Princess Eilonwy
character from The Chronicles of Prydain
Princess Eilonwy ( eye-LON-wee) is a fictional character in Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain. She appears in four of the five novels in the series, as well as Disney's 1985 animated film adaptation The Black Cauldron. Eilonwy is a member of the Royal House of Llyr, and the women in her line are formidable enchantresses, including her mother, Angharad, and grandmother Regat. She has inherited this characteristic, most readily visible in her manipulation of a magical item she calls her "bauble", a small golden sphere that glows with magical light when activated by her willpower. Eilonwy's father, Geraint, was a commoner with whom her mother fell in love.
Name origin
Eilonwy is not a historical Welsh name (unlike many others used in the stories), but it turns up in a tale by Glasynys—published in Cymru Fu, or The Wales that Was (1862–4), and translated from the Welsh by Sir John Rhys in his Celtic Folklore (1901)—belonging to the daughter of a mermaid named Nefyn ferch Nefydd and her human lover Ifan Morgan. A poem by Talhaiarn also bears the name "Eilonwy". It may be based on the literary Welsh (i.e. obsolete) word eilon, meaning "deer, stag", with the fanciful suffix -wy (used in the 1800s to adorn river names) added for euphony (or perhaps in reference to the river Elan in central Wales).
Description
Eilonwy is described having long red-gold hair, bright blue eyes, and a melodic, youthful voice.
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This entry incorporates text from “Princess Eilonwy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.