cites as illustrating it the following lines from R. Jamieson's Popular Ballads, (i. 236, and) ii. 189:--
But as it fell out on last Hallowe'en, When the Seely Court was ridin' by, The queen lighted down on a gowan bank, Nae far frae the tree where I wont to lye.
Into Welsh, however, the designation Silly Frit must have come, not from Scotland, but from the Marches; and the history of Sìli go Dwt must be much the same. For, though construed as Welsh, the name would mean the Silly who is go Dwt [195], 'somewhat tidy or natty'; but the dwt (mutated from twt) was suggested doubtless by the tot of such fairy names as Tom Tit Tot. That brings me to another group, where the syllable is trot or trut, and this we have in the Welsh doggerel, mentioned at p. 229, as follows:--
Bychan a wyda' hi Little did she know Mai Trwtyn-Tratyn That Trwtyn Tratyn Yw f'enw i. Is my name.