Faery sexual aggression

Two Faroese stamps illustrating the story of the Kopakonan, the seal wife

Like any people, the faeries are not perfect. There are bad individuals and good; most individuals can display bad behaviour as well as good. Sex is an abiding interface between humans and faes and, inevitably probably, it becomes a forum for misconduct.

From North Uist in the Outer Hebrides comes this story. A girl who was out herding cattle disappeared one night. When she eventually returned home, she was unaware that there had been any absence at all. In due course, it became apparent she was pregnant. Although the family might well have suspected that the unexplained night away was spent with a local youth, the birth showed differently. The baby was small and dark and a local wise woman advised the family to take the child to a nearby dun (ancient fort). The girl’s father did as was suggested and laid the infant outside the mound. The baby cried out as he set it down on the grass and immediately a man who was only four feet tall emerged from the knoll, picked it up and carried it inside, promising the child deer and cow’s milk. Very evidently, the girl had been raped by a faery man, and the event blacked out from her mind afterwards. The father had now reclaimed had own. It’s worthwhile noting as well the similarity here to changeling stories: to banish the imposter elf-child, it was common practice once to expose the infant outside, often at a faery-connected site. In those cases- just as in the tale of the North Uist mixed race baby- the underlying knowledge was that the faery folk would come to rescue their kin and would not permit it to suffer.

The North Uist case is not means unique. Selkie men also seem prone to impregnating human women, but they also have a habit of then abandoning them- and their children. In one Shetland story, a girl gathering shell-fish on a beach fell asleep in a cave after sitting down to eat her lunch.  Some months later she discovered she was pregnant.  This she explained by the fact that, as she had wandered along the beach that day, she had been watched by a seal floating just offshore.  It would seem that this creature had, in fact, been a selkie and that he had taken advantage of her sleep to rape her.  The best we can say about the selkie’s conduct is this: the girl subsequently dreamt that, if she went to a nearby sea inlet, she would find silver coins that would pay for the child’s upbringing.

It’s an unattractive, but nevertheless unavoidable, truth that the faeries can view humans as chattels- fair game for kidnap, sex or other exploitation. This sits ill with more recent ideas that they are a benevolent people always keen to help us, but the weight of British tradition is against this. Had it been otherwise, as I’ve described before, we mortals would not have accumulated our armoury of ways of protecting ourselves against them- the spells, prayers, charms and tricks that are such a feature of faery lore.

Faeries and Human Birth

Arthur Rackham, Queen Mab Who Rules the Garden, 1906

The renowned faery expert, Katharine Briggs, noted in her Dictionary of Fairies that ‘Hard delivery and barrenness’ amongst women were often regarded as the result of faery malevolence, particularly because a house had been badly positioned: by trespassing on faery ground in some way- encroaching on a knoll, standing on a ring or perhaps placed badly over a subterranean dwelling. Sometimes only the livestock kept by the humans would be affected, sometimes the human mother as well as the cattle and sheep would be infertile or would have problems with delivery.

That the faes would have such influence seems reasonable. One of the known functions or concerns of Queen Mab is presiding over births and French and Breton faeries are also believed to have a similar natal role. As I’ve described in my Faeries and the Natural World, there are folklore accounts that connect the Good Neighbours with our fates and lifespan; even more significantly, at least as late as the end of the nineteenth century, it was believed in parts of Scotland that it was fairies who brought babies into the world. The curious custom was that, at Halloween, unharvested cabbages would be pulled up by children and the stalks placed on window ledges and door sills. This was done in the hope that the souls of babies, trapped within the roots and earth, would be freed and would join each family as a new sister or brother during the forthcoming year.

An even more direct link between supernatural beings and fertility is revealed by another story from Scotland, this time concerning a mermaid. A fisherman from Skye was at sea fishing without success one day, when a mermaid surfaced beside his boat and spoke to him.  They reached a harsh bargain: she gave him a magical substance that granted fertility to his family and his small holding, so that his wife had three children, his dog three puppies and his horse three foals. The mermaid also guaranteed that plenty of fish would swim into his nets, but the price for all this fecundity and prosperity was high- she claimed his first-born son. Rather similar is the Welsh story of shepherd Merfyn Ffowc. He was given a magical walking stick of holly wood by the tylwyth teg by way of thanks for saving a faery girl trapped on a cliff.  Possession of the stick brought Merfyn prosperity: he married a wealthy widow with a good farm and every one of his ewes became fertile and produced two lambs.  Again, there was a catch, though. One stormy night, he lost the walking stick in a swollen river during a storm. For this carelessness, he lost his flock, which the same river washed away.

These connections with birth and fertility seem to be well-established, if now a little unclear. What, of course, is oddest about all this is not so much the babies coming out of ‘kale yards’ but the apparently well-established facts that faery populations are not very fertile and the faery women often have great problems with labour. Their low population growth is something quite widely remarked upon, as in the Cornish story of the House on Silena Moor, in which a human captive of the pobel vean discloses that babies are “very few indeed” and their arrival is marked with great celebrations. The many stories of human midwives being taken to assist at faery confinements (which rather contradict the evidence from Cornwall) nonetheless indicate that these labours are still problematic and dangerous occasions for our Good Neighbours.

As ever, the information we have is rather contrary. The fae can use their magic powers to interfere with pregnancies in the mortal world, but they seem unable to produce opposite effects in their own lives.

For more details, see my books on the Faery Lifecycle and Faeries and the Natural World.

Faery Magic Powers

Alfred Patten, Little Stage Fairy,

I have just published a short new book, a study of Faery Magic Powers. I decided to work on it when I realised that, although I have often written about the magical means that we mortals have used to overcome faery tricks or to defend ourselves against threats (strategies such as items, rituals and spells), I had not focussed anywhere near so closely upon the nature of the faeries’ own magical abilities.

It’s almost universally and unquestioningly accepted, as a fundamental and innate part of their nature, that the faeries are able to use magic- whether that’s casting glamour and deceiving our senses, vanishing, flying, shape-shifting, moving objects such as buildings, inflicting disease or death on people and animals through elf-shots, as well as numerous other powers- but we tend to take all of this for granted. I wanted to examine the folklore more closely, to try to define exactly what it is that they can do, and how it is that they bring that about. Songs and spells play a big part in this (whether it’s curses or the archetypal ‘three wishes’) but various physical means are employed too- those elf-bolts are amongst the best known, but many other items may be enchanted, or may channel enchantment to bring changes about. Some folk stories seem to indicate that the sheer presence of a faery, radiating (as it were) an aura of magic, is enough to work magic- quite frequently making those they’ve met or spoken to fall ill, or even killing them. Plainly, faery magic powers are extremely strong if they can have this remote impact. Indeed, I’ve previously described how they can kill us at a distance. This process is something they’ll undertake deliberately, but it’s worthwhile emphasising that some folklore accounts indicate that harm may be unwittingly and (I resume) unintentionally inflicted on us mortals.

In my recent book on faery music, No Earthly Sounds, I referred to a Scottish story that was told to Walter Evans Wentz (Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, 92). The tale is told to show how the sith folk of the Highlands can benefit those whom they see as their friends and punish those who displease them. A man with a hump back could sing very well well. He happened to overhear the faeries singing in their knoll and enhanced the faery song by adding an extra line which completed the metre of their verse. For this good deed, he was rewarded by having his hump taken away.  By way of contrast, another disabled man who had heard of the first’s good fortune jealously tried to imitate the other’s feat (and thereby get the same reward) by going to the same spot and adding yet another line to the song. Instead, of course, he only managed to spoil the song that the other had perfected. For wrecking the rhyme and metre, he was punished by the faeries with the bestowal of the first man’s hump- leaving him with a double hunch back.

It’s easy to get distracted by the story of faery music, human greed and cruel, if possibly deserved, punishment and to overlook the underlying magic, which is almost taken for granted. We know very well that the faeries have great healing ability derived from an intimate knowledge of herbs, but they can do much more than this. They can use their magic to take away physical disability- and they can also use it to cripple and maim if they choose. There are other stories in which those who incur their ire are lamed, paralysed or rendered dumb. We don’t know exactly how they do it, but they are able to achieve it, seemingly by mere thought or a curse, and without any contact.

This episode highlights a key difficulty encountered in writing about faery magic- which is, that its use is often hidden from us. Humans are able, from time to time, to eavesdrop on faery spells and to use them (the best example being the cry of ‘Horse and hattock!’ which can set you flying through the air on a grass stalk) and for this very reason the fae have guarded their powers closely for centuries. Scattered scraps of evidence in folklore accounts stretching back over generations help us piece together a reasonable picture of what they can do, but their conjuring abilities will always remain, to a large degree, concealed from us.

Faery Magic Powers is available as a paperback and e-book through Amazon/ KDP. On charms against faery attacks, see my Faery (2020) and The Darker Side of Faery (2021).

Magic Faery Music

The Elfin Piper, Rene Cloke

As I sought to express in my recent book on the subject, I think that we must understand faery music and song as vehicles for their magical powers. The music itself is a wordless language that can travel between our two worlds very easily, passing over the dimensional barrier that exists (say) between a dance in a faery ring (present in the mortal world, but part of Faery)- or between festivities taking place in the space beneath a faery hill- and the human sphere. As is well recorded in folklore, individuals are easily (and literally) enchanted by the sights and sounds of faery dances and are lured into their world.

Songs, too, are a powerful way of transmitting magic. That explains why the faeries are so protective of them, as several examples illustrate. A girl on the Hebridean island of Eriskay learned faery songs by sitting on a knoll, listening to and memorising the tunes and words. The hill’s inhabitants were very angry about this violation of their privacy and rights and, the next time she sat herself down on the hill to eavesdrop, they surrounded her and dragged her inside the dun, so that she was never seen again. Bearing this experience in mind, a man on another island in the Hebrides, Mingulay, would therefore seem to have had a very lucky escape. He had partly built his house on a faery knoll, a bad enough trespass already. He subsequently found that he couldn’t sleep because of the noise of music rising from below. This could have been deliberate harassment by his new neighbours to drive him away- and it worked- although not before he had managed to learn some of the faery laments. He lost his home, but gained some new tunes to add to his repertoire.

What the sith folk are protecting here is not just their copyright, but their power. A man on the isle of Barra heard a faery song coming from inside the dun of Eolisgarry, a tune which they sang when grinding their corn in the quern. He learned it himself and then used it to get his own cornmill to go more smoothly. Once again, he was fortunate to get away with appropriating not just a faery air but- with it- a share of their magical abilities. Given that their spells can be so easily acquired, it’s understandable why the fae might be so aggressively protective of their music.

[Examples taken from Otta Swire’s The Outer Hebrides and Its Legends, 1966.]

‘A Year in a Field’-a Hymn to a Cornish Menhir

A Year in a Field is a recently released film made in Cornwall. It is exactly what its title promises; it’s a meditation on one standing stone (or menhir) in a field in West Penwith, filmed through the seasons over the twelve months from the winter equinox in December 2021. The film is a beautiful succession of images of the natural world- the weather, the crops and vegetation, the wildlife- in this one arable field, coupled with a lovely sound track and the film maker, Christopher Morris’, narration on interlinked topics: world events, the threat of climate change, the history of the stone. At one point the wrapper for some Anne Summers lingerie blows into the field and he muses on how this piece of clothing will have travelled all the way from China, probably passing the stone in its field as it travelled up the English Channel on a container ship, before travelling back down England to rest here beneath a Cornish hedge. In that hedge, around the roots of the hawthorn bushes, grow ferns- ancient plants which- in the Carboniferous age- produced coal and oil- the products which went into creating the lingerie’s synthetic fibres and which powered the cargo vessel around the globe.

The film is a melancholy reflection on the threat to our environment, as well as a poetic evocation of the natural life of one ordinary field. You might imagine that spending an hour and a half looking at one Bronze Age monument and the insects, plants, slugs and mammals that live around it could be rather slow and tedious. It doesn’t seem that way at all, because of the skilful combination of image, music and commentary. For me, it helped, too, to know the area pretty well and to recognise the views or to recall very similar vistas seen from nearby locations- but this only adds to the delight and is by no means necessary for enjoyment.

The so-called Longstone sits in a field belonging to the farm of Boscawen Ros (marked as Boscawen Rose on the largest scale Ordnance Survey map), which is a little way west of the Merry Maidens stone circle, sitting on the road from Penzance/ Newlyn to Land’s End. I walked around the stone circle only last October, and I’ve driven past the end of the lane and footpath leading to the farm and the Longstone countless times. There are, in fact, two (or maybe three) standing stones here, with other menhirs, burial chambers, stone circles and ancient monuments clustered in the area. Only a little way north is the fine circle at Boscawen Un.

The name of the farm means ‘the house at the elder tree on the heath.’ This fact frames the entire film. As several readers may recall, the elder is a faery tree, inhabited by the Old Woman of the Elder Tree. She can protect and feed us, but if we damage or destroy the elder, she may harm us in turn. The Elder Mother, as the film’s maker calls her (the Elder Queen to me), is a metaphor for our threatened climate and environment. The film itself is a kind of prayer to the Elder Mother to help and save us- from ourselves and before it’s too late.

A Year in a Field has had a limited cinema release in the UK, but you can watch it online on Curzon Home Cinema.

How Do Humans Scare Off Faeries?

I was recently looking through a series of books on the Highways and Byways of various regions in Britain, searching for interesting new faery material. In Andrew Lang’s volume on the Highways and Byways in the Border (1913), I spotted his theories as to why the faeries were seen so rarely by that date. Lang put it down to motor cars, bicycles, railways and “modern villas” (pages 31 & 233). I can see how the pollution and racket of engines might conceivably upset our Good Neighbours; bicycles seem a lot less objectionable, though, and as for “modern villas,” you can’t help wonder if there’s some Nimbyism here. Of course, all Lang’s reasons are his guesses, and may disclose more about his own prejudices than any faery pet-hates. I suppose that his concern with new housing was that it was encroaching ever further into unspoilt countryside, and thereby trespassing on faery ground and disturbing them with unwanted new neighbours and new noise. Lang’s remarks reminded me of John Nicholson, who described the folklore of Northamptonshire in 1891. He said that much lore had been lost because of school-teachers and “locomotive engine drivers”- who may seem a strange target, but his reasoning was this. The first brought state education, the second carried people around, whether as tourists or commuters, dissipating local culture and knowledge.

This set me thinking about the other explanations for the disappearance of faeries that I’d read, and how those might also reflect our own guilty feelings and our preconceptions about faery kind. Another volume in the same series, Highways and Byways in Northumbria, tells how a hob used to live on Hob Thrush Island at Lindisfarne. He was scared off by St Cuthbert back in Anglo-Saxon times, an eviction which only goes to prove how longstanding is the idea that Christianity is anathema to the faes. The presence of churches is frequently cited across Britain as the reason that faeries have disappeared; for instance, on Shetland, it was said that the preaching of a new priest who arrived in one parish in the mid-nineteenth century drove the fairies to flee as far away as the Faroe Islands.

On the Isle of Man, the opening of mechanised flour and fulling mills were reported to have driven the little folk away. As well as industry, the blame was again laid on the hustle and bustle of the tourist trade and the provision of state education, both of which made older Manx adherents of the fairy faith wary of the risk of “ridicule and scepticism” from younger people. In Wales, too, quarries, collieries, ironworks, telegraph wires and railways were all said to have been progressively banishing the tylwyth teg during Victorian times.  These physical changes to the environment were believed to have been aided and abetted by the changes in attitude wrought by Methodism, teetotalism, newspapers and School Board education. In the Scottish Highlands, the already shy glaistig of Glen Duror quit the area entirely once steamers appeared on Loch Linnhe and blasting started at a new quartz quarry.

Industry, in itself, may not be a very good explanation for faery disappearances. On the Isle of Man, and elsewhere, the faeries were perfectly prepared to use the older water mills; there are also reports of faes being fascinated by some human machinery, so that mechanisation alone doesn’t seem to be the issue. As we know, the faeries operate their own industries, with coblynau and knockers down mines and in quarries. Perhaps it is the degree of noise and smoke pollution that is the issue. Equally, religion in itself is not the whole answer. The Welsh bwbach apparently objected not to a Christian priest as such but to a strand of Protestantism that was rather dour and earnest- opposed to strong ale and good cheer.

Joseph Campbell blamed the retreat of the sith folk on “railways, roads, newspapers and tourists” (Popular Tales of the West Highlands, vol.1, xxxi). What’s at issue here, I think, is not so much modernity, clutter and busy-ness as such, but the coincident change to the human temperament. Newspapers and school-books, as were blamed then (and doubtless subsequently, successively, cinema, radio, television, the internet, social media, podcasts etc etc etc), stood for a disruption to older social relations and to our accustomed interactions with the natural world and local environment.

One Scottish folklore authority summarised the situation very well in Victorian times. Reflecting on Western Argyll as it had been in the 1850s, Grant Stewart reminisced over the “dreamland” that people had inhabited before “the fierce eye of bespectacled modern omniscience” had dispelled belief.  “These were the days of elemental spirits, of sights and sounds relegated by present day sceptics to the realm of superstition or imagination.” Describing Cornwall in the same period, William Bottrell felt that the pixies had clung on until the “love of unpoetical facts [that] had come into fashion, [and] they were frightened away.” What’s been lost then, is the time to pause, to let the mind wander and to be open to unfiltered sensations.

Our Good Neighbours- notoriously- don’t like to be disrespected. What has severed our connection with them is not so much our technology- which they can adapt to and even use- but the distractions that come with that. If we have our earphones in and our eyes on screens, we are not paying attention. So, to answer the question in my title: I don’t think humans scare faeries off, so much as neglect them. They cease to show themselves, because they’ve realised so many of us just aren’t looking anymore.

Alan Wright, Girl & Fairy Dance