The Cost of Faery Bargains

Loch Guinach, 1866

Over history, humans have entered into transactions with our faery neighbours but, whatever their attractions, these deals can incorporate some very hard terms- aspects that might well make us think twice about such contracts. Either the human party to the deal may be cheated or- far worse- they may find that the price exacted is one they would not choose to pay.

A prime illustration of this must be a son of the MacCrimmon family, pipers to clan MacLeod on Skye. The boy lacked the bagpiping skills that were a talent of the rest of his family. He was approached by the faery queen with a proposal that she give him a silver chanter which would endow him with incomparable skill on the instrument- at a price. The cost of the gift was that, after seven years, he would have to meet her again. He agreed to this and found great fame and reward with his newly acquired expertise but, on the appointed day, he returned to meet the queen- and was never seen again.

A comparably tragic tale comes from Loch Guinach, near Kingussie in the Highlands. A very poor man who could not support his family went to the loch in despair, intending to drown himself. He met a faery woman there who promised that she’d make him prosperous, on condition that whatever he met on first returning to his home would become hers in a year’s time. The man consented to this. As he got home his entire family rushed out to meet him, but fortunately his dog raced ahead and got to him first. The man ought to have been relieved that neither his wife or any of his children had been quicker, but he was very attached to this particular animal and, a year later, refused to give it to the bean sith. Instead, he offered himself- and the faery didn’t quibble. He was told to come again after another year, but in the meantime she kept the dog. At the next meeting, she gave him a puppy his dog had produced and told him that he would only see the old dog one more time. This proved to be true. Many years later the man was in his sheepfold when the old dog suddenly appeared and barked three times. He realised that this was an instruction that, in three days time, he must go to the loch and there he would die.

Even when a bargain goes against the faeries’ immediate interests, they’re able to turn it to their favour in the longer term. So, a man called Robin Oig was hunting in Glenmore one day when he met a party of fairies marching with music.  He claimed a fine set of bag pipes with silver, jewelled chanter and drones by means of the time-honoured trick of throwing his bonnet and crying out “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.”  The faeries had to agree to the exchange and to relinquish the pipes to him, being obliged to comply with this formula, but when he got home, he discovered what he had obtained was a puff ball mushroom with some broken spikes of grass stuck in it.

Our Good Neighbours are always beside us and seem to have a canny knowledge of our weaknesses. They know what humans won’t be able to resist- and how to come out on top in transactions. This isn’t to say that they can’t be tricked or out-negotiated, but the best advice is probably not to overestimate your cleverness or your bargaining skills- and always to be cautious and wary.

Glenmore

The Inescapable Nature of Faery Fate

Dun Osdale

One sobering aspect of the faeries is their inexorable sense of vengeance. If a human offends them in some way, they will never forget this insult and will never fail to extract amends or punishment, however long it may take (in human terms).

One example comes from Dun Osdale on Skye. A man saw the faery mound there open and the inhabitants outside dancing. He spied on the festivities for a while, but then sneezed- and was exposed and caught by the sith folk. They dragged him inside the mound, but rather than chastising him for spying, he was (apparently) welcomed and rewarded with a sumptuous banquet. The man, though, was too canny to consume faery food and drink, knowing that he would have become trapped in the knoll. When offered a goblet of wine, he poured out the contents- and made off with the cup. The thief managed to get across the Osdale River ahead of his pursuers and, having crossed running water, was apparently safe.

When the man got home with the faery cup, his mother decided that it was wise to put a charm on him to protect him from any future attempts by the faeries to take revenge. She did not, however, enchant the stolen cup. It retained its faery mystique, or glamour, and the fatal quality that whoever saw it had to take possession of it. As a result, her son was murdered by another human who wanted to have the precious cup for himself, thereby acting as an instrument of faery judgment. Once your fate has been decreed by the fae, it cannot be escaped.

Dun Gharsainn

Another case from Skye indicates how faery vengeance can be cumulative and inexorable. A man took stones from the faery knoll of Dun Gharsainn, removing them at night because he knew that his neighbours would complain if they realised that he was behaving so selfishly as to do something that could bring down the faery wrath on the whole community, rather than just him alone. As it happened, the faeries were absent from their home when the damage was inflicted. This encouraged the man to take more building materials, but on his third visit a light shone out of the mound and a voice warned him that revenge would be taken. The faeries abandoned their ruined dwelling in great distress, but their departure didn’t spare the stone thief. First his horse died, then his cows, then his crops failed. After his fishing boat sank as well, he emigrated. We might assume this saved him, but we shouldn’t count on it. A Jersey man who vandalised a dolmen in a similar way was progressively deprived of all his wealth, possessions and family before being drowned as he tried to sail away to a new life on the British mainland.

Finally, I have told previously the story of the curse of Pantannas in North Wales. A man who had outraged the tylwyth teg by ploughing up the place where they danced was harassed by them as a result. He tried replacing the sward to appease them, but this merely postponed rather than averted their sanction, which fell upon descendants in his family generations later. Faery wrath is implacable and- it would seem- indiscriminate, in that the sins of the parents can be visited upon their distant offspring.

The Curse of Pantannas

Some Cornish water sprites

The Padstow ‘Obby ‘Oss

For my birthday a little while ago, I was given a copy of the book, The Living Stones- Cornwall, by the surrealist painter Ithell Colquhoun. Colquhoun was not just an artist, she was fascinated by the occult (being a member of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis as well as the original Fairy Investigation Society). She practiced magic herself and was intrigued about the links between Cornwall’s ancient, megalithic sites (so many of which were to be found near her Cornish home at Lamorna) and folklore.

The book, therefore, is full of interesting observations and notes on the stone circles and other ancient sites such as holy wells, of Cornwall and, particularly, of the Penwith region (accordingly, I’ve discussed her work at some length in my recent Spirits of the Land). Whenever there was faery lore linked to a location, Colquhoun recorded it. She has some interesting observations on a few Cornish water spirits that I thought it worthwhile featuring.

Describing the Hobby Horse ceremony of Padstow, she noted how Robert Hunt had suggested that “it was originally a water-horse or kelpie and states that at one time the rite was consummated by submerging him in the sea as a protection against cattle murrain.” I’d missed this and went back to Hunt’s Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall. The text records how the practice was to ride the ‘horse’ to water and, at the end of the festivities, to submerge him in the sea. Hunt then commented that the water horse is a “truly Celtic tradition.” I’ve written in previous posts about the water horses (each uisge) and the kelpie of the Highlands of Scotland. It’s a very big geographical link to tie them too closely to the Cornish hobby horse, but it’s nonetheless a fascinating and thought provoking idea.

A little later in the book, Colquhoun describes what was called ‘Nicky Nan Night’ in West Cornwall, a time of freedom and mischief for children on the night before Shrove Tuesday. Pranks such as lifting gates off their hinges would be carried out with the licence of the season. This seasonal rite at Easter wasn’t just some worship of the sun, Colquhoun perceptively suggested. In fact what was “perpetuated by Nicky Nan, as the name suggests, [is] a strain of water worship.” She then observed that the well at Colan near Newquay is dedicated to “Our Lady Nant- Nantosuelta, White Lady or water nix- and at Lamorna it may be the genius of the stream to whom we owe this survival [of the Easter mischief night].” Colquhoun knows her stuff and is perfectly right here: on the Welsh border with England a water sprite Nicky Nacky Nye is recorded; we’re looking here at the surviving remnants of some very old British traditions.

Harbourside Bucca by Tarraway Hoofpress on Folksy

Lastly, Colquhoun commented on the tradition of giving nicknames to the inhabitants of Cornish villages- Wendron goats, Madron bulls, St Agnes cuckoos and so on. She describes these as animal totems, which could well be corrected, but she then remarks that St Keverne, a village on the Lizard peninsula, is linked not to an animal but to the bucca. As the artist rightly comments: “this last is in a different category from the others in that a bucca is not an animal but a species of Cornish fairy. Unlike the pisky, who frequents the surface of the ground, or the knocker, who is a ‘swart fairy of the mine,’ he is amphibious, with something in common with the Gaelic kelpie. Within living memory, offerings of fish were made to the bucca on a certain stone at the top of Newlyn Hill [near Penzance]. Why St Keverne people should have adopted them as their totem I cannot say.”

I’d say the bucca was more like a merman than a kelpie (see the descriptions in my Beyond Faery (2020)), but his influence over the shoals of fish and the ability of people to catch them could explain the decision of a village, which must partly have been dependent on the sea, to dedicate itself to the being.

Dim Faeries- some aspects of fae nature

Tara & the Each Uisge, by Declan Kerr

Intelligence varies from individual to individual across the faery community. That’s a natural fact of life, but humans (certainly) have always regarded certain faery types as being markedly less clever than others. The element of superiority we can detect here could well derive, to some degree, from fear. If something’s a threat to us, we can feel a bit better about the situation if we find a reason to despise them.

In Scotland it is the water horse, or each uisge, which has always been viewed with a combination of terror and contempt. A few examples will illustrate this. The each is notorious as a predator of young women; their habit was to take human form, seduce the girls and then carry them off to be consumed under the surface of a lake (or, at best, held there as a domestic slave and forced wife). Concupiscence can make a water horse too trusting (although the same might well be said about humans too). On the island of Barra a ferocious example used to haunt a loch between Ersery and Bruerish. One day it snatched away a girl and proceeded to gallop off with her to its lair; she pretended to be happy enough with this, and prepared to become his wife, but she asked for a final kindness before leaving the mortal world behind, which was to gather up some heather to make a soft bed under the loch. The each agreed and took on human form to help her. It being a warm day, they sat down in the heather and she managed to sooth the horse-man into sleep. She then managed to slip away, fetched a halter with iron fittings from her home- and slipped it over the water horses’s head, so he was under her control and was compelled by the magical power of the iron to work on her family farm.

This each uisge was obviously neither wily nor alert enough to spot danger. Perhaps he was simply too trusting of the young female- underestimating her entirely. Without question, a water horse on the island of Lewis was much less bright. As a handsome young man he wooed a girl walking alone. She guessed what he was, something that was confirmed once they’d sat down and she was combing his hair for him – which was full of sand (a common clue as to the mysterious suitor’s real nature). Once again, the horse fell asleep and the girl managed to slip out of her skirt and run home. When he awoke, the each uisge was surprised how light she was, but still carried the empty skirt off to his lair, muttering all the time in bafflement about her weight.

A final example comes from Skye. The each uisge of Loch Cil Chriosd was so dim, apparently, that he couldn’t even tell the difference between a girl and a Catholic priest in his cassock. Instead of a meal, the horse ended up with a blessing (never a welcome thing to a supernatural).

On the Isle of Man, a very similar story to that of the Lewis water horse was told of the buggane who lived at the Spooyt Wooar, the Big Waterfall. The Buggane usually takes the shape of a big black calf, which sometimes alarms people by crossing the road in front of them and jumping into the adjacent pool with a sound like chains being shaken. He can take more human form though and once, in the form of a very large man, he went to a house at the end of Glen Rushen, picked up a girl who was working there, slung her over his back, and carried her down to his home in the pool into which the waterfall cascades. Just as they were coming to it, she, having a sharp knife in her hand with which she had been slicing up turnips, managed to cut the string of her apron and get free. The buggane ploughed on into the pool without noticing that he now only had the skirt and not the woman.

These stories of course perpetuate a common human prejudice that brawn lacks brain. Whether right or wrong, we instinctively don’t expect big muscly beings to be bright, whether they’re human or supernatural. Perhaps a better example to test the hypothesis about faery intelligence, therefore, is manner in which changelings are often exposed.

Readers may very well recall that one way of demonstrating that your strangely altered child is no longer your baby but is, in reality, an old faery man substituted for infant in the cot, is the trick of brewing with egg-shells. The idea is that so novel a practice as cooking food, or making beer, in lots of impractical little pots is bound to provoke the changelings’ curiosity, so that they won’t be able to help disclosing themselves. In one example from Mull, a woman started boiling some pebbles in a pot. The changeling was so amazed that it stood up in the cot and asked what she was about. On being told that she boiling the stones to make them soft, the old faery man exclaimed how he’d lived 500 years and never seen such a thing. He was promptly ejected from the cradle and the human home

What these stories seem to tell us about faeries is that they’re credulous, lacking in wile and quite without caution. They don’t suspect there’s a possible trap being laid and they aren’t wary enough to hold their tongues and conceal their identities. We might describe this behaviour in a couple of ways: we might regard it as simplicity and naivety (if we’re feeling generous) or we might call it downright stupidity. If the latter, it might suggest that it’s more than just the big bumbling faeries who are not as sharp as they should be. A comparable dilemma arises in the stories like Rumpelstiltskin where again, the faery discloses the very thing that he’s supposed to keep secret (in these cases, his name). How do we classify this: overconfidence, hubris, carelessness or just plain daftness?

It’s harsh to make these observations, but we have to recognise that humans can often (luckily for them) outwit their Good Neighbours. Then again, another part of the explanation may be, it strikes me, that the faeries are innocent of some of the ways of humans. They don’t lie- and can therefore too easily be taken in- and they may not always understand how our society operates, laying them open to deception or misinterpretation.

The best assumption, doubtless, is that some faes are brighter than others and that some fae’s mothers are brighter than other fae’s mothers (to seriously misquote The Smiths)!

Like long barrow sleepers

The poet Andrew Young (1885-1971), wrote this evocation of A Prehistoric Camp, :

“It was the time of year
Pale lambs leap with thick leggings on
Over small hills that are not there,
That I climbed Eggardon…

But there on the hill-crest,
Where only larks or stars look down,
Earthworks exposed a vaster nest,
Its race of men long flown.”

Eggardon Hill, which is east of Bridport, in Dorset, is an Iron Age hill fort, but there is evidence of much earlier use in the form of several tumuli or long barrows on its summit.  The presence of barrows within the defences is what interests me here: it is quite a common feature, as for example at Hambledon Hill further east in the same county.  

Also by Young is the poem ‘Wiltshire Downs‘ from which I quote the final stanza.

“And one tree-crowned long barrow
Stretched like a sow that has brought forth her farrow
Hides a king’s bones
Lying like broken sticks among the stones.”

With his mentions of lost races and ancient kings, Young has connected to a key feature of our landscape and folklore, but he does not take advantage of the full mystery associated with these features.  There are deep resonances here at which Young only hints in the most subtle, or oblique, manner. Welsh poet and artist David Jones made full use of the layers of tradition and myth, though, in his extended prose-poem concerning the Great War, In Parenthesis (1931), in which he described slumbering British troops in Flanders dugouts as being “like long-barrow sleepers, their dark arms at reach.” He returned to this theme decades later in his series of poems,  The Anathemata.  In the poem Sherthursday and Venus day Jones mentioned “the hidden lords in the West-tumulus.”  In the same poem he also recognised the intriguing mystery of hill-forts as well as barrows, imagining a climb “up by the parched concentric bends over the carious demarcations between the tawny ramps and the gone-fallow lynchets, into the vision lands.”

“Into the vision lands…” Jones intimately knew and worked with the legend and myth of the British Isles: he understood that the landscape was more than topography, that it comprised accrued memories and stories, that our reading of the land is as much composed of (often subconscious) echoes of legend and fairy-tale as it is of geology and land use. Beneath the features we see there are, indeed, the “hidden lords,” the “long-barrow sleepers” of British tradition. King Arthur sleeps beneath a hill, somewhere, waiting to answer the call to save Britain. Places across the British Isles are charged with the power of these genii loci, the spirits of place.

Cadbury Castle, Dorset: site of Camelot, faery grain store & site of sleeping knights

Rudyard Kipling was another writer who drew on the deep wells of folklore and, in his poem ‘Song of the Men’s Side’ from the book Rewards and Fairies, he advised:

“Tell it to the Barrows of the Dead—run ahead!
Shout it so the Women’s Side can hear!
This is the Buyer of the Blade—be afraid!
This is the great God Tyr!”

In Kipling’s story The Knife and Naked Chalk the faery Puck, the archetypal British supernatural being, introduces the children Dan and Una to a neolithic herder who tells a tale of “a Priestess walking to the Barrows of the Dead.”  The herder sees a girl he knows at a tribal ceremony:

“I looked for my Maiden among the Priestesses. She looked at me, but she did not smile. She made the sign to me that our Priestesses must make when they sacrifice to the Old Dead in the Barrows. I would have spoken, but my Mother’s brother made himself my Mouth, as though I had been one of the Old Dead in the Barrows for whom our Priests speak to the people on Midsummer Mornings.”  

The ancestors lie beneath the tumuli and their purpose is to advise and help their living descendants.  Perhaps that function is not yet exhausted…

As just mentioned, a vital element of one strand of British folk stories (the so-called ‘Matter of Britain’) is the concept of the sleeping hero.  King Arthur, most commonly, is understood not to be dead and buried in Avalon but lies hidden beneath some ancient feature- a hill fort or cave, perhaps- awaiting the time when he is summoned to bring salvation to the island and its people. Beneath the ancient heights of those tribal fortifications, warriors lie in wrapped in the dreams of centuries, patiently biding their time until the call is sounded and their slumbers are ended. Arthur’s the best known of these heroes, but other sleepers include Thomas of Erceldoune, or Thomas the Rhymer, the mortal man who met the faery queen one May Day and travelled with her as her lover into Faery. Now he serves the once and future king, awaiting the day. Faery and folk history become entwined; Arthur is both mortal warrior and immortal faery monarch; human politics merge with mystical meaning and leave their mark upon the land- a constant reminder, to those in the know, that there is more present than meets the eye.

In another of his poems, Rite and Fore-time in the collection Anathemata, David Jones equated tumuli with altars, regarding both as places of worship and of burial of holy relics.  His analogy is perceptive and powerful.  The sleepers in the barrows are our ancestors, our predecessors on the land, and doubtless one element in their interment and the rites associated with their monuments was a reassertion of community links not only with those who had gone before but also with the landscape over which their remains now watched.  They had become both features in the landscape and guardians of that landscape.

In my 2022 book The Spirits of the Land- Faeries and the Soul of Britain, I pursue these themes in more detail, examining how the faeries as spirits of place and the stories of Arthur have become woven into the archaeology, the place-names and landforms of the country.