Scottish Fairy Belief E-Book

Lizanne Henderson

• Herausgeber: John Donald
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 504

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

The authorities told folk what they ought to believe, but what did they really believe? Throughout Scottish history, people have believed in fairies. They were a part of everyday life, as real as the sunrise, and as incontrovertible as the existence of God. While fairy belief was only a fragment of a much larger complex, the implications of studying this belief tradition are potentially vast, revealing some understanding of the worldview of the people of past centuries. This book, the first modern study of the subject, examines the history and nature of fairy belief, the major themes and motifs, the demonising attack upon the tradition, and the attempted reinstatement of the reality of fairies at the end of the seventeenth century, as well as their place in ballads and in Scottish literature.

Leseprobe

SCOTTISH FAIRY BELIEF

Scottish Fairy Belief

A History

Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan

This eBook was published in Great Britain in 2022 by John Donald,

an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by John Donald

Copyright © Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan, 2001

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 433 7

The right of Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan to be identified as the authors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Strathmartine Trust towards the publication of this book

Contents

Plates, Tables and Figures

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: Beware the Lychnobious People

  1. The Nature of Fairy Belief

What’s in a Name?

Betwixt and Between: What are Fairies?

Fairy Origins: Folk and Learned Ideas

Extinction of a Species: The Retreat of the Fairies?

  2. The Wonderful World of Fairy

The Road to Elfland

Liminal Worlds: The Location of Elfland

Ferlies to Find: Descriptions of Fairyland

The Wee Folk?

Fairy Life-Styles

Activities and Pastimes of the Fairy Folk

The Politics of Fairyland: Social and Political Structures

  3. Enchantments of the Fairies

Fairy Glamourie: The Modes of Enchantment

Breaking the Spell: The Modes of Disenchantment

Changelings: ‘of nature denyit’

  4. The Rise of the Demonic

The Reformation Centuries

Redefining the Supernatural

The Scottish Witch Hunt

Satan’s Greatest Enemy: King James VI

The Assault on Fairy Belief

Motifs in Common

  5. Writing the Fairies

True Thomas

Eldritch Explorations

Fairies in Flyting

  6. The Reinstatement of Fairy Belief: Robert Kirk andThe Secret Common-Wealth

‘The Fairy Minister’: Robert Kirk

The War Against Atheism and the Sadducees

Seers, Second Sight, and the Subterranean People

Robert Kirk and Fairy Belief

  7. Farewell Lychnobious People

Fantastical Fictions

Folklore and Fairyology

Figuring the Fairies

Bibliography

Index

Plates

  1.Hawthorn at Merlin’s Grave, Drumelzier

  2.The Fairy Hills, Balnaknock, Skye

  3.Eildon Hills from Scott’s View, Bemersyde

  4.The Rhymer’s Stone, Melrose

  5.Tamlane’s Well, Carterhaugh, Selkirk

  6.Lynn Glen, haunt of Bessie Dunlop

  7.Robert Kirk’s Bell, Balquhidder

  8.Doon Hill, Hill of the Fairies, Aberfoyle

  9.The Clootie Tree, Doon Hill, Aberfoyle

10.Grave of Robert Kirk, Kirkton, Aberfoyle

11.Grave of Will o’ Phaup, grandfather of James Hogg, Ettrick

Tables

1.Liminal Space

2.Robert Kirk’s Universe

3.Witch Trials

4.Folk Motifs

Figures

1.The King of France’s Cellar

2.King James interrogates Agnes Sampson

3.‘The Fairy Rade’, by K. Halsewelle

Acknowledgements

Although they conjure images of ethereal, and, in the minds of some, small creatures, the fairies of Scotland represent rather a colossal subject which tends to grow on acquaintance. We are conscious that we could have spent much more time in search of them and that, as in the best fairy tales, all has not been quite resolved at the end.

Part of the research for this book was carried out at the Folklore Department of Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland. L.H. owes many thanks to her supervisors, the late David Buchan, and Martin Lovelace, for their encouragement and many helpful comments. She is also indebted to Louise Yeoman, Miceal Ross, and Joyce Miller. E.J.C. has been exploring fairy belief as a reflection of folk mentalité for longer than he cares to admit. He is grateful to students at the universities of Guelph and Glasgow for their invaluable participation in the quest. Theo van Heijnsbergen, Cathair Ó Dochartaigh and Douglas Gifford all most generously gave advice on literary matters. Needless to say, the authors alone are responsible for the errors that undoubtedly remain.

The friendly assistance of the staff at the National Archives of Scotland, the University of Guelph Library’s Scottish Collection, Stirling Archive and of Special Collections at Glasgow University Library has been greatly appreciated. We also thank John and Val Tuckwell for their faith and interest in this project.

Lizanne Henderson

Ted Cowan

Glasgow, 2001

Abbreviations

APS

The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland,

ed. T. Thomson and C. Innes (Edinburgh 1814–75)

Child

F. J. Child,

The English and Scottish Popular Ballads,

5 vols (Boston and New York 1882–1898)

Court Books

The Court Books of Orkney and Shetland, 1614–1615,

ed. and transcribed Robert S. Barclay (Edinburgh 1967)

Court Book of Shetland

Court Book of Shetland, 1615–1629,

ed. Gordon Donaldson (Lerwick 1991)

Daemonologie

King James VI,

Daemonologie in forme of a Dialogue 1597

(London 1924)

Extracts … Aberdeen

Extracts From the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1570–1625,

Spalding Club (Aberdeen 1848)

Extracts … Strathbogie

Extracts from the Presbytery Book of Strathbogie

(Aberdeen 1843)

Good People

The Good People: New Fairylore Essays,

ed. Peter Narváez (New York and London 1991)

JC

Justiciary Court Records (NAS)

Kirk

Robert Kirk,

The Secret Common-Wealth,

1691, ed. Stewart Sanderson (Cambridge 1976)

Letters

Walter Scott,

Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft

(1830; London 1884)

Maitland

Maitland Club Miscellany

(Edinburgh 1833)

Miscellany

Miscellany of the Spalding Club

(Aberdeen 1841), vol. 1.

Minstrelsy

Walter Scott,

Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,

4 vols, ed. T. F. Henderson (Edinburgh 1932)

NAS

National Archives of Scotland

NLS

National Library of Scotland

NSA

New Statistical Account of Scotland,

compiled by John Sinclair 15 vols (Edinburgh and London 1845)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

OSA

The Statistical Account of Scotland

compiled by John Sinclair 21 vols (Edinburgh 1771–1799)

Pitcairn

Robert Pitcairn,

Ancient Criminal Trials in, Scotland

4 vols, (Edinburgh 1833)

POAS

Proceedings of the Orkney Antiquarian Society

(Kirkwall 1923–5)

PSAS

Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland

SCA

Stirling Council Archives

SND

Scottish National Dictionary

TGSI

Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness

Trial … Irvine

Trial, Confession, and Execution of Isobel Inch, John Stewart, Margaret Barclay & Isobel Crawford, for Witchcraft, at Irvine, anno

1618 (Ardrossan and Saltcoats 1855)

INTRODUCTION:

Beware the Lychnobious People

… who in the sixteenth century lacked familiarity with angels and demons? Who did not carry inside himself a strange, phantasmagorical universe haunted by strange species?

Lucien Febvre1

The world is full of spirits. ‘As thick as atomes in the air’, wrote Robert Kirk in 1691, they populate every nook and cranny. They are ‘no nonentities or phantasms, creatures, proceeding from ane affrighted apprehensione confused or crazed sense, but realities’. Not all tales of pygmies, fairies, nymphs, sirens, or apparitions can be true, but so many are the stories, and so universally told, that surely they ‘could not spring of nothing?’2 The Reverend Kirk believed the fairies to be one of several orders of spirits inhabiting the world. To him, and the many others who shared his views, the fairies were just another species awaiting scientific analysis like the many animals, birds and insects that were being discovered as the world’s horizons widened.

This book seeks to investigate the nature of Scottish fairy belief from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries and aims to reach some conclusions about the role of fairies as a cultural phenomenon. Despite J. R. R Tolkien’s cautionary observation that ‘faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable though not imperceptible’, we attempt to describe as well as perceive. Most of the tropes and metaphors associated with the fairy experience are by no means unique to Scotland, but are found throughout the length and breadth of Europe with analogues much further afield. The pantomime question annually roared at laughing children, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ would have baffled people in pre-industrial societies; everybody did, for the contrary was unthinkable. The only dispute concerned what fairies represented, questions of whether the guid neighbours were manifestations of divine providence or the legions of hell. As late as the 1840s sober ministers compiling their parish reports for the New Statistical Account were quite capable of suggesting that just as the capercaillie or the pine marten had not been seen in their districts for seventy years, neither had the fairies. Consideration of the latter affords an opportunity, too seldom available or seized in historical investigation, to explore the mentalité or mindset of the Scottish folk to learn something of their hopes and fears, their assumptions and their concerns, as they struggled to comprehend the world around them and the unfamiliar, yet momentous, forces to which it was subject.

Interest in the folklore of past generations has always been with us, although the investigative motives have sometimes been questionable. For instance, the antiquarian approach toward folk beliefs and traditions often took a patronising view of the subject as a means of validating the beliefs of the present, lauding the rational and the learned, at the expense of the ‘ignorant’ and the ‘superstitious’. Yet even in the writings of the most complacent and censorious of commentators it is possible to detect an element of nostalgia for an ‘idealised rural past’, an imagined idyll in total harmony with nature.3 Those engaged on such a quest have often been doomed to disappointment for there is seldom much trace of the idyllic in a past which witnessed an unprecedented assault on fairy belief, and on folk culture generally. The religious impetus, both protestant and catholic, to remodel the world, subjected the fairies to a process of demonisation, with frightening consequences for the people who resisted these reinterpretations and steadfastly held on to their beliefs. Such was the climate of suppression and persecution that it is often difficult to understand how fairy belief survived, relatively unscathed, if somewhat refurbished and sanitised, into the modern era.

This book is concerned with the ‘real dramatis personae of fairy narrative, the people in them’.4 We are not concerned with proving the reality, or otherwise, of fairies; such an endeavour would be as futile as it is irrelevant. What we can prove is that many Scots people, who lived mainly in the period from c.1450 to c.1750, had no doubt that fairies actually existed. The dictum that the ‘folk’ in folklore ‘can refer to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one common factor’,5 is suitably broad to be applicable to this study, the common factor being, in this case, an opinion about fairies, whether that be a strongly held conviction that they existed, or, less commonly, rank disbelief. Having said this, our focus is directed toward the ‘esoteric’ rather than the ‘exoteric’ factor,6 toward the ‘culture produced by the popular classes’ rather than the culture ‘imposed’ upon them,7 ever-mindful that most of our sources were produced by the literate and learned, forcing us to view the esoteric perspective through an exoteric lens.

Belief is not the easiest of subjects to study. In approaching the mentalité, or mental world, of a past age it is important to shed anachronistic attitudes, to be aware that our predecessors’ response to events and perceptions was not the same as our own. Since there was no assumption of the natural as opposed to the supernatural, folk across the wide spectrum of society had no sense of the impossible and thus

in the whole fabric of life nature and supernature were perpetually intertwined … They were at home in a peculiar world where phenomena were not located precisely, where time did not impose a strict sequential order on events and existences, where what came to an end could nevertheless continue …8

Carlo Ginzburg’s argument for the existence of ecstatic cults in continental Europe includes references to fairies within Scottish witch trials, as a uniquely Scottish manifestation of this ecstatic experience. As he points out, the ‘thoughts, the beliefs, and the aspirations of the peasants and artisans of the past reach us (if and when they do) almost always through distorting viewpoints and intermediaries’,9 thus posing problems for the folkloristic approach. For example, to say the least, the use of witch trial evidence ‘to classify beliefs or practices in folkloric culture, known via indirect, casual, often stereotyped testimonies interspersed by hiatuses and silences, is difficult’.10 The nature of the documentation available to the folklorist should not, however, deter one from attempting to study the folklore of the past: ‘the fact that a source is not ‘objective’ … does not mean that it is useless’.11

Witch trial testimonials are of crucial importance to this study. Investigators such as Walter Scott and John Dalyell used the fairy material in witch trials for purely anecdotal purposes, thus trivialising the experiences of the victims. The first systematic approach was taken by J. A. MacCulloch in his study of the mingling of fairy and witch beliefs (1921).12 No one else has extensively used the witch trial evidence to establish the nature of Scottish fairy belief. Aside from the fact that the Scottish witch-hunt is an understudied phenomenon in its own right, the reluctance to use the depositions of those accused of witchcraft has sprung from the prevailing attitude that the confessions are no more than the effect of torture and leading questions by the inquisitors. The confessions are thus somehow divorced from those who utter them as testimonies and accused alike are manipulated by cynical puppeteers.

Another problem is that the tendency has been to study persecution, ‘giving little or no attention to the attitudes and behaviour of the persecuted’, but there is no difficulty in agreeing with the assertion that although the testimonies are fragmentary and indirect, ‘individuals articulate in a distinct manner, each with his (or her) own accent, a core of common beliefs’.13 Accessing these beliefs through the use of documentation originating from, or filtered by, demonologists, inquisitors and judges, a process whereby ‘the voices of the accused reach us strangled, altered, distorted’, involves looking at the trial evidence in a different way. It is the importance of ‘the anomalies, the cracks that occasionally (albeit very rarely) appear in the documentation, undermining its coherence’,14 that we must seek. The anomalous material in the Scottish witch trials that this book will attempt to investigate are the alleged encounters with the fairy folk, in several examples the sole reason accusations of witchcraft were made against the victim. In many cases we prefer to quote what purport to be, and sometimes clearly are, the actual words of the informants. Their voices have been silent for too long.

A frustrating aspect of the trial records is the frequently abrupt termination of the transcript, presumably at the behest of the judges who were, in the main, only interested in recording certain types of evidence, namely those which they wished to hear. This is very noticeable in Isobel Gowdie’s trial (1662), where so often the copyist stopped writing down the details about the fairies, which she so amply provided.

The bias shown, even by relatively recent scholarship, toward the witch trial evidence is also problematic. Commenting on the case of Bessie Dunlop, Robert Chambers opined, ‘the modern student of insanity can have no difficulty with this case: it is simply one of hallucination, the consequence of diseased conditions’. The confession of Isobel Gowdie is frequently dismissed as the product of insanity. Sir Walter Scott commented, ‘it only remains to suppose that this wretched creature [Isobel] was under the dominion of some peculiar species of lunacy’. J. A. MacCulloch accused Isobel of ‘delusions and erotic ravings’. Even Katharine Briggs’ response to this case was highly prejudicial: ‘these strange, mad outpourings at least throw some light on the fairy beliefs held by the peasantry of Scotland in the seventeenth century’.15

Another source which may be controversial, but which may also be held to represent the authentic voice of the folk, is that of Scotland’s rich ballad heritage. The historical value of ballads has, like witch trial evidence, been devalued and ignored. Contrary to the view that the ballads ‘present no coherent record of either historical event or of popular belief and custom at any one particular period’,16 we would claim that the ballads do preserve valuable material and that they do indeed provide an important articulation of folk belief. When we study the ballads, we are studying not only the ‘poetry of the folk’ but stylistic representations of belief as well. In the late nineteenth century the American scholar, F. J. Child master-minded the five volume edition of popular ballads which turned out to be preponderantly Scottish in origin. Though fairies do not feature prominently in the classical ballads (only 11 of the 305 Child ballads contain fairy material), we would argue that they are most worthy of investigation. Of the Child corpus (numbers in brackets are those ascribed by the editor), we have identified the following which mention the fairies: [2] ‘The Elfin Knight’, [4] ‘Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight’, [19] ‘King Orfeo’, [35] ‘Allison Gross’, [37] ‘Thomas Rymer’, [38] ‘The Wee Wee Man’, [39] ‘Tam Lin’, [40] ‘The Queen of Elfan’s Nourice’, [41] ‘Hind Etin’, [53] ‘Young Beichan’ and [61] ‘Sir Cawline’.17

Child, who was sceptical toward the historical value of the ballads, stated in his introduction to ‘The Battle of Harlaw’, ‘A ballad taken down some four hundred years after the event will be apt to retain very little of sober history’. The late David Buchan refuted this claim, and the general attitude that ballads cannot be taken seriously as history. He found that ‘Harlaw’ was ‘historical in a rather extraordinary way’, reflecting the kind of ‘historical truth’ that rarely finds its way into the documents, ‘the ways in which the folk imagination reacted to, moulded, and used for its own emotional purposes, the raw material of historical event’. The ballads, we suggest, similarly provide a heavily figurative and motifemic expression of the fairy beliefs of the folk, for ‘ballads can contain factual truths not found in the often scanty records, and can contain certain emotional truths, the attitudes and reactions of the ballad-singing folk to the world around them’.18

Researching Scottish fairy belief is rather like confronting a huge obscure painting which has been badly damaged and worn through time, great chunks totally obliterated and now completely irrecoverable, portions repainted by poorly skilled craftsmen, and other parts touched up by those who should have known better. Nevertheless, enough remains — much more by far than we have been able to retain in this book — to present a reasonably vivid picture of what fairy belief once was and meant to the believers. In assembling this material, we have not worked toward some deconstructionist end, but rather have tried to synthesise the individual components, to reconstruct the whole essence of fairy belief as a distinct phenomenon. It has been sensibly observed that ‘the attempt to attain knowledge of the past is also a journey into the world of the dead’.19 As we embark upon a similar journey, we feel some envy for Thomas Rhymer who enjoyed the assistance of the Fairy Queen to show him the road. In our case, however, we must find another way to Elfland.

Notes

  1 Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (1942; Cambridge 1982), 446.

  2 Kirk, 62, 64.

  3 Jacqueline Simpson, intro., Examples of Printed Folk-Lore concerning the Orkney and Shetland Islands, collected by G. F. Black, ed. Northcote W. Thomas (1903; London 1994).

  4 Barbara Rieti, Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland (St. John’s 1991), 215.

  5 Alan Dundes, ‘What is Folklore?’, in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (N. J. 1965), 2. Personally we prefer the definition of ‘folklore’ as given by Robert A. Georges and Michael Owen Jones, ‘The word folklore denotes expressive forms, processes, and behaviours (1) that we customarily learn, teach, and utilize or display during face-to-face interactions, and (2) that we judge to be traditional (a) because they are based on known precedents or models, and (b) because they serve as evidence of continuities and consistencies through time and space in human knowledge, thought, belief and feeling’. Folkloristics: An Introduction (Bloomington and Indianapolis 1995), 1.

  6 Wm. Hugh Jansen, ‘The Esoteric-Exoteric Factor in Folklore’, in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (N. J. 1965), 43–51.

  7 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (1976; Harmondsworth 1982), xv.

  8 Febvre, Problem of Unbelief, 440–444. What is now called an act of nature was once considered an act of God.

  9 Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xv.

10Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. R. Rosenthal (New York 1991), 213.

11Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xvii.

12J. A. MacCulloch, ‘The Mingling of Fairy and Witch Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Scotland’, Folk-Lore 32 (1921): 227–44.

13Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 2, 23.

14Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 10.

15Robert Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland: From the Reformation to the Revolution, 3 vols. (Edinburgh 1874), vol. 1, 110; Letters, 235; MacCulloch, ‘The Mingling of Fairy and Witch Beliefs’, 238; Katharine Briggs, The Vanishing People: A Study of Traditional Fairy Belief (London 1978), 25.

16Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford 1932), 161.

17The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F. J. Child. 5 vols. (Boston and London 1882–1898). Single volume edition The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Francis J. Child. Eds. and intro. by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge (London n.d.). On Child and his collection see The Ballad in Scottish History, ed. Edward J. Cowan (East Linton 2000).

18David Buchan, ‘History and Harlaw’, in Ballad Studies, ed. E. B. Lyle (London 1976), 29–40.

19Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 24.

CHAPTER ONE

The Nature of Fairy Belief

Gin ye ca’ me imp or elf,

I rede ye look weel to yourself;

Gin ye ca’ me fairy,

I’ll work ye muckle tarrie [trouble];

Gin guid neibour ye ca’ me,

Then guid neibour I will be;

But gin ye ca’ me seelie wicht,

I’ll be your freend baith day and nicht.1

There is, arguably, as much evidence of one kind or another for the activities of the fairies from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries as there is for the existence of either the Picts, the Britons, the Angles or the Scots during the first millennium of Scottish history. In strictly historical terms, they appear on the scene with tales about Thomas Rhymer at the end of the thirteenth century. They figure in medieval and renaissance poetry and they have a prominent presence in the ballads. Witch trial testimonials record their activities. Such judicial indictments, processes and decisions would normally be regarded as representing some of the soundest types of historical evidence, affording a dilemma for the investigator who must be inclined to intellectually reject the bizarre reportage which they contain. None other than King James VI considered it worth his while to write an influential treatise, Daemonologie, which included some material on fairies. A hundred years later the respected and scholarly minister of Aberfoyle, Robert Kirk, produced a learned tract about them in which he drew upon oral informants and local traditions in the manner of a modern folklorist. He was the first person writing in English or Scots to use the expression ‘fairy tale’ though he conceived his dissertation as a serious contribution to contemporary science and theology, written, in part, for friends and acquaintances who were members of the Royal Society in London. He was by no means alone since a number of his contemporaries were turning their attention to matters of the occult and the supernatural. By the eighteenth century traditions about the ‘fairfolk’ were eagerly sought out and published by a host of so-called authorities who believed that the objects of their interest were no more, though the fairies continued to hold their place in the folk tradition. Writers such as Walter Scott and James Hogg fostered a massive interest through poetry, story and ballad collection. Throughout the nineteenth century the elves littered the pages of Scottish literature, from which inspirational source they impacted upon painters and book illustrators. Folktale collections significantly added to the corpus of lore, as did the energies, or imaginations, of legions of antiquarians. Andrew Lang, inspired no doubt by Kirk, whose tract he edited, is generally credited with being the first to truly popularise some of the traditional material which he described as fairy tales, while J. M. Barrie, from Kirriemuir in Angus, invented one of the most famous of modern sprites when he introduced the malevolent Tinker Bell in his much-loved play, Peter Pan.

Like the early peoples of Scotland, the fairies left their legacy in place names which are abundant throughout the length and breadth of the country. A pair of chambered cairns on Cnoc Freiceadain in Caithness are known from their shape as Na Tri Shean, the three fairy mounds. Now over 5,000 years old, these impressive monuments overlook the nuclear power station at Dounreay which harbours sinister materials that will be lethally active for ten times the age of the cairns. Every county in Scotland has fairy hills or fairy glens. The magnificent Schiehallion on the edge of Rannoch Moor is the fairy mountain of the Caledonians. Sith (fairy) names are numerous throughout Gaelic-speaking Scotland. Tomnahurich Hill at Inverness is an abode of the elves, as is Dumbuck Hill in Dunbartonshire. Perhaps most famous of all are the Eildon Hills in the Borders, where true Thomas met the queen of the fairies. Names containing the local element ‘troll’ or ‘trowie’, are plentiful in the islands of Orkney and Shetland. Just when such countrywide names were first conferred is problematical, for while some may be old, we may suspect that many others post-date the fairy craze which took hold in the late eighteenth century, in much the same way as a majority of the topographical features of Glen Etive in Argyll were renamed following the publication of James Macpherson’s purported translations of Ossianic poetry in the 1760s, or MacBeth names were applied to landscape features around Dunsinane, in the beautiful howe of Strathmore, as the play became familiar to an increasingly literate public.

The fairies even bequeathed their own archaeology in the prehistoric graves, brochs, souterrains, and ‘Picts’ houses’ which they were thought to have inhabited. The landscape contained many ‘downie’ or fairy hills which provided access to Fairyland. Wells, confluences of rivers and burns, and ancient trees were places frequented by the elves. Fairy rings preserved the imprints of spritely feet dancing the light fantastic, standing stones representing the dancers themselves fossilised in the cold, cruel light of dawn, as at Haltadans on the island of Fetlar. There were caves where human musicians, most often pipers and fiddlers, trapped forever by the enchanters, could be heard to play on certain eldritch nights.

Although many writers have pretended that the so-called fairy faith constituted folk belief in all its pristine purity, they were sadly deluded for, from earliest times, ecclesiastical authorities well versed in the classics persistently traced popular lore back to classical or biblical sources. The practice can be charted in the works of Augustine and Gregory the Great, to name but two luminaries in the christian panoply. Superstitio to the Romans meant any non-Roman belief, just as it later came to bear such semantic burdens as non-christian, non-protestant or non-rational. But ‘somebody else’s belief’ could be rendered more intelligible by assimilation, which was what, as often as not, the Church recommended, or by the manufacture of a pedigree which foregrounded such beliefs in the mythology of the bible or of Greece and Rome. To this heady brew antiquaries later added ingredients from Scandinavia, Germania, the Celtic areas, the Near and Far East and ultimately, the World at large.

Dichotomies such as ‘elite and folk’, ‘literate and illiterate’, ‘official and unofficial’, and other such ‘them and us’ couplings are easy to understand in theory, but in practice the issues are much more complex. Further unwitting obfuscation was created by the model of the ‘little tradition’ and the ‘great tradition’, the one of the people at large, the other of the learned, which recognised that popular or folk culture is not a closed system. The assertion that the ‘great tradition and little tradition have long affected each other and continue to do so’ acknowledged the mutual flow between the two, although as Peter Burke noted, ‘the elite participated in the little tradition, but the common people did not participate in the great tradition’. The distinction is offensively patronising, as are labels such as ‘the little people’ to describe those who were, or are, the non-elite. In Scotland the people at large were called, quite simply, as they still are, ‘folk’. Most observers would now agree with Carlo Ginzburg, following Mikhail Bakhtin, that the key lies in ‘circularity’: ‘between the culture of the dominant classes and that of the subordinate classes there existed, in preindustrial Europe, a circular relationship composed of reciprocal influences, which travelled from low to high as well as from high to low’.2 Thus, a synthetic and holistic model is to be preferred, composed of many interlocking and over-lapping spheres of belief and activity, one influencing the other.

Anthropological concepts of ‘official culture’, maintained through formal documents and laws, and ‘real culture’, or culture as it is actually practised, fail to encapsulate that exchange and rapport between the two; ‘official culture stands in relation to real culture as the elite value system stands in relation to that of the folk’.3 This is not to lament the passing of a merry, rosy-cheeked peasantry dancing on the village common; rather it is to celebrate, and in some measure to recover, the non-exclusive culture that virtually everyone took for granted. For long in western culture the progress of ‘civilisation’ has been marked by the distance which the elite have been able to place between themselves and the folk, by stressing the superiority of learning over supposed ignorance, of literacy over orality and by emphasising the importance of the rise of manners, widely interpreted. A possible means of studying such phenomena is provided by the unifying discipline of folklore.

One of the functions of folklore is to maintain the stability of culture:

the basic paradox of folklore is that while it plays a vital role in transmitting and maintaining the institutions of a culture and in forcing the individual to conform to them, at the same time it provides socially approved outlets for the repressions which these same institutions impose upon him.

People who have had a supernatural experience do not always interpret it as such themselves: ‘the social group that surrounds him [or her] may also participate in the interpretation’. Furthermore, while some people may be prone to phenomenal experiences, others may be better able to provide an explanation. Ultimately, ‘the group controls the experiences of its members’. To formulate the matter in another way, in terms postulated by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, there is a cultural hegemony in effect which operates from the bottom up so that, culturally speaking, certain phenomena cannot be disbelieved.4 It was as impossible, at certain times in history, to question the existence of witches as it is today to query Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, either on the grounds of supposed invincible authority or the certainty of invincible ignorance. So it was with fairy belief, but the group itself was subject to the historical influences being exerted upon it, sometimes perceived, but often impersonal, unknown and incomprehensible — and thus, in turn, the beliefs themselves were affected by remote forces originating far from the community.

That many people in pre-industrial Europe believed in fairies cannot be disputed on the basis of available evidence. They were a part of everyday life, as real to people as the sunrise, and as incontrovertible as the existence of God. While fairy belief was only a fragment of a much larger complex, investigation of the fairy tradition is potentially rewarding. Through the study of folk beliefs, it may be possible to understand the worldview of people who lived in a past which was very different from our present. Too often the study of history is concerned with recognition and relevance, or worse is approached with a sense of presentism which is as much the conceit as it is the curse of scholarly enquiry at the commencement of the twenty-first century. People in our past did not think or act as we do, yet they experienced anxieties and bewilderments as profound, or more so, as those which affect us all, and like many of us they sought explanations outside themselves.

It has been observed that the supernatural is the least studied of all topics in the folklore discipline, a circumstance that can be attributed to an academic bias against supernatural beliefs on ideological grounds: namely, that such beliefs ‘arise from and are supported by various kinds of obvious error’. A great deal of scholarly work has taken this perspective, a ‘tradition of disbelief’, as its starting point, the adoption of an attitude in which both belief and disbelief are suspended and an external point of view taken. The approach adopted in this book is that which has been termed ‘experience-centred’ and focuses not on whether a belief is true or untrue, but on the reasons such beliefs are held to be credible. It should be possible to believe one’s informants without believing their explanations. When dealing with the beliefs of people in the past there is the additional problem of trying to understand the world in which they lived, a world constantly subject to modification by the identical beliefs that we are attempting to recover. The study of alien belief-systems requires a ‘temporary suspension of the cognitive assumptions of our own society’. The role of the folklorist with regard to folk belief scholarship has been, and will doubtless continue to be, a hotly debated issue. The stance taken in this study is that it is irrelevant whether or not fairies existed; what matters is that people believed in the reality of the phenomenon. The folklorist is thus interested, as should be the historian, in the ‘reality of the supranormal experience and not in the reality of paranormal phenomena’.5

This book is largely, but not exclusively, concerned with fairy belief in pre-industrial Scotland. The assumption is that before revolutionary economic changes engulfed both rural and urban Scotland, generally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but at different times in different places, life had remained much the same for several hundred years. People in 1450 lived in pretty much the same type of house, ate the same sort of food, worked on the land in much the same sort of occupation and died the same sort of death as folk in 1750. People alive in the latter years would have more in common with their predecessors than they would with their successors in 1850. Before the mass exodus to the cities, or overseas, most people still lived on estates subject to the whim of the local laird in his castle or ‘big house’; they inhabited a world that, economically, socially and culturally, was still essentially medieval.6 Such a model confers a validity upon the work of the collectors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries frequently denied by the more severe of their critics. These men – for they were almost exclusively male – were still in touch with traditions which were vital and persistent. While some embroidery and invention did take place, much of their evidence must be evaluated, scrutinised and corroborated like any other historical source material. When subjected to rigorous analysis, it very often passes the test.

The fairies of Scottish folk, and for that matter the learned, tradition bear little or no resemblance to the vast majority of modern stereotypes of fairies. Rather, the images inherited by the twenty-first century find their inspiration in the butterfly-winged, diaphanously clad, frolicking nymphs of writers such as Shakespeare, and artists such as Blake and Fuseli, with a hefty infusion of later accretion. The romantic Cottingley Fairies, the materialistic Tooth Fairy,7 and Walt Disney’s mischievous Tinker Bell are the pervasive iconographic forms in current popular culture. The approach of the third millennium generated a spate of fairy books, often profusely and imaginatively illustrated, and frequently inspired by the New Age movement. Many of these, unfortunately, depend much more on faith, fantasy and intuition than upon any shadow of respect for the disciplines of History and Folklore. Although the literary, artistic and mass media creations were undoubtedly inspired by folk tradition, they are by no means representative of their often wilfully ignored, and frequently disparaged, folk roots.

If it were possible to ask the people of pre-industrial Scotland what they thought about the ‘guid neighbours’, they would probably admit to a fascination (from Latin fascinum, a spell, witchcraft) but they would deny that there was anything very merry, or coy, or playfully mischievous about the fairy folk in their experience. The fairies were dangerous, capable of inflicting terrible harm, even death upon people and their livestock, and every precaution had to be taken to keep them at bay, or at least placated. Though they were occasionally benign, their proclivity towards cruelty and general malevolence meant that they were best avoided at all costs. The northern ‘light-hearted, night-tripping elves’,8 so dear to the hearts of a number of investigators during the past two hundred years, can no longer be said to reflect the fairy traditions that once impacted upon the Scottish consciousness.

What’s in a Name?

James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, wittily distinguished the problem besetting the study of fairy belief:

That fairies were, was not disputed,

But what they were was greatly doubted.

Each argument was guarded well,

With ‘if’ and ‘should’, and ‘who can tell’.

Because of their unfavourable reputation, fairies were frequently given amiable and agreeable names. Such placatory appellatives were thought to please and mollify the fairies, thus reducing the risk of inducing their wrath. Robert Kirk’s The Secret Common-Wealth affirmed that sluaghmaith, or ‘good people’, was a name often used by Highlanders, ‘it would seem, to prevent the dint of their ill attempts’. It was a rule best obeyed ad infinitum as they were supposed always to be invisibly present, so at all times must be spoken of with respect. Kirk used a variety of designations: subterranean people, invisible people, and lychnobious people (those living by lamplight). Of this last appellation he explained, they ‘instead of day, useth the night, and liveth as it were by candle night’. He also distinguished between lowland names such as elves, fauns, and fairies, and Gaelic terms ‘hubhsisgedh, caiben, lusbartan & siotbsudh’.9

Throughout the whole of Scotland there were several different euphemisms for fairies: the good neighbours, the good people, the honest folk, the fairfolk, the green goons, the gentry, the little people, the forgetful people, the still people, the restless people, the seelie and unseelie court (from sellig meaning blessed), and the people of peace. Other terminology for these eldritch (weird, unearthly) beings included elves, the hill folk, fanes, and the klippe. Gaelic words for fairy were síth, sluagh (the fairy host), and Daoine Síth or maithe (people of peace). The Dame of the Fine Green Kirtle, a fairy woman who is usually friendly, features in many Highland folktales. Within the rich, and heavily Norse influenced, traditions of Orkney and Shetland they were known as the peedie and peerie (small) folk, ferries, the grey folk, the huldre-folk or hidden people, and the hillyans, but the most common term was troll, trow or trowies. A related species, known as the kunal-trow, was male only and therefore obliged to marry a human bride, but on the birth of their child the mother died. The hogboy or hogboon (from Old Norse haug-búinn, meaning mound-dweller) inhabited Orkney burial chambers and guarded them from intruders. Over time, the hogboy traditions became intermingled with the brownies from mainland Scotland.10

Brownies or broonies, who were the answer to the peasant’s prayer since they could accomplish a superhuman amount of work without demanding payment, attached themselves to particular households or families. In appearance, they have been variously described, from squat, shaggy, naked creatures to tall, handsome and well proportioned. They usually kept to themselves, being mostly solitaries, unlike the fairies who were notably gregarious. Generally brownies were thought to be male, with only occasional references to the female of the species, though the gruagach has been described as ‘a female spectre of the class of Brownies, to whom the dairy-maids made frequent libations of milk’.11

One generic term frequently used is ‘wicht’ in the primary sense of ‘a supernatural being or one with supposed supernatural powers’, as in the label ‘the guid wichts’ for the fairies. In the centuries of persecution and demonisation the word fell together with ‘witch’, and although the term survived in the sense of ‘wight’ (warrior or man), much damage was done in the intervening period.

In some cases the personal names of individual fairy folk are given, though such occurrences are fairly unusual. The most interesting name of all, used to specifically denote the queen of the fairies, is NicNiven or Neven, which appears to derive from Neamhain, one of the Gaelic and Irish war furies better known as Badb. The matter is complex since Neamhain and Badb may represent different aspects of the same persona, but badhb in some Irish dialects is the word for the supernatural death messenger more familiarly known in Ireland and Scotland as the banshee, bean-shithe literally ‘fairy woman’ in Gaelic. Badhb also means a hoodie-crow and carries the sense of ‘deadly’ or ‘ill-fated’; it can also translate as ‘witch’, which is apposite since in Scotland NicNiven was also queen of the witches. This intriguing name therefore, it would appear, originated in the Gàidhealtachd whence it was imported into the Lowlands and even found its way to Shetland. W. B. Yeats was therefore incorrect when he stated that ‘the gentle fairy presences’ which haunted the imagination of his countrymen became ‘formidable and evil as soon as they were transferred to Scottish soil’, since this truly terrifying death messenger seems to be shared by both Ireland and Scotland while her associations give some indication of how the Scots regarded the fairy queen.

Self-confessed witch, Isobel Gowdie, supplied several names during her trial in 1662, such as Robert the Jakis, Sanderis the Read Reaver, Thomas the Fearie [Fairy?] and Robert the Rule. An old lady from Quarff, Shetland was reported early in the twentieth century as having known some trows by name, such as ‘Sara Neven’ (NicNiven again) and ‘Robbie a da Rees’ (obscure but possibly Norn russa a mare or horse). In the ballads, the only cognomen given to a fairy is Hind Erin, the lusty lover from the ballad of the same name. In the genre of folktale personal names are occasionally ascribed. The nasty Lowland fairy, Whoopity Stoorie, whose name must be guessed to break the spell, and the benevolent Habetrot, a fairy patron of spinning, are examples from the genre. The brownies are also generally innominate, though there are a few exceptions. The best known is perhaps Galloway’s Aiken Drum, the Brownie of Bladnoch, but there are others, such as Wag-at-the-wa’ from the Borders, Puddlefoot from Perthshire and Meg Mullach (or Hairy Meg), a female brownie from Strathspey.12

The etymology of the word ‘fairy’ is about as vague and amorphous as the creature which it signifies, though there has been no lack of theories about its derivation. Many have favoured etymologies derived from words that denoted female supernatural beings, such as the Arabic Peri, or the Latin nympha. Others sought out derivatives from words with supernatural associations, such as the Old English fagan, or the Latin fatua.13 One popular idea is that in the Roman period the Latin fata, meaning ‘fate’, came to be associated with native goddesses. Hypothetically as the Latin language was subsumed by Old French the /It/ was omitted, producing fae, but unfortunately, there is no concrete evidence for such a change. Noel Williams, who has conducted a thorough study of the word and its mystical connotations and denotations, points out that the main problem with this etymology is its reliance upon the ‘vague processes of ‘identification’ and ‘misunderstanding”. The majority of Old French fee and Middle English fay citations rarely indicate a female enchanter, but rather denote a ‘quality of phenomena or events which may or may not be associated with creatures’. Although fay could be used to mean ‘enchantress’, this was not the primary sense of the much more common fairy, which seems to convey the concept of ‘fatedness’, a quality ‘which can control and direct the actions of humanity’. The etymology may not derive from fata and fae, but from a term denoting fatedness. There were also words in Old English, such as faege, ‘fated, doomed to die’, aelf meaning ‘supernatural’, and the problematical scinu which could mean ‘skin’, or ‘shining’, ‘apparition’ or ‘appearance’, all in a supernatural context. It is possible that when the term fairy was imported into Britain it incorporated some of the connotations of these Old English words. But whatever the precise etymology, the notion of ‘fatedness’ has been central to the development of the word fairy since its earliest occurrences.14 It is in this sense that it was utilised in Scotland by medieval makars, or poets, such as Blind Harry and Gavin Douglas. To say that a person was ‘surely fey’ meant that he was near his end; to be ‘fey taikin’ was to have a presage of impending death. ‘Fey’ in Douglas’s poetry conveyed the sense of ‘unfortunate’ or ‘producing fatal effects’, ideas implicit in the Scottish notion of fairies.

It is an important consideration that the word fairy, as it emerged in twelfth-century England, was initially a literary term. The people at large would have retained Old English words.15 It is not clear when fairy was incorporated into everyday language, though there is some evidence to suggest that the term was becoming reasonably well established in Scotland by the fifteenth century.

Betwixt and Between: What are Fairies?

The importance of Robert Kirk’s work to the understanding of the nature of fairy belief, and other supernatural phenomena, cannot be stressed enough since he greatly enhanced his account by drawing upon a range of informants and tradition-bearers. His invaluable contribution provides an unrivalled corpus of information and a rare insight into various aspects of belief in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Kirk opined that fairies were a distinct order of created beings, possessing intelligence, and having ‘light changable bodies’ that could be ‘best seen in twilight’, though usually only by ‘seers or men of the second sight’. In many ways their lives paralleled those of humans, whom they resembled in size and appearance, but they lived in a state ‘betwixt man and angell’, which rendered them difficult to define, often leading commentators to describe what they were not rather than what they were. To Sir Walter Scott ‘the fairies were a race which might be described by negatives, being neither angels, devils, nor the souls of deceased men’,16 but, needless to say, such doubts did not prevent him from formulating his own opinions on the nature of these puzzling beings. In his incomparably influential Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3) he characterised fairies as a capricious, diminutive race who dressed in green, rode horses in invisible processions, and inhabited conical-shaped hills. They frequently danced on the hills by moonlight, leaving behind circles or fairy rings in the grass; they attacked humans and cattle with elf-shot, and they enjoyed hunting. The ‘Wizard of the North’ considered that Scottish fairies never received the ‘attractive and poetical embellishments’ enjoyed by their English counterparts. He speculated that this was perhaps due to the stricter persecutions these creatures suffered under the presbyterian clergy, which had the effect of ‘hardening their dispositions, or at least in rendering them more dreaded by those among whom they dwelt’. He also suggested that the landscape of Scotland might have been conducive to a more malevolent and terrifying breed, since

we should naturally attribute a less malicious disposition, a less frightful appearance, to the fays who glide by moon-light through the oaks of Windsor, than to those who haunt the solitary heaths and lofty mountains of the North.

The idea that certain landscapes facilitated fairy-spotting was widely held. One visitor maintained in 1794 that the Isle of Man was the only place where there was any probability of seeing a fairy. Man was, at one time, briefly part of the kingdom of Scotland and links remained close, particularly with Galloway, for hundreds of years. His informant – ‘an aged peasant of a pensive and melancholy aspect’ – had told the visiting investigator that the elves were most likely to be seen sitting beside brooks and waterfalls, half-concealed among bushes, or dancing on mountain tops. These creatures were ‘generally enveloped in clouds or in the mountain fogs, and haunted the hideous precipices and caverns on the sea-shore’. The visitor considered that Manx people were more susceptible to fairy sightings because of scenery and ‘a sombrous imagination heightened by traditionary terrors’.17

Fairy Origins: Folk and Learned Ideas

Speculations as to the origins of fairies are almost as numerous as the different types of their kind who once haunted Scotland. Some authorities considered them to be ghosts, or the souls of the pagan dead, existing in a limbo between heaven and earth, while others thought that they were originally nature spirits. To some commentators they were representative of a folk memory of an actual race of people driven by their conquerors into remote and inaccessible areas, or a similarly remembered race who were believed to be diminutive in size, or a shady recollection of the druids. Alternatively, they might be fallen angels cast out of heaven by God. In the Irish tradition the fairies were derived from mythological deities. The legend of the Tuatha Dé Danann owes much to erudite Irish monks well-versed in a highly developed antiquarian tradition. It relates that the Tuatha were a divine race, descended from the Greek mother goddess Danu, who were conquered by the Milesians (humankind). The mortal victors struck a bargain to the effect that while they would inhabit the surface of the earth, the defeated pantheon would either retreat west to the island of Tir Nan Og (Land of Youth) or make new homes inside the earth; thereafter they were known as the sidhe. Stories of the Tribe of Danu circulated in Scotland from at least the sixteenth century, and doubtlessly long before. Bishop Carswell identified the fairies as the Tuatha Dé Danann in the introduction to his Gaelic Prayer Book of 1567. Whatever the theories as to origin, there was, as might be expected, considerable overlap, as the folk absorbed elements of the learned tradition.18

That fairies represented the souls of the dead, or ghosts, was for long a fashionable opinion and, at times, a confusingly entwined yet distinct tradition of the folk. To discover something of the persistence of the connection one need look no further than the depositions given by accused witches Bessie Dunlop (1576) and Alison Peirson (1588), who both clearly maintained a linkage to the fairy realm through men who were once ordinary living, breathing mortals. Folk customs, such as the offering of meal and milk to appease the fairies, were carried out to placate the dead. In 1656 there were reports at Kinlochewe of the ‘pouring of milk upon hills as oblationes’.19 Often, as for example in Orkney, the offerings were decanted into, or left on top of, neolithic burial chambers. Kirk’s parishioners held divided opinions about the nature and origin of the inhabitants of Fairyland, though most believed that the dead were in some way connected with, or shared a relationship with, the fairies.

Some thought the fairies to be caught in a state of limbo, a condition which seems to have distressed them: ‘their continuall sadness is because of their pendulous state … as uncertain what at the last revolution [Judgement Day] will becom of them, when they are lockt up into an unchangable condition’. Others averred that the ‘subterranean people’ were ‘departed souls attending a whil in this inferior state, and cloth’d with bodies’ procured through their good deeds in life. Second-sighted people told Kirk they often saw fairies attending funerals, where they would partake of funereal food, or might carry the coffin ‘among the midle-earth men to the grave’. A fairy might appear as a ‘double-man’ or doppelgänger, also known as a ‘reflex-man’ or a ‘co-walker’, a kind of mirror-image or wraith. Places distinguished as fairy hills were also popularly believed to house the souls of the ancestors, and ‘a mote or mount was dedicate beside everie church-yard, to receave the souls, till their adjacent bodies arise, and so become as a fayrie-hill’, a notion which spawned the idea that fairies were the guardians of the dead.20

Tales and legends accumulated through the fieldwork of the American Evans-Wentz, in the first decade of last century, indicated that some people believed fairies were spirits of the dead, while others thought they were both spirits of the dead and other spirits not the dead, while others again explained they were like the dead, but were not to be identified with them. He contrasted Breton death legends and customs with fairy traditions found in Scotland, Ireland and Wales and uncovered several overlapping areas. His conclusions, which were conditioned by a pan-Celtic approach no longer convincing, may have been influenced by his Oxford teacher Andrew Lang who, commenting on the creatures of Robert Kirk’s treatise, found them like ‘a lingering memory of the Chthonian beings, “the ancestors”, and who pronounced that ‘there are excellent proofs that fairyland was a kind of Hades, or home of the dead’. Another American, Lowry C. Wimberly, found striking resemblances between the ballad ghost and the ballad fairy, thus reinforcing the idea, well established in the folk tradition, but ultimately to be traced to literary notions of Pluto and Hades, of a close relationship between fairies and the souls of the dead.21

Postulations based on the premise that fairies constitute a folk memory of former races, conquered peoples who were pushed out beyond the periphery of settled areas, have fuelled the imagination of many scholars on this subject.22 Of particular significance was a theory advanced by David MacRitchie that fairies were an actual race of small or ‘little’ people, the original Pictish peoples of Scotland. Although MacRitchie is often credited with first suggesting this idea, it had been long anticipated. Thirty years earlier it had been argued that the first fairies were Picts. He was also pre-empted by the esteemed collector of Highland folktale, John Francis Campbell of Islay, who in 1860 wrote:

Men do believe in fairies, though they will not readily confess the fact. And though I do not myself believe that fairies are, in spite of the strong evidence offered, I believe there once was a small race of people in these islands, who are remembered as fairies … the fairy was probably a Pict.

Campbell argued that there were more reasons to assume fairies were once real people rather than ‘creatures of the imagination’, or ‘spirits in prison’, or fallen angels, because the evidence of their ‘actual existence is very much more direct and substantial’, not to mention that all European nations have had similar beliefs ‘and they cannot all have invented the same fancy’.23

Walter Traill Dennison, a collector of Orkney folklore, associated the fairies with the Picts, but he also pointed out that prehistoric burial mounds were believed to be trowie homes. Folk traditions were not entirely devoid of the Pictish association, as is indicated by stories about the ‘pechts’ and the numerous ‘Picts’ houses’ marked on nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps to denote archaeological remains of indeterminate origin, yet it is difficult to establish how far back in time the identification of Picts with supernatural entities can really be traced and whether or not this was a ‘learned’ imposition upon folk ideas or vice versa. Late nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators generally state that folklore concerning the Picts confused them with gnomes, brownies and fairies because of the nature of Pictish archaeological remains. Brochs, tower-like structures found mainly, but not exclusively, in the Western and Northern Isles and dated to the period 500 B.C. to 200 A.D., have small entrances and tiny steps. Souterrains, possibly cellars or storage chambers which are low-roofed and underground, dated from around Roman times to c. 700 A.D. but built by local people, contributed to the supposition that the Picts were of small stature. In fact, the fallacious idea that the Picts were short and lived underground can be traced back to the eleventh-century History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen by Adam of Bremen, and the anonymous Historia Norwegiae, written c.1200. The latter noticed that ‘the Picts little exceeded pigmies in stature’. Morning and evening they worked hard at building their brochs, ‘but at mid-day they entirely lost all their strength, and lurked, through fear, in little underground houses’.24 Both histories are reflective of the type of propaganda that must have followed the subjugation of Pictish life and culture by the Vikings and the Scots. There is no archaeological evidence to suggest the Picts, or for that matter any of the other peoples of early Scotland, were of particularly small stature. Nonetheless, the folk were capable of making their own rationalisations. If they found inland deposits of shells or sand they assumed that such sites had once been covered by the sea, just as fishermen figured out that some parts of the ocean had inundated dry land or people finding tree roots in peat bogs assumed the sometime existence of a forest that had otherwise totally disappeared. They were perfectly capable of working out for themselves that structural remains, whatever their size, on moors or hillsides had been placed there by their predecessors.

The theory that fairies represented a folk memory of druids, on the other hand, clearly owed much to book knowledge, as did the far-fetched assertion that fairy changelings were actually children stolen by druids in order to procure ‘the necessary supply of members for their order’. Over-enthusiastic antiquaries were capable of the wildest fantasies beside which the supposed ignorant superstitions of the folk pale into insignificance. One such antiquarian bizarrely maintained that the belief in fairies

doubtless arose from the circumstance that the priestesses or female Druids, who performed some of the rites of their religion while living in retired places, were called by the poets the ‘nymphs of the groves’, which gave rise to the fancy of ignorant people that charming fairy women, clad in green apparel, inhabited remote places, such as woods, valleys, hills, and rude dens.25

Such views were an echo of the Ossianic craze sparked off when James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) to the accompaniment of Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation on same, both men conspiring in a sort of well-intentioned literary fraud which seized the imagination of their readers. So widely read were the putative poems of Ossian, the ancient Gaelic bard, druids and all, that they entered the popular tradition.

Yet another theory of origin appears in the intriguing tale of a reputed giant living in the North of Scotland, called ‘Balkin, the Lord of the Northern Mountains’, which identified him as the father of the fairies:

… he was shaped like a satyr and fed upon the air, having wife and children to the number of 12 thousand which were the brood of the northern fairies, inhabiting Southerland [Sutherland] and Cateness [Caithness] with the adjacent islands.

His multitudinous progeny spoke ancient Irish, lived in caverns and mountains, and engaged in regular combat with the fiery spirits of Mount Hekla in Iceland. The supposition that fairies were more likely to be found in the remotest of regions was of longstanding. Ever since medieval times mention of either of the two northernmost mainland counties automatically equated with supernatural habitats. A fourteenth-century English map noted of the empty spaces of Sutherland, hic habundabant lupu (here wolves abound).26 Wolves, witches and fairy wichts co-existed in the wilderness.