Seafaring Faeries

A typical 1890s British postcard

We tend to imagine faeries as very much terrestrial beings, allocating other types of supernatural creature to water (whether that’s kelpies and the like in rivers or the Cornish bucca, mermaids and the Highland each uisge in the sea). This isn’t the entire truth, though, as- just like humans- some faeries will venture forth from the land in boats, not just to travel around but because, evidence indicates, they can be partial to fresh fish.

Examples of seafaring faes can be found across Britain, although in certain areas this does not happen at all, giving rise to the idea that sailing is antithetical to the faeries: in Cornwall, for example, it’s been said of the spriggans that “none of the faery tribe dare touch salt water.” This may surprise us given the location, but the pixies and pobel vean seem to prefer to fly rather than to sail.

Constance Symonds (active 1920s/’30s), The Punt

In Orkney and Shetland, the trows are reputed to be excellent sailors. They will fashion craft from egg-shells or from seaweed, but- inevitably- the trows are also known to steal humans’ sailing craft, a liberty compounded by the fact that they never tie up the boats after they’ve finished with them. Taking boats without permission is plainly a lot easier than making your own, and the islanders have found over the centuries that it’s best to accept this and to make an accommodation with the trows, allowing them to use one’s property without complaint. A story from Shetland exemplifies this:

“A crofter noticed that his boat was being used without his permission. One night, he hid in the craft and watched as three male trows climbed in and launched it. They rowed just three strokes of the oars before landing on another beach. The crofter recognised the place, which would normally have taken men hours to reach by sea. The trows disappeared into a cleft in the cliff face that had opened up for them and reappeared with four kegs of brandy that they loaded into the boat. After rowing back to their starting point, each trow took one keg; they left the fourth for the crofter, chanting ‘One for the owned, one for the owner.’ Christmas came soon after this incident and the crofter generously shared his barrel of spirits with friends and neighbours. Subsequently, other men tried to find more kegs of this brandy, but no-one could never find an opening in the cliff face.”

Downstream in a Peapod, Amelia Jane Murray, 1805

Another island community, the Manx people, also discovered that the little folk who lived alongside them shared many of their habits. The Manx faeries have been said to have “unlimited influence over [sea] fishing” and to excel at the many crafts associated with the industry.

The Manx little folk have been seen boat-building at Perwick, as well as engaging other preparations for sea-fishing, such as mending nets and making barrels to store the catch of herring in. At Cronk-ny-Irree-Laa near Patrick there’s a cave called Ooig-ny-Sieyr (the Cooper’s Cave) in which the faery barrel-makers have been regularly heard at work. It’s believed that to hear them (especially in May) promises good herring fishing for the faery fleets. However, it’s also said that good catches for the little folk can mean poor fishing for humans, and vice versa. Furthermore, it’s believed that to see their boats, or rather the innumerable twinkling lights of them, out at sea is either a sign that a good catch may be found there- or it is a warning to other mariners to put in immediately, because it presages a storm. Clearly the faeries’ knowledge of the sea, fisheries and weather are greatly to be trusted.

The faeries’ boats have been seen on Manx beaches after they have returned from a fishing trip and also being hauled higher up the strand to make them safe before a storm; the fisherfolk will frequently vanish very quickly once their owners know they’ve been seen. Their fleets have sometimes been sighted out at sea in Peel Bay, illuminated by lanterns and with their nets and floats paid out, although hearing the sound of rowing and the splash of their oars is much more common, because they will tend to extinguish their lights if they realise human boats are near.

Some of the doubt about the scale of Manx faery fishing enterprises must doubtless derive from the natural secrecy of the little folk, as they will tend to be active under cover of darkness, or otherwise concealed. For instance, the captain of a ship sailing to Whitehaven in North West England to fetch coals one night saw the sea full of lights as far as he could see. He concluded it was the faeries, out in their pleasure craft. In addition, it seems that the little folk will sometimes hide the activities of their fishing fleets under dense mist. So, in the early 1900s, one witness described how he had been sea-fishing from rocks when a fog approached over the sea. Then he heard what sounded like children’s voices and found himself surrounded by faery boats with lights on their prows and the men calling to each other in Manx.

The patchy distribution across Britain of the folklore evidence seems to indicate that ocean-going faes tend to be limited to locations where geography obliges them to use boats either to get around or to exploit the area’s natural resources: so, for example, from the Scottish Inner Hebridean island of Muck comes a report, dated to about 1910, of a meeting between two boys and a faery family in a boat. The main focus of the account is the bread the faeries gave to the boys to eat, and we almost overlook the incidental detail that they were found on the water, travelling with their dog.

Finally, as the illustrations to this post will amply demonstrate, the notion of the faeries being all at sea was scarcely a novel one for previous generations. Arguably, in fact, it was so familiar a notion that it could be abstracted from the folklore records of basic subsistence and transport and rendered cute and charming. Examination of the postcards reproduced here will reveal that the faeries depicted have (predictably) been reduced by the artists to minute size so that they can float around using shells, leaves and peapods (incidentally, the faery bread supplied on Muck was said to have shrunk the boys down so that they could go abroad the boat). An alternative is, I suppose, that magic has been employed to inflate those objects. Certainly, consistency of scale is abandoned: are Constance Symonds’ insects huge or tiny; how big are the butterflies above compared to the mussel shell and the foliage; is the scallop shell in Rene Cloke’s picture enormous or are the bulrushes very small? For a much longer discussion of faery iconography, see my Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century for more on this subject. Equally, my Manx Fairies provides more detail about the habits of the little folk of the Isle of Man.

A birthday card design by Rene Cloke, c.1940

The Spirits of the Forest- faeries, dryads & sprites

Edgar Maxence, The Spirit of the Forest, 1898

There is a persistent association of faeries with woodland, as I have described in a much earlier post. Despite its prevalence in literature and art, in the actual folklore record the link is rather weaker. Several simple demonstrations of this are found in the other common images of faery habits: they are known for dancing in rings, and these are typically to be found in meadows and pastures; they inhabit river banks or prominent burial mounds, or are to be found in caves, beneath hills or within ancient stone structures such as brochs and duns; they live beneath human habitations or (typically as boggarts, hobs and brownies) or they dwell in our homes with us.

In England, the traces of a tradition that the faeries live in and amongst trees is rather slender. There is the saying “Faery folks are in old oaks,” and some tentative evidence for a people called the ‘Oakmen.’ Some spirits, such as Old Goggy, Lazy Lawrence and the Grig, are found in orchards, closely tied to the life and productivity of apple trees; there are also links with hawthorn trees, something strongly developed for the sidhe in Ireland but surviving only in scraps in England and Scotland.

Perhaps it says something about the intensively farmed landscape of England in particular that some of the best evidence for the intimate links between faeries and trees come from other parts of Britain. Elder trees are widely seen as having magical or spiritual properties, but it is on the Isle of Man that they are most clearly identified as the haunt of the fairies. The faeries live in elders, so that- when the branches bend in the wind at night- it is interpreted as a sign that the faeries are riding upon them. Given their status as faery residences, interference with the trees can be dangerous. For example, Evans Wentz heard the story of a woman from Arbory parish who one dark night accidentally collided with a ‘tramman‘ tree. She was instantly smitten with a terrible swelling which all her neighbours agreed was the consequence of offending the fays by her clumsiness. Another local account told of a man who cut down an elder and was driven to suicide by the aggrieved fairies. The faery connection to the trees is more than merely functional: when the elders at Ballaboy were felled, the faeries appeared at night to lament their loss, and it is said that if the trees become decayed and the best branches for swinging on fall off, the faeries will move to another location.

The other key source of evidence for an intimate link between faeries and trees is Wales. Most particularly, the strongest association is between the oak and the tylwyth teg. At Nant y Glo in Aberystruth parish, Monmouthshire, a famous early ironworks was established. Before it began to use coal for smelting, in the late eighteenth century, it was fuelled by wood, which led to the hills and valleys locally being stripped of timber. Prior to this depredation, the local faeries had lived in and protected the woods. Known as y tylwyth teg yn y coed (the ‘faery folk of the wood’) they were seldom seen far from the trees and, in particular, they assembled beneath the female oaks there. Anyone who felled the oaks was harmed- either dying or at least suffering “a strange aching pain which admitted of no remedy.” After the foundaries were set up, the faeries fled.

As well as open, grassy places, the tylwyth teg have also been seen dancing in glades under trees- for example at Pontcwm in Monmouthshire, where a man was abducted permanently after he joined in their dance.   The spreading shade of female oaks (brenhinbren) is frequently sought out by the fair folk (although a crab apple has also been mentioned as a favourite), although ideally these trees should never be too far from hedges or larger stands of timber so that hiding places from humans are close at hand if they’re needed. At Downing House in Flintshire, North Wales, there stood an oak tree which was regarded as the residence of the faeries, or else very closely connected to them. A child that became ‘peevish’ (in other words, was suspected of having been changed by the tylwyth teg) would be laid beneath it overnight. On returning in the morning, the parents would expect to find their own baby returned.

Various other trees are also mentioned as faery haunts in Wales. Hollies are attractive to the tylwyth teg so that, in bad weather, sprays of holly used to be hung up around houses to provide the fair folk somewhere to shelter. There is also evidence of a connection between the tylwyth teg and yew trees, as I have described in detail previously. Hazels are mentioned as another species protected by the faeries, for- like oaks- they enjoy dancing beneath the shade of their canopies. Lastly, a faery walnut was once known at Llandyn Hall near Llangollen. This was the location chosen by the fair folk for the celebration of their weddings and, when it was decided to cut down the tree, the aggrieved faeries exacted their revenge, causing a branch to fall and kill one of the workmen.

The accumulated evidence from across the British Isles therefore shows that the relationship between faeries, elves and trees was once far closer than the individual surviving traces would seem to indicate. The exact nature of that interaction is especially hard now to define. There was residence and regular usage, but the ties may have gone considerably deeper; some kind of spiritual identity may have been felt to exist as depicted in Alexandre Seon’s Symbolist image (below) in which the mysterious woman gliding between the trees represents the spirit of the forest. She is, therefore, a sort of dryad (literally, a nymph of the oaks) and we might well speculate on the possible deeper meaning of the Welsh evidence if we recall that the word druid derives from the same root as the Greek name for thr wood nymph, for the drys in ‘dryad’ denotes an oak tree and an oak tree is derw or derwen in Welsh. The word ‘hamadryad’ adds a word signifying ‘together’ as a prefix, underlining the inseparability of spirit and tree in Greek tradition.

John LaFarge, Spirit of a Water Lily, 1862

The attribution of spiritual life to vegetation was extended by the Greeks from trees to many other plants , including pastures, marshes and water meadows; so, for instance, the fifty first Orphic Hymn is addressed to the nymphs who “nourish flowers” and nurse the fruit. This is an idea that persisted even into modern times: examples include John LaFarge’s Spirit of a Water Lily (with her butterfly, or ‘Psyche’ wings) and the ‘girl-flowers’ that inhabited the garden of the magician Klingsor in Wagner’s Parsifal. I think it is highly likely that the notion of the plant nymph almost inexorably merged with the nature of British faery, as it was feminised and miniaturised, resulting in the emergence of the flower fairies of twentieth century artists Cicely Mary Barker and Margaret Tarrant.

For more on faeries and trees, see my books on the Tylwyth Teg, the Manx Faeries and on Faeries and the Natural World. On nymphs, see my Nymphology blog, and for more on the flower fairies and other visions of Faery, see my study of Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century.

Alexandre Seon, La Passante, 1895

Once Upon a Time… Some Victorian Visions of Faery

Henry Meynell Rheam, Once Upon a Time, 1908

Henry Meynell Rheam (1859-1920) was a late-Victorian British painter. He was born in Birkenhead and studied art at Heatherley’s School in London, followed by time in Germany and at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris. Eventually, Rheam settled in Cornwall, first in the fishing village of Polperro and then in Newlyn, Penwith, where there was a famous and established artist’s colony. The ‘Newlyn School’ artists are celebrated for their realist, ‘plein air’ studies of the local fishing community and, initially, Rheam too painted village people on their boats or the quays. There was, however, another strand to the output of the Newlyn painters: Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes, wife of Stanhope Forbes, one of the group’s most famous members, had a Pre-Rapahelite inspired style in which she used to paint medieval and legendary scenes. Another Newlyn resident, Thomas Cowper Gotch, also produced romantic pseudo-Gothic images and, in due course, Rheam was also to abandon his portraits of fishermen and women and to opt instead for faery and mythical pictures.

Rheam, Queen Mab (illustrating Shelley’s poem), 1912

Rheam’s work is of interest for what it shows us of late Victorian/ early Edwardian conceptions about faery kind. What is immediately noticeable is the strange disparities in scale that Rheam offered. Whilst the women who feature in Once Upon a Time and Snow White may be assumed to be humans, the other adult females he painted- Mab, Titania and the anonymous ‘faery queen,’ must all be presumed to be faeries themselves, yet they tower over their subjects in oddly inexplicable fashion. As for the central figures in Fairy Wood and Fairy Queen (two pictures which, on examination, are variants of the same idea), they are about to attract the attention of a human knight, so it is possible that- rather than being mortal women- they are faeries who have used glamour to give themselves human stature, the better to be able to lure in the unsuspecting male. Rheam also painted a picture inspired by Keats’ famous poem, Belle Dame sans Merci, so he would have been well aware of idea of the fae woman as dangerous temptress (and she, too, is human-sized).

Rheam, The Fairy Wood, 1900

Rheam, The Fairy Queen

The bulk of Rheam’s faery figures are, however, tiny. This conforms to the very common theme in British art and literature (prevalent, as I’ve said before, since Tudor times) to picture the faery race as being very small and, it would tend to follow, as relatively harmless- except, perhaps, when encountered in numbers. This was a key aspect of the growing preference for ‘infantilising’ faeries, which was not just a matter of stature but also involved rendering them harmless and evermore child-like. The addition of wings, with all their associations with butterflies and moths (small, attractive, colourful, non-threatening), as well as the preference to make all faeries into little girls, accelerated the ‘disarming’ in the popular mind of a people who had for centuries been understood to be dangerous and fickle.

Rheam, Once Upon a Time- Snow White

As readers will observe, Henry Rheam had not fully adopted the new iconography and all its implications. The ‘page boys’ in Fairy Wood and Fairy Queen have the faces of young boys and seem innocent and unthreatening. The faery band approaching Titania is so very tiny as to seem incapable of harm, but the rest of the faeries depicted by Rheam are rather different. They may be small, but his white-haired, ‘gnomish’ old men- with their exaggerated facial features- have the potential to be more unpredicatble and capable of malice. That is leavened, though, by their clothes. The widespread habit of artists to give faeries and goblins odd medieval-fashion hoods or hats– pointed and with strange flaps- makes them seem more comical than perilous (as I’ve written before, illustrator Heath Robinson is another example of this trope). Extravagant beards and the occasional very mournful looking individual add to this suffusing mood.

Rheam, Titania

Plainly, Rheam was not alone in the approach that he took to depicting faeries. I’ve discussed plenty of other artists from around this time who helped to embed a certain image of Faery in our collective unconscious (Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and Arthur Rackham are other outstanding culprits); I’ll briefly discuss one other here.

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Prospero & Ariel

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale (1872-1945) was another British artist inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites who produced illustrations, paintings and stained glass. She trained at the Crystal Palace School of Art and then the Royal Academy, after which she became an art teacher and designer. Her book commissions included illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and her work generally explored literary, medieval and fairy tale themes.

‘EFB,’ as she was widely known, produced a number of faery paintings, several of which I have illustrated in other posts on this blog; these include The Introduction, a depiction of a water sprite, and The Lover’s World. In these, just as in Rheam’s works, we see a huge range of sizes, from tiny naked beings up to an adult sized ‘nymph’ or naiad. Curious headgear and rather old-fashioned clothes also mark out these creatures as faeries, who are not of our world (or even of our time, it would seem). The Introduction shows them as friendly and welcoming; the very small spirits of The Lover’s World can only appear to us to be benign, given their size and their appearance around the love struck girl. The water sprite, however, must be approached with far greater caution; like all such beings, the risk of the human being dragged into the pond behind her is considerable. She may be offering flowers to the unseen mortal in the picture, but that blue hair is a clear indicator that she’s not like us and ought not to be trusted. Lastly, Youth and the Lady (below) is an allegorical scene featuring a supernatural girl who exists somewhere between faeries proper and the spirits of Shakespeare’s Tempest, who are seen depicted above with Prospero. The symbolic female figure seen in Youth and the Lady is a winged girl, of mortal size, who conforms in many respects to the newly-minted Victorian tradition for faes: she’s blonde, rosy-cheeked, smiling, dressed in pink and clutching flowers. However, as she flies merrily away, we understand that her presence is allegorical rather than magical and that the rather pessimistic message of the painting is that youth is evanescent- it will pass away and can’t be caught and held. Youth, in her unchanging faery state, never ageing, never altering, underlines the bleak reality of human mortality.

Along with two other fantasy illustrators, William Stephen Coleman and Richard ‘Dickie’ Doyle, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale was discussed in a short book by Graham Ovenden- Nymphets and Fairies (1976).

Out in the ‘Fields We Know’- The Dangers of Faery Kidnap

George Elgar Hicks, Asleep in the Cornfield

As will be well known to regular readers- and as I’ve often described- one of the most reprehensible of faery traits is their tendency to steal human children, leaving behind one of their own, a ‘changeling,‘ who may be a faery baby but is more often an elderly faery male, disguised by glamour. These kidnappings frequently take place in human homes, with the child being snatched from its bed or cradle, but another notable location for takings is out in the fields, when mothers are working with their families or community to get the harvest in- a time of year when all available help was required to complete the time-critical task. By the nature of the work, the child was frequently left vulnerable: it would be laid down to sleep and the mother would be busy, very often some distance away. As the illustrations to this post show, this was an extremely common practice in times past.

Our records of thefts of infants from fields go back a very long way. The monk Ralph of Coggeshall (died 1227) compiled the Chronicon Anglicanum between 1187 and 1224 whilst he was abbot of Coggeshall Abbey in Essex. This ‘English Chronicle’ is a history of political events, but it also includes notable incidents he has heard about. One is the story of ‘Malekin,’ from the neighbouring county of Suffolk; she was a little girl who was stolen by the faeries from a cornfield where her mother was working during harvest. Subsequently, rather like a ghost, she reappeared to the inhabitants of nearby Dagworthy Castle, being able to communicate with people but unable to return to live with mortals.

A couple of typical ‘harvest kidnap’ stories come from the Isle of Man- both have happy endings, unlike the case of Malekin. One woman went to harvest corn in a field and laid her baby down whilst she worked.  Seeing an opportunity, a little red faery woman snatched the child up and put a changeling in its place.  The elf-child cried out and the human mother naturally went to pick up and comfort what she thought was still her infant.  One of the men in the field had the presence of mind to prevent her and, when it became apparent that the exchange had been discovered and that the changeling was going to be ignored, the faery woman replaced the human baby and departed.

In a rather similar Manx case, a woman went to help with the reaping, taking her un-christened (and consequently much more vulnerable) child with her. She placed it between two sheaves on the headland of the field (the unploughed strip at the end of the rows), taking the precaution of placing an open pair of scissors across it (a double charm of iron in the shape of a cross), for fear the fairies should take it. She was busy at the other end of the furrows when she heard the baby wailing and, thinking that something had happened to the child, she hastened to the spot, but found that it wasn’t there. In a panic, she ran towards field gate, from where she saw two little people dragging the child between them along the track. She rushed after this pair, seized her baby back and carried it safely home. It was supposed that the scissors had slipped off, and had thereby left the child unprotected. The mother was lucky and, as well, brave enough to defy and take on the faery abductors.

John Linnell, Harvest

A similar case concerned a woman in Staffordshire but, interestingly, it featured a hob rather than a faery. The mother was, again, working in a field during harvest when her baby was taken by the hobthrust. The infant who was left in exchange never spoke, but the woman cared for it like her own child until it died at an early age and, until that time, she would find money hidden in drawers and corners around her house- ‘compensation’ from the hob to cover her time and expenses.

In this Staffordshire story, the original baby was never recovered but the mother managed to accept what had happened and transferred her care to the substitute. Plenty of changeling tales concern the rather more understandable response of the distraught parents, who would resort to magical and often extreme measures to restore their children. These usually have a sucessful outcome, albeit at the expense of the torture of the suspected changeling. A story from Almscliffe Crag, near Leeds in West Yorkshire, falls somewhere between these two poles. At some time during the mid-Victorian period, two children were stolen from a woman whilst she was working in the fields at harvest.  So far, so familiar- yet in this instance, so great was her distress at their disappearance, and so prolonged her weeping, that the local faeries unusually took pity on her and gave her the children back.  All the same, unlike the immediate recoveries in the fields, this account shares something of the bitter-sweet tone of Malekin’s story. The reason is that, despite their short time away, the two infants had spent some time in Faery and had been permanently affected by that experience (elf-addled, as I’ve termed it), meaning that they grew up distinctly smaller than others of their age.  

Why are kidnappings from fields so popular with faeries? There are several obvious reasons. The first is that the children have been brought into ‘their’ domain; they are left temptingly near to faery dwellings, as if the parents are almost ‘asking for it’ (or so the faery thinking must go). Consider, in this context, the Welsh example of a man who had fallen asleep in a field who awoke to hear some of the tylwyth teg debating whether or not to stab him in the leg. He promptly leapt up, to find that no-one visible was near, but he escaped being wounded. His offence, it would appear, was being in their territory and being inattentive of his own safety. The helpless baby is in the very same predicament, but is defenceless.

In addition, for the prospective faery kidnappers, there’s no need to take the risk of entering a human dwelling and, probably more enticingly, there may be far fewer protections put in place. As I’ve enumerated in various posts and books, houses were very commonly defended with all kinds of countermeasures– iron, blessings, Bibles and a huge range of other charms- all designed to place a magical barrier between the baby in the cot and the acquisitive faery. Out in the harvest field, many of these charms were going to be forgotten or were simply not feasible (the example of the open scissors is a fortunate exception). The mother- along with the other humans present- is very prone to becoming distracted, absorbed in the labour and not paying attention to the baby. Moreover, as work progresses across the field, the people are very likely to get further and further out of sight and earshot, leaving the infant a sitting duck. Two of the paintings also reveal that, as the harvest proceeded, the sheaves of cut corn would be piled together into stooks, with the risk of the baby being hidden as a result.

John Linnell, Harvest Dinner, 1860

The ‘symbiosis’ of human and faery is fascinating. Ever watchful, they get to know our habits and our habitual locations- and the opportunities those offer. My recent post about stealing corn is another example of this: once the mortals have gone to the trouble of growing and harvesting corn, they leave it piled up in the fields or, better still, heaped up in barns, yet again just ‘asking’ for it to be appropriated by faeries. Serves us right, perhaps.

The Hidden Faery Lords

One of the Bendith y mamau, by Karla-Chan

The Welsh poet-artist David Jones once wrote evocatively of the “hidden lords of the West tumuli.” This phrase from his long poem Anathemata is just one of many instances in his work when he tied together British myth and landscape, seeing magical, mystical ties that went back deep into the roots of the land and the people.

Elsewhere in the same work, he grouped together the “West horse hills… Moel of the Mothers, the many colles Arthuri.” This densely symbolic phrase unites the burial mounds of a race of ancient mounted warriors- the British/ Welsh moel meaning a rounded, grassy hill (as in the Malvern Hills)- along with references to the victory of ‘king’ Arthur against the Saxons at the battle of Mons Badonicus (Mount Baden)- which might also be termed a collis, or a hill, in the Latin which would still have been spoken by some in the immediate post-Roman Britain when Arthur/ Artorius is believed to have fought), and, lastly, the ‘bald hill’ or barrow or knoll that Jones associated with the ‘Mothers’- the three Matrae goddesses of Romano-Celtic Britain, the spirits who would become the Bendith y Mamau or Mothers’ Blessings of later Welsh faerylore.

There is myth and the supernatural bound up in Jones’ lines just as much as there is history and reality. Arthur has often been postulated to have been a post-Roman cavalry commander, but as he was absorbed by legend, he also became a non-mortal national saviour, sleeping with his troops under a variety of hills and mounds around Britain. Here the dividing line between living and dead, human and not human becomes exceedingly fine and hard to determine.

In the Anathemata, Jones went even further back into the past, in fact, associating those burial mounds with the oldest Welsh person known to science, the so-called ‘Red Lady of Paviland,’ a prehistoric hunter buried in a cave during the last Ice Age. Once again the poet entwined many layers of history and legend:

“where the long mound inhumes
his neolithic loves or the round-barrow keeps
the calcined bones of these, his still more modern hallows
that handled the pitiless bronze.
Pray for her by whom came war
for whose urn-burial they made the cist four-square
on the bank of the Alaw.”

Here, Jones envisages that a common thread connects the deep past and the present; the same spirit runs through the land and is continually present, as the ‘ghosts’ of ancient warriors or the faery genius loci of the island.

Who exactly are these “hidden lords of the tumuli,” the people who live in the ancient barrows or burial mounds? J. R. R. Tolkien coined a name, barrow wights, to denote malign wraiths in Lord of the Rings. He borrowed the concept of undead grave-spirits with physical bodies from Norse mythology, in which they’re called vaettr or draugr. ‘Wight’ was a term used for the faeries in older English, indicating some close connection between the beings in Germanic belief: vaettr and wight are words that are both descended from the same ultimate root. Draugr more specifically denotes an undead creature, but it is in turn related to the Scots trow, the term applied to the faery folk on Shetland and Orkney.

Across European cultures, we can see that there was a clear sense was that burial mounds were not cold graves, but were inhabited by some form of life. In Britain, unlike the Vikings- it would seem- we found an accommodation with those people. They were potentially dangerous, but they would tolerate a human presence and the two populations could get along together reasonably most of the time, provided respect and caution were shown.

The Scottish trows epitomise some of the key aspects of the ‘barrow wight.’ Central to their identity in the human world is their association with hills, or ‘trowie knowes’: the trows are alternatively known as the ‘hill-folk;’ people kidnapped by them are taken ‘under the hill,’ something that illustrates the perpetual threat and fear that hill-dwellers engender, and, lastly, one of the best known stories about trows features them addressing a human riding past their home by shouting to him from inside the hill. Both the Norse influence, as well as the un-severable link with hills, is reinforced in the case of the Shetland equivalent of the mainland broonie (or brownie), a being who’s called the hogboon. His name derives from the Norse haug bui, meaning mound-dweller, for the simple reason that trows were so often encountered living in ancient burial mounds.

The trows are wary of coming out of their hills and being seen, but a grudging coexistence and mutual aid can exist between the two populations- as we see in the case the man riding past the knowe, who is asked to tell another trow (who’s in his barn, stealing his milk) that her child has had an accident. She may be interfering with his property but- if he knows what’s good for him, now and in the future- he’ll do her a good turn.

In their relationships with the people of Orkney and Shetland, the trows are a good example of the curiously ambivalent nature of faery kind. They are near, yet distant; nearly human, but also other, alien, and not quite mortal. The hills and mounds they inhabit share the landscape with human fields and pastures, so they are never far away from us; they’re close enough to sneak into barns to steal milk, or to kill cows when they’re out grazing, and to be able to carry these ill-gotten gains home with ease. They look so like us that they can eat our food, their children will play with ours and- of course, human and trowie adults can have relationships and families. At the very same time, nonetheless, they are not us, and our curious co-existence is forever unresolved; we live parallel lives which touch- or collide- from time to time, but which will also diverge sharply.

Some of the ‘Scobbins’ made by Leanne Hutchinson of based Trowie Knowe Crafts (image from the Shetland News)

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread”- on faeries, theft & labour

Fairy thieves by Herbert Cole

The phrase “by the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread,” reflects the fate of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden, according to Genesis: excluded from Paradise, they will have to work to get their food. Curiously, this line from the Bible also has some faery parallels.

There is a story about faery theft of human food that appears in several versions in the folklore record- from Northamptonshire, in the south-east Midlands, through Suffolk and down to Sussex. The most famous version, perhaps, is the Suffolk one, a tale widely known as ‘Brother Mike.’

“There once was a farmer who had a large amount of wheat stored on his barn. However, his heaps of wheat got smaller and smaller, and he had no idea how. At last, he hid himself near the barn one moonlit night where he could see the barn doors and, just when the clock struck midnight, a crowd of ‘little tiddy frairies’ appeared, running. They were ‘little bits of things,’ only as big as mice and they wore little blue coats, yellow breeches and tiny red caps with long tassels hanging down behind. They ran right up to the barn door and it opened wide as if by itself; then they hauled themselves over the threshold. Once the faeries were all inside, the farmer crept nearer and nearer and looked in. The ‘little frairies’ danced round and round for a while and then they each picked up an ear of wheat and shouldered it to carry it off. There was, though, one faery who was so small that he could hardly lift his ear of wheat and he kept saying as he walked: ‘Oh, how I du twait, a carrying o’ this air o’ wate’ (Oh, how I sweat, carrying this ear of wheat). When he got to the threshold, the little man was unable to get over, and the farmer reached out and seized him. The poor faery cried out “Brother Mike! Brother Mike!” as loud as he could, but the farmer dropped him in his hat and took him into the house for his children, where he tied him to the kitchen window. The poor little thing wouldn’t eat anything and pined away and died.”

There’s plenty to say about this. I’ve described captive faeries (and their fates) in a previous post (and they often cry out to relatives for help when they’re caught), but we might also remark upon the diminutive size of the beings- no bigger than mice and sharing the same habits. The Northamptonshire poet, John Clare, drew the same parallel in one verse: saying that “Mice are not reckoned greater thieves” (than faeries); he likewise regarded them as tiny and well suited to sneaking undetected into homes and shops.

Alongside their small stature is the faeries colourful and quaintly antique clothing along with an ingratiatingly childish nature: the faery thief lisps “twait” (or sometimes “twit”) rather than ‘sweat.’ A comparable speech impediment is found in a story of a Shetland trow who wants to borrow a sieve from a mortal family, but asks for a “piftan pif” (sifting sieve). This is either to be understood as a sign of immaturity or as an indicator of disability but, whichever explanation we choose, the closeness of faery physical development to our own is notable. Not only can they speak our language, but they may suffer comparable defects in performance too.

In contrast to the Suffolk faery, the character in the Sussex version of the story can pronounce the word correctly. He says to his companion “I’m sweating, Puck, are you?” to which the farmer angrily responds, “I’ll sweat you, you little rascals.” The man doesn’t catch them, though, and he’s punished with a poor harvest that year because he denied the faeries their rightful share of his crop. In another Suffolk telling, the interfering farmer receives a blow to his head, and is dead within the year; what’s more, in this case the faeries had not be stealing the corn but had been feeding it to the cart-horses, something they cease to do, so that the beasts waste away as well. As I have observed before, faery vengeance may be harsh as well as inexorable.

The core of the Borther Mike story seems to be the constant faery trait of living upon the fruits of human labour, whether there is some brownie-like work provided in return for this- threshing grain or caring for livestock- or whether it is pure larceny. There may be something of a Biblical joke worked into this- the struggle faced by fallen man is magnified by the fact that fallen angels (now the faeries trapped on earth between heaven and hell) prey upon them. Furthermore, part of the punishment of those angels may be that they too have to toil and sweat to acquire their ill-gotten gains.

Lastly, the question of faery perspiration is a subject few of us contemplate, I imagine. As I described in my book The Faery Lifecycle, as well as in a posting on faery poo, there are records of faery excretion which make it clear that they are physiologically very like us. It follows that sweating is another bodily function we will have in common- another reason why the faeries want to bathe regularly- but it is mentioned even less often than other processes. Nonetheless, as the story of Brother Mike shows, it is a normal fact of faery life.

Austin Osman Spare- occult artist

Theurgy, 1928

Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was a British writer, artist and explorer of the occult. During his life he knew such figures as Aleister Crowley, and his collaborator Victor Neuburg, and he produced a series of volumes of his own on magic and the supernatural. These were illustrated with his very fine pen and pencil drawings, which drew upon the style of Aubrey Beardsley, one of his earliest inspirations, and which were supplemented by inscriptions in his own magical alphabet, a script that was something akin to hieroglyphics, the magical sigils Spare used, and the angelic Enochian alphabet.

Spare was fascinated with spirits and ‘elementals.’ Although much of his life was spent alone, he did not feel solitary, for “I have only to turn my head to see the whole gang of familiars, elementals and alter-egos that make up my being.” He felt that these beings were always with him, visible in hordes around him. The exact nature of these entitites is uncertain, but they seem to be related to his creative powers and, as such, were some sort of manifestations of his “obsessions” or artistic visions. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson expressed this same concept more clearly in his essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams.’ He described how, whilst he was asleep, his ‘Brownies’ or Little People helped the dreamer:

“And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies (God bless them!) who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep and, in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For myself- I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all [and that] the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share…”

For Stevenson, these Brownies were “the little people who manage man’s internal theatre.” They work away behind the scenes, in the subconscious of the writer or artist, “they are near connections of the dreamer” and “often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him… better tales than he could fashion for himself.” These beings are plainly not domestic brownies as we might traditionally know them, but they are nonetheless working for humans in an equally valuable, if immaterial, way.

For Spare, elementals or familiars could also be intrusive, interfering with his moods or- even- with events in his life. As such, in the late 1920s he devised a way to try to control them, using them to make ideas and wishes come true- a form of personal magic that conjured and controlled his ‘faeries.’

Spare, Palimpsest

For Spare, these supernatural beings were very real and tangible, and could sometimes be summoned physically into his presence. One persistent theme in his art was that of satyrs, or of ‘satyrised’ men, characters who seem to stand for his own carnal desires or to symbolise male passions more generally.

An example of the reality of the supernatural to Spare struck me as very familiar indeed. He told a friend about an incident that had occured back in the 1900s when he was staying with friends in the countryside one winter and had gone out for a walk alone. He got lost, and it started to snow, but just at the point that he was exhausted and beginning to despair of his fate, a horse and cart appeared and took him to an inn. It seemed quite an old fashioned establishment but the warmth and shelter were naturally extremely welcome and he was revived with the finest wine he had ever tasted; then, when the snowfall ceased, he was shown the way home. The friends with whom he was staying were puzzled by his story as they knew of no such inn in the direction he indicated and, the next day, they set out to find it. They came across the cart tracks and followed them to a snowy mound- the ruins of a building long since collapsed.

We might interpret this (as I think Spare did) as a magical manifestation of shelter when he so desperately needed it, but it made me think of the numerous incidents when the faeries have conjured buildings out of nothing to provide board and lodging to lost humans- what I’ve called ‘glamour houses.’ I’ve discussed these at length in a previous post, but this story is very similar to the account with which I start my discussion of the subject- it concerns an inn on the Cotswolds that was found by a traveller in the snow and which had vanished by the next day when he came back to try to find it with his puzzled friends.

The eighteenth century minister and writer on Welsh faeries, the Reverend Edmund Jones, described a rather similar faery experience that he had had when he was a boy. He saw a strange apparition of something like a sheep fold, in which people were sitting, as well as coming and going from the structure.  Jones recalled that they “seemed like people who had lived before his time,” by which it appears that he was referring to their old-fashioned clothing styles. In reality, he revealed, there was no sheepfold at the place, only the overgrown traces of the ruins of one (see my Welsh Faeries- The Tylwyth Teg, c.3).

Netheresque, Austin Osman Spare

I’m also reminded of a strange incident reported by Dr. Susan Owens in her book, Spirit of Place- Artists, Writers & the British Landscape (2021). In 1916 the writer Edith Olivier was working with the Women’s Land Army. One October evening she was driving through the village of Avebury, site of a huge megalithic circle: she drove down an avenue of standing stones and decided to park and to climb onto the high banks that surround the stones. From there she saw, in-between the menhirs, a crowd of people attending a fair. They held flares and torches whilst they enjoyed the stalls and games, shouting and laughing to each other; oddly, though, no-one was wearing coats despite the heavy rain that was falling on that autumn evening. The rain got heavier, so Edith returned to her car to carry on her journey. She didn’t go back to Avebury for another nine years, but when she did, she discovered that the last time Avebury had a fair was in 1850 and that the avenue of stones she had driven along had disappeared before 1800…

The world of the faeries seems to have an interface- or to intersect- with the realm of the dead, so that the borders are unclear and the differences between them are hard to define- other than to say that there is no straight equation ‘faery=ghost.’ What’s very clear from the folklore record (as I’ve described in my Faery Lifecycle) is that faes are born, mature, eat, drink, procreate, age, fall sick and, ultimately, die. That being the case, the eerie events described in these three stories are open to being interpreted in several different ways, but in the case of Spare, his interest in the esoteric and the occult must have made him more sensitive or vulnerable to such a contact.

For more information, see Phil Baker’s fascinating Austin Osman Spare- The Life & Legend of London’s Lost Artist– available for all good physical and virtual vendors, etc.

Introduction to A Book of Satyrs, 1928

“Do it thi-sen”- the ‘ainsel’ theme in faery stories

Herbert Cole, illustration for ‘Ainsel’ in Ernest Rhys, Fairy Gold- A Book of Old English Fairy Tales, 1906

Across Britain, you will find in the folklore record examples of the so-called ‘ainsel’ theme in faery accounts. Whether we are talking about faeries, brownies, each uisge, brollachan, trows– or others- this trope repeatedly appears.

It’ll be helpful to start with a brief discussion of British dialect. ‘Ainsel’ means ‘(my) own self’ (in other words, ‘me’) but variants upon this come from all parts of the British Isles. On Orkney and Shetland you read about ‘mysel’ whilst the title of this post comes (for me) from much closer to home. Being brought up in South Yorkshire during the 1960s and ’70s, I knew there was the ‘proper’ way to talk (at school and at home) and there was the local way to talk- in the playground and in the park (in other words, not when tha wa’ at skoil or at oo-em). When I first came across ainsel stories I straightaway knew what they meant, although in South Yorkshire you would have said ‘mi-sen’ (myself)- and, by extension ‘thi-sen’ (yourself, from thee- ‘you’) and ‘us-sens’ (ourselves) etc. Getting to grips with dialect is, in fact, almost a precondition to faery research, because so much of the folklore was recorded orally word for word. Some was therefore in Welsh and Gaelic, of course, but a lot was in the local dialect, whether that was Sussex, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, the Scottish Borders or Orkney and Shetland. Researching my recent book on trows, I came across a lot of documents in island-speak (a mixture of Scots and Norse). I’ll admit that I could manage short passages, but the longer stories often lost me.

Any road (as we say in South Yorkshire), back to ainsel. The plot of the story is always broadly the same, whatever the exact details of faery type and scenario. A typical one would be along the following lines:

“A woman was alone at home when a faery turned up. His plan was plainly to take advantage of her and she wished to defend herself. He asked her name and she replied ‘Mi-sen.’ He accepted this as her name without question and proceeded to try to seduce or assault her. She happened to be cooking- and there was boiling water/ porridge in the pot over the fire. When the faery got too close, she threw the contents of the pot all over him. He fled in agony and- it turns out- there were other faeries (friends or relatives) waiting quite nearby outside. They asked who’d hurt him and he said ‘It wa’ mi-sen.’ Their response was- in South Yorkshire speak- ‘Well, if tha did it thi-sen, there’s nowt to be done for thi, lad.’ They would have revenged the injury on a third party, but if the faery hurt himself through carelessness or accident, there was no guilty party to be punished.”

There are variations of place (a mill, a shieling) and the cause of the injury can vary- perhaps there was a fight, a trial of strength, a simple accident- but the core interaction of the ainsel stories is always the same. At the heart of the ainsel theme, there are several key principles. Firstly- don’t tell faeries your true name– it gives them power over you or (as in this case) it exposes you to liability and vengeance. Secondly, there has to be a bit of a suspension of disbelief about faery intelligence- as we’ve seen. The human says they’re called ‘Myself’ and the faery believes this and doesn’t say, “That’s not a personal name- what are you really called?” We have to accept this, as otherwise the story doesn’t work; in some cases, the faery may be a child, so we can put it down to the inexperience and ignorance of youth. In other cases, this excuse is not available in the plot and we have to suppose (I think) that the faery is just daft. To a certain extent, this carries over to the friends and relations waiting outside. They don’t ask too many questions and readily accept that the injury is self-inflicted.

The story fits within a broader category of tales which are concerned with the power of personal names, the need to keep these concealed, and how faeries can be outwitted by discovering what they’re secretly called (Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin is the continental version made famous by the Grimm brothers, but there are several British examples). At the core of all of these accounts is the notion that the faeries are a bit dimmer and less canny than humans: they can be careless and can be outsmarted as a result- in the ainsel cases, by simple wordplay. It’s a rather condescending and dismissive view of faery intelligence and one that, given our general fear of offending them, may seem rather ill-advised. I suspect that the ainsel stories are told, nevertheless, because they make us feel better: the faeries have magical powers and can be harmful towards us but– don’t despair- we can sometimes outwit and outmanoeuvre them.

Illustration to ‘Ainsel’ in Hartland, English Fairy & Other Folk Tales, 1890

“More Things in Heaven and Earth”- than we’d like to admit?

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  So says Hamlet to Horatio in act 1, scene 5 of Shakespeare’s play about the Danish prince. The pair have met with the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father, and Hamlet has spoken at length with him; Horatio finds the possibility of interaction with a spirit “wondrous strange” but the prince proves more flexible and more accepting. His famous phrase can, of course, be applied to any supernatural phenomenon.

I was put in mind of this line by a comment received on one of this blog’s posts, as well as by a recent conversation with a friend. Responding to my discussion of faery children, the reader observed: “What we do know is that they’re fully mythological, and always have been.” I think we may take this as a gentle rebuke for writing so seriously- and at length over so many years- about beings that don’t exist. I can understand this sort of comment- which may, of course, be a healthy corrective to an unhealthy obsession in a mature man (!)- but regular readers will be aware that it runs counter to the fundamental approach of this blog, which has always been based upon the very simple rationale that ‘tens of generations of British people can’t be wrong.’ I’ve always preferred to go back to the huge body of British folklore to get the most original and authentic information on faery encounters, a strategy that avoids the consciously literary and fictional descriptions of the last century and a half but which, also, takes the stance that these consistently reported sightings and meetings must reflect some genuine experience, repeated across the country and across the centuries.

What underlined this for me was a short description of an experience given to me recently when I met a friend in a central London pub to catch up on our news after a couple of years. He’s now into his seventies and has a daughter in her late thirties who’s a physicist. She visited him at his home near Glastonbury last year and they went for a walk in a wood close to his house. In a glade there, they came across a ‘faery ring‘ of mushrooms on the turf- a common enough occurrence in the British countryside in the later summer and autumn. Nearby, a small brook ran through the wood. It had rained heavily a few days previously, and the brook had swollen and overflowed its bank in the direction of the faery ring. The spate had created what I’d probably have called at university an “alluvial fan” (B.Sc. Geography, Southampton, in case you wondered). In other words, a spread of fresh sand had been washed onto the soil and leaf litter- and across this was a line of tiny human-like foot prints. My friend was perfectly prepared to accept them for what they appeared to be; his daughter, given her professional scientific background, was a lot more challenged, yet reluctantly had to concede that the only explanation for what they witnessed was the one that she couldn’t bring herself to accept- that a very small person had walked out of the ring and across the freshly deposited sand, leaving a crisp and hard-to-deny trace of their presence. Hearing about it gave me a delicious chill down the spine; the actual experience for a ‘non-believer’ may have been more alarming.

Folklore is not a thing of the past. It continues to accumulate as new encounters take place and are recorded. Proof of this is to be found in the valuable Fairy Census (available online and from Amazon). The record of faery-human interactions is far from static, whatever we might imagine about a scientific, ‘modern’ society. Modern technologies may distract and interfere with contacts, but they’re still going on.

Trowie things- a new book

I’m pleased to announce the publication through Amazon of a new book, a study of the Trows of Orkney and Shetland. My recent researches on the oral folklore website Tobar an dualchais reminded me of the wealth of faery lore from these northern islands, as well as the attractive ‘self-contained’ nature of the archipelagos- from the perspective of writing about the trows. The book in this sense sits alongside my studies of pixies, brownies and of the faeries of Wales or the Isle of Man, although the impression these separate titles might create of hermetic isolation is, of course, illusory. Influences flow back and forth across the land borders between Wales and England, or between Somerset and Devon and the neighbouring counties, and the fact that Man or Orkney and Shetland are islands has never insulated them from mainland influences (and vice versa). It’s very easy to find the a parallels between the trows and the faeries of North East Scotland or the sith folk of the Highlands- as well as wider similarities across the whole of of the island of Britain.

Nevertheless, an analysis of the trows made for a compact study of a faery ‘race’ with its own particular characteristics. As I’ve observed before, the trows have a strong tradition of music and dance, and this aspect of their culture has long crossed over into the music of the islanders. The trows also exhibit in aggravated form some of the worse traits of faerykind- bad temper, antagonism to mortals and a powerful predilection for stealing cattle and kidnapping people- especially women.

What is particularly notable within this narrowly focussed investigation is the fluidity of terminology. The trows have a very definite character and habits, yet even for the islanders clearly and consistently delineating them from faeries, brownies and other supernatural beings has not always been easy. There seems to have been a greater preparedness in the past centuries to identify a separate faery population inhabiting the islands alongside the trows, but the latter have steadily subsumed the latter- as also has happened with brownies/ domestic trows. Some commentators- as early as the eighteenth century- ascribed the disappearance of brownies to a spread of Protestantism, which had less tolerance for beings that could not be accommodated securely within scripture. This process was as much one of consciously ignoring the brownies as condemning them as demonic, but it seems to have accelerated a blurring of boundaries between those supernaturals who shared human habitations and those who trespassed into them from time to time- generally to steal something, whether it was food, babies or, even, burning embers when their own fires had gone out.

Even more puzzling is the distinction between trows and various marine beings. A species of sea-trow has been identified and is believed to have been at odds with the land-dwelling trows- the extent that the slower, dimmer sea-trows were driven permanently from the land at some point in the past. However, separating sea-trows definitively from selkies– and, in turn, differentiating these from the Orkney fin-folk, from mermaids and from other sea ‘monsters’ is a further problem. In the book I have opted for treating trows and faeries as synonymous, but I have provided separate chapters on brownies and sea-trows because their individuality is better defined.

The degree to which landscape and climate are determinative of the people and culture arising from it is something I’ve touched upon from time to time in posts. There may be an argument to say that the rugged nature of the trows is reflective of the environment from which they arise, but it may still be much too reductive to ascribe their character entirely to the natural world from which they spring, even if we regard them as spirits of the land. As I’ve said, there’s a continuum of faery ways that can be traced from Land’s End to the northern tip of the isle of Unst, common features that unite all of the British faeries.

Last- rather tangentially- a plug for the very fine film The Outrun, starting Saoirse Ronan. Filmed substantially on the Orkneys, and in particular Papay (Papa Westray), its a psychological study with a fair bit of folklore woven in. There’s a nice animated sequence of the Mester Stoorworm as well as some interactions with the seals/ selkies (including singing to them). On Netflix and recommended.