Fairy Faith of Great Brittian

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They are less dark than their Scottish counterparts, more beautiful even than the Welsh Tylwyth Teg (Fair Family), more noble than the Cornish piskies (pisgies, pixies), less associated with the dead than the Breton korrigans. I am referring to that race of fairy variously called Tuatha De Danann, Sidhe, Good People or, by one 'peasant seer' of Sligo, the Gentry: 'The folk are the grandest I have ever seen. They are far superior to us, and that is why they are called the Gentry. They are ... a military-aristocratic class, tall and noble appearing. They are a distinct race between our race and that of spirits, as they have told me. Their qualifications are tremendous. "We could cut off half the human race, but would not," they said, "for we are expecting salvation." And I knew a man three or four years ago whom they struck down with paralysis. Their sight is so penetrating that I think they would see through the earth. They have a silvery voice, quick and sweet. The music they play is most beautiful. They take the whole body and soul of young and intellectual people who are interesting, transmuting the body to a body like their own.'would be still, were it not that belief in them is now considered risible. Perhaps they are still seen but are no longer reported for the same reason. Certainly those who collected eyewitness accounts, did not have to look far. They had only, in fact, to ask around their estates and the surrounding area to find witnesses in abundance.</div> <bR> <div> FAIRY LIGHTS</div> <div> The writer Dermot MacManus tells us of a sighting which is common not only in his native Ireland but across the world. The witness was a friend of his whom he calls Miss Patricia. When she was eighteen, some time in the last century, she saw one night at about 2am a blaze of light across the lough on which her farmhouse was situated. She stared in amazement as the small fort on the far side of the water was lit up by hundreds of little white lights. She saw them 'all rise up as one and, keeping their formation, sail steadily through the air across the little lough towards the other fort, not far from the farmhouse. She did not see them settle there, but ... hastily retreated to the safety of the house.'</div> <div> The two 'forts' on opposite sides of the lough were 'fairy forts', also called raths, lisses or forths. They can be ancient tumuli or barrows, but they are more often natural outcrops of land, usually artificially shaped or surrounded by a bank and ditch, whose provenance and purpose has disappeared beyond history into myth. The forts are said to be where the people of Fairy live. Sudden bursts of light or music have been seen and heard there; sometimes a cavalcade of horsemen is seen passing into them through a hitherto invisible entrance. The lights are fairies. They follow straight paths between their preferred places, like Miss Patricia's two forts, and woe betide anyone who builds on the paths or obstructs their traffic. Thus we see that odd lights have a predilection for certain places and landmarks. They are seen over stone circles or legendary hills or even certain trees. Their appearances favour certain times of day, or certain days.</div> <div> Miss Patricia saw hers on Halloween, when both pagan fairies and Christian souls of the dead are particularly active. Her lough may also have played a part: lights, whether we call them UFOs or fairies, like bodies of water. </div> <bR> <div> Another witness of a fairy sighting recalls, "I never saw fire go up in the air (presumably 'fairy lights'), but in the wood beyond the tree at Raheen I used often to see like a door open at night, and the light shining through it, just as it might shine through the house door, with the candle and the fire inside ... Many of them I have seen - they are like ourselves only wearing bracket (i.e. speckled) clothes, and their bodies are not so strong or so thick as ours, and their eyes are more shining than our eyes."</div> <bR> <div> When MacManus was a boy, the head gardener told him of a sighting at Lis Ard, the famous 'fairy fort' on MacManus land. He had been working in the field below when "he had looked up and seen the bank lined with a score or more of the fairy folk, all life-sized, the women mostly young and good-looking and with shawls over their heads. The men wore red or brown coats and some were bareheaded ... while others wore conical hats... all of them had penetrating, staring eyes which ... seemed to pierce right through him."</div> <div> Of course, there are a whole range of fairies which folklorists have had little success in classifying. I shall quote only one brave attempt, by an informant of Evans Wentz, because she at least claimed to have seen all her categories of fairy and, besides, it's as good as any. She is described as 'a cultured Irishwoman now living in County Dublin'.</div> <div> The fairies we have just been discussing she calls the Good People, who are "tall beautiful beings, as tall as ourselves." They are distinct from, on the one hand, the gods "who are really the Tuatha De Danann and taller than ourselves" and on the other, from the Little People who are "quite good-looking" and naturally, "very small." These in turn are separate from gnomes and leprechauns. The gnomes she saw on the side of Ben Bulben (a well-known Sligo mountain) had "rather round heads, dark thick-set bodies" and stood about two and a half feet tall. She called them 'earth-spirits.' Leprechauns are also small and "full of mischief." She followed one from the town of Wicklow out to the Carraig Sidhe (Rock of the Fairies), where he disappeared. "He had a very merry face, and beckoned to me with his finger." </div> <div> If these are just some of the fairies in one culture, the problem of classification is compounded when we consider that every culture has, or used to have, their equivalent, whose characteristics sometimes overlap, sometimes differ, from culture to culture, from tribe to tribe and even perhaps from individual to individual.</div> <bR> <div> English fairies are named differently from county to county. There are Danes (Somerset), Derricks (Devon & Hants), Farisees (Suffolk), Feeorin (Lancashire), Piskies (Cornwall) and so on - to say nothing of assorted boggarts, brownies, gnomes, goblins, hobs, imps and a host of fairy animals from 'waterhorses' to fairy cats.</div> <div> However, the great variety of fairies may be only apparent. Evans-Wentz's 'peasant-seer' stressed that the Gentry were "able to appear in different forms. One once appeared to me, and seemed only four feet high, and stoutly built. He said, 'I am bigger than I appear to you now. We can make the old young, the big small, the small big.' "</div> <bR> <div> DEMONS</div> <div> Christianity's chief method of getting rid of the fairies was to demonise them. This process began with the earliest of the New Testament writings. In the epistles of St Paul, he writes of the Gentiles ' they sacrifice to the devils, and not to God.'</div> <div> The Greek word he used for devils was daimonia: daimons. At a stroke, the host of intermediate beings recognised by all pagan peoples everywhere were stigmatised as demons in the service of Satan (diabolos).</div> <div> In the Middle Ages, they emerge from collective oral culture into medieval romances, written by individuals. In Sir Orfeo (C.1330), for example, the story derives from the perennial motif of a human abducted by the fairies. The later are no shadowy figures, but appear in a blaze of wealth, luxury and hard material splendour. The Fairy King, who has threatened to take Orfeo's wife, arrives with over a hundred knights and a hundred ladies on white horses. In his own country he has a hundred towns and a crystal castle with a moat and buttresses of gold. The impression made by the fairies is one of violent passionate life. They are both beautiful and dangerous like the damsels of the later Grail romances, whose Christian veneer barely conceals their ancient pagan roots.</div> <div> The author cannot decide whether the place to which Orfeo's wife is abducted is the land of the dead or not. It is certainly full of people who were presumed dead but aren't (lines 389-90), but it is also full of people who really have died (391-400). It contains as well those who have been taken there in their sleep (401-4). Running concurrently with such debates were the usual views: that fairies were a separate rational species, distinct from angels and men; or that they were angels who had not quite fallen (they did not join Satan's rebellion but were, so to speak, fellow-travellers), or that they were fallen Angels proper and, as such, demons.</div> <bR> <div> FAIRY BEASTS</div> <div> Mysterious beasts have always been taken for granted by traditional cultures, who call them ghosts, spirits, phantoms, devils - or, at least, these are the words we use to translate their words for them. </div> <div> East Anglia is haunted by a black dog. In Norfolk it is called Shuck (Black Shuck, Old Shuck, Old Shock). Its name is imitative some say, of the sound of chains which it drags. In Suffolk it tends to be called Scarfe, Galley Trot or Moddy Dhoe. There are probably several of them.</div> <div> A Norfolk man heard it in May 1945 - the baying, as of a hound, which grew louder until it was 'ear-splitting'. At the same time he heard a sound like a chain being dragged along the road. He ran for his life. Seven years earlier Ernest Whitehead saw a black object approach ing him as he was walking home along the Bungay to Ditchingham road on the Suffolk/Norfolk border. It turned out to be a large dog with a long black shaggy coat, about two and a half feet tall. When Ernest drew level with it, it vanished. </div> <div> Coastguard Graham Grant got a good look at it on 19 April 1972. It was on the beach at Gorleston, Norfolk, and it 'was running then stopping, as if looking for someone'. He watched it for a minute or two and then 'it vanished before his eyes.' </div> <div> The black dogs of Lancashire and Yorkshire are known as Barguest, Trash and Skriker. Trash makes a sound like heavy shoes splashing through mud; Skriker screams. In Staffordshire it is called Padfoot; in Warwickshire, Hooter. </div> <div> Reports of black dogs are also found in France, Italy, Croatia, Germany and Austria. In the USA they are seen mostly in found in Pennsylvania, Mississippi and the state of Missouri.</div> <div> In Celtic cultures they fit naturally into the usual fairy framework, whether as the Isle of Man's Buggane or Moddy Dhoe, or as the Scottish Highlands' cu sith. In Ireland, black dogs are only one of many fairy creatures. Dermot MacManus gives us a dramatic sighting by a friend of his, a Mr Martin, who was trout-fishing near his home in Co. Derry in 1928 when 'he saw a huge black animal come into sight, padding along in the shallow water. He could not at first make out what it was, whether dog, panther, or what, but he felt it to be intensely menacing, so ... he dropped his rod and jumped for the nearest tree on the bank.' Meanwhile, the animal advanced steadily and 'as it passed it looked up at him with almost human intelligence and bared its teeth with a mixture of snarl and jeering grin. His flesh crept as he stared back into its fearsome, blazing red eyes, which seemed like live coals inside the monstrous head.' Thinking that it was an escaped circus animal, Mr Martin went home for his shotgun and hunted it. But no one he met had seen it and he was forced to give up. A few months later he happened to see a cigarette card, one of a series illustrating Irish place names. It depicted Poulaphuca (Pool of the Pooka) with its famous waterfall in the background.</div> <div> In the foreground was a very life-like portrait of the animal he had seen, the Pooka itself, a great black fairy dog. He began to inquire of the people local to his home and soon gathered plenty of stories of sightings. A creature like his had often been seen over the years, 'usually standing in or by the river near the local bridge, but always in the gloaming ... it was fifty or more years since anyone had claimed to have seen it in broad daylight.' </div> <div> There are several classic features to this apparition. Firstly, we see how the Pooka, like all black dogs, is associated with a particular place, such as a pool or a stretch of road, and especially with a liminal place - a bridge, a river bank, a crossroads, and secondly it is most often seen at a liminal time such as twilight ('the gloaming'). </div> <bR> <div> PHYSICAL EVIDENCE </div> <div> I have in front of me a photograph of a shoe. It was found by a farm labourer on the Beara Peninsula, south-west Ireland, in 1835. It is black, worn at the heel and styled like that of an eighteenth-century gentleman. But it is also only two and seven eighths inches long and seven-eighths of an inch at its widest - too long and narrow even for a doll's shoe.</div> <div> If it were an apprentice piece, how did it come to be found on a remote sheep track? Why was it made in the style of the previous century? Why is it such an odd shape? How did it come to be worn? Who would possess tools fine enough to make such a curiosity?</div> <div> The man who found the shoe assumed it belonged to the 'little people' and gave it to the local doctor, from whom it passed to the Somerville family of Castletownshend, Co. Cork. On a lecture tour of America, the author Dr Edith Somerville gave the shoe to Harvard University scientists, who examined it minutely. The shoe had tiny hand-stitches and well-crafted eyelets (but no laces), and 'was thought to be' of mouseskin. </div> <div> Other shoes, equally odd, have been found in Ireland, not to mention other items of clothing, such as the coat found in a 'fairy ring' by John Abraham ffolliott in 1868. It was only six and a half inches long and only one and three quarter inches across the shoulder. Fully lined and with cloth-covered buttons, its high velvet-trimmed collar was greased and shiny from, presumably, long wear, while other parts were frayed and the pockets holed and scorched as if from a tiny pipe. </div> <div> There is nothing that can be usefully said about these artifacts. They are like red herrings, and they polarise opinion, inviting ridicule and cries of 'hoax!' from one party and, from the other, implicit belief in an actual race of little people who dress like us but always in a slightly older fashion. </div> <bR> <div> THE FAIRY STROKE</div> <div> Seventy-three-year-old Neil Colton of Co. Donegal, Ireland, told Evans-Wentz of something that happened to him just before sunset on a midsummer's day when he was a boy. He, his brother and a female cousin were gathering bilberries up by some rocks at the back of his house, when they heard music. 'We hurried round the rocks, and there we were within a few hundred feet of six or eight of the gentle folk (i.e. fairies), and they dancing. When they saw us, a little woman dressed all in red came running out from them towards us, and she struck my cousin across the face with what seemed to be a green rush. We ran for home as hard as we could, and when my cousin reached the house, she fell dead. Father saddled a horse and went for Father Regan (the priest). When Father Regan arrived, he put a stole about his neck and began praying over my cousin and reading psalms and striking her with the stole; and in that way brought her back. He said if she had not caught hold of my brother, she would have been taken for ever.' This is an example of a fairy 'stroke', a word which lingers on in medical usage. Fairies do not take kindly to being seen unless they expressly wish it. They can paralyse the intruder with a stroke or with a touch.</div> <div> A Galway man, Jackson Davis, told W.B. Yeats about an old white-haired man who had appeared to him three times and then vanished. On the third appearance - perhaps as punishment for Davis's failure to pay sufficient attention to him? - the old man touched him with one finger on the side of the head; and the place remained for ever after without feeling. Davis was lucky: those who are 'touched' are liable to lose their wits ('touched in the head').</div> <bR> <div> THE MIDWIFE'S JOURNEY </div> <div> The idea that we have a reciprocal relationship with the fairyworld is nowhere better exemplified than in the host of folk tales which describe the otherworld journey of the midwife. Typically, she is visited at dead of night by a member of 'the Gentry', and persuaded to go with him to attend an expectant mother. She is transported swiftly to a magnificent mansion 'splendidly lit up with such lamps as she had never before seen' and conducted through opulent surroundings to the bedchamber of the mistress, whose baby she delivers. (The mistress sometimes confides that she is a human who has previously been abducted to the fairy realm.)</div> <div> The midwife attends the endless festivities which go on day and night - dancing, singing, feasting and merriment. When at last she tears herself away, she is given a purse with instructions not to open it before she re-enters her own house. If she opens it prematurely, there is nothing in it but coal or withered leaves; if she waits until she is home, it is full of silver and gold.</div> <div> Jacob Grimm reported a Scandinavian story concerning a clergy man, Peter Rahm, who on 12 April 167l had a solemn legal declaration drawn up. It testified to an event which had occurred eleven years before. He had been visited one evening by a little man, swart of face and clad in grey, who begged his wife - she was a midwife - to help his own wife who was in labour. Rahm, recognising the man as a troll, prayed over his wife, blessed her and bade her go in God's name with the stranger. 'She seemed to be borne along by the wind. After her task was accomplished, she ... refused the food offered her, and was borne home in the same manner as she had come. The next day she found on the shelf in the sitting room a heap of old silver pieces and clippings, which it is to be supposed the troll had brought her.'</div> <div> The midwife's passage to and from the Otherworld is comparatively easy because she is already a borderline, liminal figure. She was often a 'wise woman' to whom a certain unearthliness attached, including at times a suspicion of witchcraft. But her special status stemmed above all from the fact that she presided over the rite of birth, when the ante-natal Otherworld draws very close to this world and the midwife, like a tutelary daimon, has to straddle the threshold. Young children before baptism and young mothers prior to 'churching' are especially vulnerable to fairy abduction for the same reason: they have not yet been officially received, or received back, into this world - they still have one foot in the other. </div> <bR> <div> SUPERNATRUAL FOOD </div> <div> One invariable feature of the midwife's visit to the Otherworld is her refusal to accept food and drink there. She knows, and tradition confirms, that to eat fairy food is to be doomed to stay in the fairy domain. Indeed, the women whom she attends are often just such humans who have rashly succumbed to an invitation to feast and, compelled to stay, have married fairy, elf or troll men.</div> <div> The motif of supernatural food, its delights and perils, is as old as the gods, who are variously said to live on such substances as ambrosia or soma. </div> <bR> <div> THE DECLINE IN THE FAIRY FAITH </div> <div> Folklorists usually assume that the 'fairy faith' has been progressively dying out and is now pretty much defunct. It is certainly true that the fairy faith is less widespread; but, at the same time, it does not do to take informants at their word. More than l,000 years ago Irish monks were claiming that belief in fairies was on the wane. Peasants in the west of Ireland were saying the same thing 150 years ago. Two generations after that, Evans-Wentz and Lady Gregory found that it was still part of everyday life - although their informants, of course, asserted that the fairy faith had all but disappeared. It is still current today, despite embarrassed protestations to the contrary. In other words, the golden age of fairies, so to speak, has always - like that of the gods - been ascribed to former times. The fairies are always going, going - but never gone.</div> </td> </tr></table></body>