The figures beneath each entry give reference numbers for the Bibliography
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The very numerous fairy animals, of which there are many traditions in the British Isles, may be divided into two main classes. There are wild ones, that exist for their own purposes and in their own right, and the domesticated ones bred and used by the fairies. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between these two types, because the fairies occasionally allow their creatures to roam freely, as, for instance, the Cu Sith of the Highlands, which is generally kept as a watch dog in the Brughs, but is at times free to roam as its pleasure, and the Crodh Mara, which sometimes visit human herds. But the distinction is generally clear. The two kinds of fairy creatures occur very early in our traditions and are mentioned in the medieval chronicles. Examples are the Grant, a medieval Bogey-Beast mentioned by Gervase of Tilbury, and the small dogs and horses to be found in Giraldus Cambrensis' story of Elidor. Examples of the free Fairy Horses are the dangerous Each Uisge of the Highlands, the hardly less dangerous Kelpies, the Cabyll Ushtey of the Isle of Man, and such Bogies as the Brag, the Trash and the Shock. All these have some power of shape-shifting. The horses used by the fairies occur everywhere in the Heroic Fairy legends, whereever there is the Fairy Rade in which they are to be found. They have been taken over by the Devil where he haunts with the Yeth Hounds of the Devil's Dandy Dogs, and even with the Cwn Annwn, which once explicitly belonged to Gwyn ap Nudd. The fairy horses of the Tuatha De Danann are the most explicitly remembered. The Black Dogs are the most common of the wild dogs in England, but there are many bogey-beast dogs, the Barguest, the Gally-Trot, the Mauthe Doog of Man, and the Shock. The domestic Fairy Dogs most vividly remembered are Bran and Sceolan, the hunting dogs of Finn, and in the Cu Sith; but traditions of the Hounds of the Hills still linger in Somerset.
The fairy cattle were less fierce than the wild fairy horses. Occasionally these were independent, like the Dun Cow of Kirkham, and they were beneficent, not dangerous. The Elf-Bull was a lucky visitor to any herd, and so were the Gwartheg Y Llyn of Wales. There were, however, ferocious ghost bulls like the Great Bull of Bagbury. Of miscellaneous creatures, the most famous were the seal people, the Selkies and Roane. Cats were almost fairies in themselves, but there was a fairy cat in the Highlands, the Cait Sith, and a demon-god-cat, Big Ears, which appeared after horrible invocations. Afanc was a river monster of Wales, something like a giant beaver, and the Boobrie was a monstrous water-bird. Goats and deer may be said to have been fairies in their own proper shape, and many birds, the owl, the wren, the eagle and the raven had strong fairy associations. The salmon were a fairy creature, and even insects had their part. In fact the whole of these islands is rich in fairy zoology.
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One proof of the dependence upon mortals of the fairies is their eagerness to borrow from their human neighbours. This is particularly frequent in Scotland. They borrow grain and occasionally implements. They borrow the use of mills and of human fires. The story of the Isle of Sanntraigh is one which was used by Mac Ritchie to enforce his contribution to the theories of fairy origins. Indeed, all these examples of fairy borrowing fit in well with the suggestion that the first fairies were the remnants of a conquered people gone into hiding and yet creeping nervously around their conqerors for what pickings they could find, and the subject overlaps with fairy thefts.
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The fairies have a great reputation for various skills. They are seen and heard working on their own account, they teach skills to mortals and they do work for them. A vivid account of their activities is given by J. G. Campbell in SUPERSTITIONS OF THE HIGHLANDS AND ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND: The Fairies, as has been already said, are counterparts of mankind. There are children and old people among them; they practise all kinds of trades and handicrafts; they possess cattle, dogs arms; they require food, clothing, sleep; they are liable to disease, and can be killed. So entire is the resemblance that they have even been betrayed into intoxication. People entering their brughs, have found the inmates engaged in similar occupations to mankind, the women spinning, weaving, grinding meal, baking, cooking, churning, etc., and the men sleeping, dancing, and making merry, or sitting round a fire in the middle of the floor (as a Perthshire informant described it) 'like tinkers'. Sometimes the inmates were absent on foraging expeditions or pleasure excursions. The women sing at their work, a common practice in former times with Highland women, and use distaff, spindle, handmills, and such like primitive implements.
Their skill in spinning and weaving is famous, as is shown in such tales as Habetrot and Tom Tit Tot, but there is some qualification to this. In the Isle of Man the looms and spinning-wheels are guarded from the Lil'Fellas at night because they are likely to spoil the webs. This opinion is illustrated in a passage from Sophia Morrison's MANX FAIRY TALES about a fairy visit to a Manx house, a memorat taken down from James Moore:
I'm not much of a believer in most of the stories some ones is telling, but after all a body can't help believing a thing they happen to see for themselves.
I remember one winter's night - we were living in a house at the time that was pulled down for the building of the Big Wheel. It was a thatched house with two rooms, and a wall about six foot high dividing them, and from that it was open to the scrabs, or turfs, that were laid across the rafters. My Mother was sitting at the fire busy spinning, and my Father was sitting in the big chair at the end of the table taking a chapter for us out of the Manx Bible. My brother was busy winding a spool and I was working with a bunch of thing, trying to make two or three pegs.
'There's a terrible glisther on to-night,' my Mother said, looking at the fire. 'An' the rain comin' peltin' down the chimley.'
'Yes,' said my Father, shutting the Bible; 'an' we better get to bed middlin' soon and let the Lil'Ones in to a bit of shelter.'
So we all got ready and went to bed.
Some time in the night my brother wakened me with a: 'Shish! Listen boy, and look at the big light tha's in the kitchen!' Then he rubbed his eyes a bit and whispered: 'What's Mother doin' now at all?'
'Listen!' I said, 'An' you'll hear Mother in bed; it's not her at all; it must be the Little Ones that's agate the wheel!'
And both of us got frightened, and down with our heads under the clothes and fell asleep. In the morning when we got up we told them what we had seen, first thing.
'Aw, like enough, like enough,' my Father said, looking at the wheel. 'It seems your mother forgot to take the band off last night, a thing people should be careful about, for it's givin' Themselves power over the wheel, an' though their meanin's well enough, the spinnin' they're doin' is nothin' to brag about. The weaver is always shoutin' about their work, an' the bad joinin' they're makin' in the rolls.'
I remember it as well as yesterday - the big light that was at them, and the whirring that was going on. And let anybody say what they like, that's a thing I've heard and seen for myself.
Of the crafts in which fairies are distinguished, the most curious and contradictory is smithy work, when we consider the fairies' fear of cold iron. Gnomes were, from of old, reputed metal-workers, and many famous swords and breastplates were wrought by them, but in the tale of 'The Isle of Sanntraigh' the fairies, who were governed by the dirk stuck into the hillside, taught their captives unusual skill in metal-work, from which the rescued boy afterwords profited. As is common in folk-lore, there is no explanation of this anomaly. A notable literary use of this theme is made by Rudyard Kipling in REWARDS AND FAIRIES the sequel to PUCK OF POOK'S HILL.
Lepracauns were reputed to be highly skilled at their trade, but since there is no record that they made shoes for other than fairy feet, there is no means of testing this.
Goblins labouring in the mines were proverbial in the 17th century for producing no results by their deedy labours. Boat-building, on the other hand, was a work on which they nightly laboured and which they could transfer to human protégés. Ewan Wentz, in the FAIRY-FAITH IN CELTIC COUNTRIES, collected a story from a Barra piper about how an apprentice boat-builder, who had picked up a fairy's girdle, was given the gift of a master's skill when he returned it to her. The gift remained even after he had told how he acquired it. One undoubted gift of the fairies was that of skill in music, and there are many stories of how the MacCrimmons, the most famous family of Scottish pipers, were given their skill by the gift of a black chanter to a despised younger son of the family. The gift was accompanied by tuition. Many songs and airs have come out of fairy hills and have survived the change into the human world.
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Equivalent, sidh (shee). The tumulus at New Grange, Ireland regarded as dwelling-place of Fairy-Folk. Some of the most beautiful of the antique Irish folk-melodies, the Coulin, are traditionally supposed to have been overheard by mortal harpers at the revels of the Fairy Folk. Conary Môr (Mor) lured by the Fairy Folk into breaking his geise; they seal all sources of water against mac Cecht; besides these events describes Rolleston Fergus mac Leda, Conan mac Morna, and Keelta and the Fairy Folk, and furthermore Gwyn ap Nudd, King of Welsh Fairy Folk (Tylwyth Teg).
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Allan Cunningham in his LIVES OF EMINENT BRITISH PAINTERS records that William Blake claimed to have seen a fairy funeral. 'Did you ever see a fairy's funeral, madam? said Blake to a lady who happened to sit next to him. 'Never, Sir!' said the lady. 'I have,' said Blake, 'but not before last night.' And he went on to tell how, in his garden, he had seen 'a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and grey grashoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared'.
Most people would deny the possibility of a fairy funeral, believing the fairies to have lives co-terminous with this earthly world, or else that they dwindle and disappear in the course of ages, like the Small People of Cornwall. Yet, here and there, people claim, like Blake, to have seen fairy funerals. One of these is preserved in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies among the fairy experiences of Walter Johnstone, one of the travelling people of Perthshire. He found a ruined house near Tom na Toul with a well near it. He was just going to dip his can into the well when he saw a light coming out of the bushes. Two wee men came out, about six inches tall, carrying a coffin between them. They were wearing bowler hats, not the 'lum hats' usually worn at Scottish funerals. Dr. T. F. G. Paterson of Armagh Museum collected a similar account from one of the old people:
A man once followed a fairy funeral. He was up late at night an' heard the convoy comin'. He slipped out an' followed them an' they disappeared into Lisletrim Fort (a triple-ringed fort near Cullyhanna). He heard the noise of them walking plain, but saw none of them.
Kirk in his incomparable work puts a period to fairy lives and also mentions funerals:
There Men travell much abroad, either presaging or aping the dismall and tragicall Actions of some amongst us; and have also many disastorous Doings of their own, as Convocations, Fighting, Gashes, Wounds, and Burialls, both in the Earth and Air. They live much longer than wee; yet die at last, or at least vanish from that State.
A little later he says: 'They are not subject to sore Sicknesses, but dwindle and decay at a certain Period, all about ane Age.'
Some people are not certain that their funerals are not part of this 'presaging or aping the dismall and tragicall Actions' of men; at least it is so in Bowker's 'Fairy Funeral', in his GOBLIN TALES OF LANCASHIRE. Two men were once walking home towards Langton village on a clear moonlight night. One was the old cow-doctor, Adam, and the other was a lively young fellow called Robin. As they came up to the church the first stroke of twelve sounded and they passed it as the chimes pealed out. A moment later they stopped, for the peal of the passing-bell began to ring. They counted the strokes, and after twenty-six they stopped - Robin was twenty-six years old. They wondered who it could be among his companions, but decided that they would know in the morning, and hurried on towards home. But as they reached the drive and lodge of the ancient abbey, the gate swung open and a little dark figure came out with a red cap on his head. He was waving his arms and singing a sweet but mournful dirge, and he was followed by a procession dressed like him which bore in the midst of it a tiny coffin with the lid pushed back so that the face was visible. The two men drew back into the hedge, but as the coffin passed old Adam leant forward, and in the moonlight saw the face of the corpse. 'Robin, mi lad,' he said, 'it's the picter o'thee as they hev i' the coffin!' Robin started forward, and saw it was indeed the miniature of his own face. The bell still tolled and the funeral cortége passed on towards the church. Robin took it for a death warning and determined to know the appointed time. Adam tried to restrain him, but he hurried after the Feeorin, and, touching the leader, he asked, trembling, 'Winnot yo' tell mi heaw lung I've to live?' At once, with a flash of lightning and a spatter of rain, the whole procession vanished, and the two men made their way homeward as best they could through wind and rain.
From that time Robin was a changed man. There was no more riot and merriment for him. His only comfort was to sit with old Adam at night and talk over what they had seen and heard. In a month's time he fell from a stack and was fatally injured.
This is the fullest account of a warning funeral, but there are reports of them in Galloway and Wales. The Welsh corpse-candles are among the Will O' The Wisp phenomena discussed by Aubrey and Sikes, but these are ascribed to the spirits of the dead rather than to the fairies.
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All the Heroic Fairies spent a great part of their time in solemn rides, and their horses, large or small according to the riders, were often described. The fairies described by Elidor were small, but noble, and they had horses and hounds proportioned to their size, the Welsh Gwragedd Annwyn rode on milk-white horses and the Fairy Rade described in the Scottish ballads was on horses of varying colours richly caparisoned with tinkling bells. The Tuatha De Danann, who were conquered and driven underground by the Milesians and who afterwards dwindled down into the Daoine Sidhe, were the very cream of the heroic fairies, and their horses were eloquently described by Lady Wilde in her ANCIENT LEGENDS OF IRELAND:
And the breed of horses they reared could not be surpassed in the world - fleet as the wind, with the arched neck and the broad chest and the quivering nostril, and the large eye that showed they were made of fire and flame, and not of dull, heavy earth. And the Tuatha made stables for them in the great caves of the hills, and they were shod with silver and golden bridles, and never a slave was allowed to ride them. A splendid sight was the cavalcade of the Tuatha-de-Danann knights. Seven-score steeds, each with a jewel on his forehead like a star, and seven-score horsemen, all the sons of kings, in their green mantles fringed with gold, and golden helmets on their head, and golden greaves on their limbs, and each knight having in his hand a golden spear.
And so they lived for a hundred years and more, for by their enchantments they could resist the power of death.
A few pages later she tells of the last of these royal steeds:
Of the great breed of splendid horses, some remained for several centuries, and were at once known by their noble shape and qualities. The last of them belonged to a great lord in Connaught, and when he died, all his effects being sold by auction, the royal steed came to the hammer, and was bought up by an emissary of the English Government, who wanted to get possession of a specimen of the magnificent ancient Irish breed, in order to have it transported to England.
But when the groom attempted to mount the high-spirited animal, it reared, and threw the base-born churl violently to the ground, killing him on the spot.
Then, fleet as the wind, the horse galloped away, and finally plunged into the lake and was seen no more. So ended the great race of the mighty Tuatha-de-Danann horses in Ireland, the like of which has never been seen since in all the world for majesty and beauty.
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The fairies have a code of morality of their own and are strict in enforcing it. We can deduce something of their nature from the degree of severity with which they punish infringements of their code. In the first place, they are a secret people and punish any attempts at spying or infringements of fairy privacy, often to the utmost of their power. In the various Fairy Ointment stories, there are varying degrees of culpability. Sometimes the midwife to the fairies touches her own eye inadvertently with a finger still smeared with the ointment, and often she is allowed the benefit of the doubt and only the fairy sight is taken from her. In the tale of CHERRY OF ZENNOR, Cherry had wilfully offended to spy on her master from jealousy and she was left the sight of her human eye and only banished from Fairyland. In the parallel story of JENNY PERMUEN, Jenny made no mention of the fairy ointment and reported herself as sent back from Fairyland when the year and a day for which she was hired was over.
No penalty except that of inability to return was imposed on them for reporting their adventures. The most severe punishment was rightly inflicted on Joan, Squire Lovell's housekeeper, in Hunt's story in POPULAR ROMANCES OF THE WEST OF ENGLAND of 'How Joan Lost the Sight of her Eye'. This was inflicted for sheer meddling. Joan was on no legitimate business, but was merely paying a friendly call on Betty Trenance, reputed to be a witch but actually a fairy. Peeping through the latch-hole before she knocked, she saw Betty anointing her children's eyes with a green ointment, which she hit carefully away before answering the door. Joan, however, contrived to get hold of the ointment, and touched her eye with it with the usual result. When she betrayed her fairy sight to Betty's husband, he not only blinded her right eye but tricked her into a ride on a devilish horse who nearly carried her into Toldava fowling pool in the company of the Devil and all his rout.
People who spied on the fairy revels or boasted of fairy favours were generally punished, sometimes with blights and illnesses, and those who stole fairy treasures did so in danger of their lives. Spies were often punished only by pinching, like Richard of Lelant, the old fisherman who saw Lelant Church lit up and climbed up to peep in at a window. Inside the church he saw the funeral procession of a fairy queen, and foolishly betrayed himself by an exclamation of surprise. At once the fairies flew past him, pricking him with sharp weapons. He only saved his life by flight (Hunt). The 'old Miser on the Fairy Gump' in Hunt's story, who tried to capture the royal dais and table at the revels on the Gump, deserved a severer punishment. Just as he raised his hat to cover the high table, a whistle rang out, a thousand cobwebs were thrown over him and he was bound to the earth, pinched, pricked and tormented till cockcrow. In the morning he hobbled down to the town, no richer than he had been, and permanently tormented by rheumatism. It must be acknowledged that he deserved it. Lack of generosity, rudeness and selfishness are all unpopular with fairies, as many traditional fairy-tales show. Gloomy fellows are disliked, and a merry heart is popular. - One of the most notable traits of the fairies is their strong interest in neatness and orderly ways. They expect to find the hearths that they visit swept clean, with fresh water set out for their use. A breach of this habit is often punished, as in the tale of the milkmaid who forgot to leave out clean water for the fairy babies and refused to get up when reminded of it. Her companion dragged herself out of bed to set the water and was rewarded with a silver sixpence, but the milkmaid was punished by seven years' painful lameness. Scols and wife-beating husbands are both likely to be punished. In short, the faults chiefly condemned by them are undue curiosity, meanness, sluttishness, illtemper and bad manners.
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