Faery-inflicted diseases

Henri Pierre Picou, Fairy & Cupid

I cite here a text called The Fairies Song, an anonymous verse that comes from Arthur Clifford’s Tixall Poetry collection of 1813 and which dates to the reign of Charles I. It was reprinted in 1851 in the Book of English Song. The verse is fascinating for its generally malign view of faerie kind. Conceded, they dance lightly- as we might expect the dainty little modern faery to do, but thereafter matters go awry. They stir up bad weather, raise floods and revel in the tempest, exulting in the fact that “what frights others is our joy.” They visit human kind disguised, having shapeshifted into various forms, and cheerfully cause illness and pain amongst us.

“We dance on hills above the wind,
And leave our footsteps there behind.
Which shall to after ages last,
When all our dancing days are past.

Sometimes we dance upon the shore,
To whistling winds and seas that roar,
Then we make the wind to blow.
And set the seas a-dancing too.

The thunder’s noise is our delight,
Jind lightnings make us day by night ;
And in the air we dance on high.
To the loud music of the sky.

About the moon we make a ring,
And falling stars we wanton fling,
Like squibs and rockets, for a toy.
While what frights others is our joy

But when we ‘d hunt away our cares.
We boldly mount the galloping spheres
And riding so from east to west.
We chase each nimble zodiac beast.

Thus, giddy grown, we make our beds.
With thick black clouds to rest our heads,
And flood the earth with our dark showers.
That did but sprinkle these our bowers.

Thus, having done with orbs and sky,
Those mighty spaces vast and high,
Then down we come and take the shapes,
Sometimes of cats, sometimes of apes.

Next turn’d to mites in cheese, forsooth,
We get into some hollow tooth ;
Wherein, as in a Christmas hall,
We frisk and dance, the devil and all.

Then we change our wily features,
Into yet far smaller creatures.
And dance in joints of gouty toes.
To painful tunes of groans and woes.”

What intrigues me here is the faeries’ responsibility for disease. Readers may very well be familiar with the fact that the faes will often wound or kill livestock with their arrows, the so-called elf-bolts, which are used in order to steal the beasts from mortal farmers so that the faeries can consume them or their dairy products. You might also recall my description of how paralysis can be used as a form of sanction against humans who have displeased their good neighbours. This verse nonetheless seems to indicate that our more day to day ailments and aches and pains are down to supernatural intervention as well- be it as a cruel prank or, possibly, because that’s just part of what the faeries do.

There’s some basis for this supposition. I suspect the anonymous Stuart poet was elaborating from an idea that was very standard at the time. ‘Feyry’ (and the like) was a term for certain forms of ill-health that inexplicably might befall people. In Scotland consumption (tuberculosis) was thought to be inflicted by the faeries as a cover for abducting the victim’s spirit. The sudden illness then explained as being ‘faery struck’ bequeathed us the ‘stroke’ known to medicine today. Hives and skin blisters were caused by a blast of faery breath, and skin discolourations and unexplained bruising were ‘fairy nips’ and enlargement of the spleen was called ‘elf cake.’

If the faeries are indeed responsible for all these maladies- major and minor- it makes a great deal more sense why an anonymous parson of Warlingham in Surrey made a collection of “certain medicines… taught to him by the fayries” in the early seventeenth century, about contemporary with our song. Toothache was cured (on the faes’ advice) by mixing wheatmeal with spurge to produce a dough which was then put into the cavity in the painful tooth. Spurge (euphorbia) produces a latex-like sap that is highly irritant, so it would undoubtedly have some effect on your tooth- possibly unpleasant- and certainly the polar opposite of the modern tooth fairy.