Green Sleeves and other Scottish tales- some thoughts on faery magic

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, My Green Sleeves

The Scottish folk tale Green Sleeves, like the related Nicht Nought Nothing, is mainly concerned with the common theme of completing a series of impossible tasks in order to avoid a serious, if not fatal, consequence. In Nicht Nought Nothing the trials are imposed by a giant and the eponymous hero is helped by the giant’s daughter. In Green Sleeves it is a wicked wizard, one of whose daughters helps the hapless human faced with these apparently insurmountable demands. This story is not really a faery tale as such, although the wizard’s nickname shows that he is dressed in green, which may well indicate some sort of supernatural connection. The story also involves guessing his name to avoid a dreadful forfeit, an element we know well from accounts about other faeries with secret names, such as Trwtyn-Tratyn and others.

What particularly interests me about the story of Green Sleeves, though, is the way in which the prince is assisted in his tasks by the wizard’s daughter, Blue Wing (she’s a sort of swan maiden who can shape shift into bird form). She helps him complete every challenge using “a magic box containing thousands of faeries.” Just as Green Sleeves and Nicht Nought Nothing have echoes of the labours of Hercules, so too here is there a memory of Pandora’s box. Yet this one is full of benign sprites and the outcome will be true love requited and a couple living happily ever after (eventually).

Several observations can be made about these faeries. One is that, apparently, they are verging on the microscopic in size, meaning that (to grossly misquote John Lennon), now we know how many fays it takes to fill a magic box (sorry). Whilst British folklore (generally) accepts that the majority of faery folk are about the size of children aged about eleven or twelve (albeit with many exceptions to this rule), we very rarely hear of them being reduced to the size of midges. This might well make us suspect that the influence of Pandora’s myth is especially strong at this point.

The second point is that these faeries are under the control of Blue Wing and will perform an endless range of arduous tasks- very quickly. Here, we are on much more familiar ground. In the Scottish account of The Red Book of Menteith, a faery queen had banished some troublesome elves into the Red Book. The condition was that they would only be released when the laird of Menteith opened the volume. Eventually, this happened by mistake and instantly the released faeries appeared before him demanding work. To be freed of them, he had to set them various impossible tasks to complete. Scottish faery lore also tells of a spell book owned by the Wizard of Reay. This seems to have had powers very similar to those of the Red Book. The wizard’s young servant peeked inside the tome and was instantly surrounded by little men demanding that he give them work to do. Just as in the previous story he first asked them to make ropes of heather, which they quickly did; then he asked for ropes of sand. When this proved impossible, they deserted the wizard.

The confinement (or laying) of faeries within some sort of object would seem to be quite a well-known idea in Scotland. Certainly, the imposition of apparently impossible tasks is a common theme of Scottish stories. Other examples include several tales that pair the faeries’ spinning skills with a task imposed upon a human that can be both impossible and fatal if it’s not completed.  In many of these stories it’s a cruel human who sets the hopeless task and a fay who assists with it.  For instance, in the legend of Habetrot, a girl must prove her skill at the spinning wheel or face some unspecified punishment from her mother.  A faery woman named Habetrot (who’s been called the patron spirit of spinning) appears with a team of helpers and assists the daughter.

As I have described previously, construction, domestic chores and farming tasks (such as reaping) are especially those that faeries are charged to complete and which they can manage in an incredibly short period of time. The Irish writer Lord Dunsany, in his story ‘Carcassonne,’ wrote how that city had been built by elf-kings “on an evening in May by blowing their elfin horns.” Such is the power of elf magic, which can move and assemble materials with amazing speed and skill. Other Scottish stories tell of similar acts of transportation, as when supernatural beings construct entire buildings within the space of a single night: for example, the glaistig who built an impregnable fort (or a barn in some versions) or the hag, the Cailleach a’Chrathaich, who reroofed a home her companion faeries had damaged by making the roofing materials, wood and turf, fly back into place through the air.

Although I have often stressed how independent and distinctly un-helpful most faeries can be (brownies and hobs excepted), it will be clear that occasionally, some humans, through the use of superior magic powers, can constrain and control the faes to oblige them to apply their magic powers for the benefit of people- and to do so in record time.

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).