Fairies

A Dangerous History

Richard Sugg

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781789141207, 9781780238999
• eBook ISBN: 9781780239422
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Don't be fooled by Tinkerbell and her pixie dust—the real fairies were dangerous.In the late seventeenth century, they could still scare people to death. Little wonder, as they were thought to be descended from the Fallen Angels and to have the power to destroy the world itself. Despite their modern image as gauzy playmates, fairies caused ordinary people to flee their homes out of fear, to revere fairy trees and paths, and to abuse or even kill infants or adults held to be fairy changelings. Such beliefs, along with some remarkably detailed sightings, lingered on in places well into the twentieth century. Often associated with witchcraft and black magic, fairies were also closely involved with reports of ghosts and poltergeists. In literature and art, the fairies still retained this edge of danger. From the wild magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream, through the dark glamour of Keats, Christina Rosetti's improbably erotic poem "Goblin Market, " or the paintings inspired by opium dreams, the amoral otherness of the fairies ran side-by-side with the newly delicate or feminized creations of the Victorian world. In the past thirty years, the enduring link between fairies and nature has been robustly exploited by eco-warriors and conservationists, from Ireland to Iceland. As changeable as changelings themselves, fairies have transformed over time like no other supernatural beings. And in this book, Richard Sugg tells the story of how the fairies went from terror to Tink.

Three

Fairy Dangers

‘KILLER FAIRIES CAUSED FOUR deaths.’ So ran a headline in The Sun on 30 November 2006. It was true: they had – not, admittedly, in 2006, but some time between 1656 and 1663, in Lamplugh, Cumbria, where archivist Anne Rowe had recently unearthed a list of deaths and their causes. As Lesley Park, at the Whitehaven Archive, kindly confirmed for me, this list included an entry reading, ‘Frighted to death by fairies . . . 4’. With no more detail than this, we can already infer that fairies, in this context, were sinister enough to be blamed for mysterious deaths. We can also add that, well into the nineteenth century, many Britons died of their fear of ghosts, while across the world the fear of vampires, witches or black magic has quite literally scared innumerable people to death.

Come 2006, Rowe’s find shot into the mainstream press precisely because the idea was so delightfully ludicrous. Who, after all, could possibly be scared of fairies? The answer, for most of history, was in fact: almost anyone. Fairies were dangerous. Not to believe in them was dangerous. Not to respect them or take them seriously was dangerous – hence all the carefully euphemistic or indirect names one used in speaking of them, from ‘the Gentry’ to ‘the Good People’, ‘Themselves’, ‘the fair folk’ and ‘the people of peace’ through to the charming Welsh phrase bendith û mamme, or ‘such as have deserved their mother’s blessing’. Fairies stole your children. They made you or your animals sick, sometimes unto death. They could draw the life, or essence, out of anything, from milk or butter through to people. Their powers, as we have seen, were almost limitless, not only demonic but even godlike in scale and scope.

Fairies and Witches

While ordinary people still believed this less than a century ago, the educated had also believed it in the era of the witch persecutions. Witches did these kinds of thing, and fairies or fairyland were quite often referenced in their trials. Although Joan of Arc was tried as a heretic, rather than a witch, the latter association naturally clung to such an unusual woman, and it is notable that in 1431 her interrogators took an interest in the ‘fairy tree’ around which Joan had played in her childhood in Domrémy. In the Protestant camp, Calvin later emphasized how ‘the Devil works strange illusions by fairies and satyrs’. In early modern Sicily one distinct type of witch was the female ‘fairy doctor’, the phrase donna di fuori (‘woman from outside’) meaning either ‘fairy’ or ‘fairy doctor’. Here Inquisitors encouraged people, including suspected witches, to equate fairy and witch beliefs. In 1587 they were especially interested in one Laura di Pavia, a poor fisherman’s wife who claimed to have flown to fairyland in Benevento, Kingdom of Naples.

In many cases, educated witch-believers saw fairies and fairyland as sources of dark power for witches. Lizanne Henderson lists 38 Scottish witch trials (1572–1716) featuring references to fairy beliefs, including that of Isobel Strathaquin (Aberdeen, 1597), accused of using skills which she ‘learnt . . . of an elf-man who lay with her’. At the 1616 trial of Katherine Caray the accused spoke of meeting not only ‘a great number of fairy men’ on the Caithness hills at sunset, but ‘a master man’ – a figure which in this context could have been seen as ‘the King of the Fairies’ or ‘the Prince of Darkness’. After a Scottish girl, Christian Shaw, suffered hysterical fits in 1696, the ensuing trial featured a veritable cauldron of lurid evidence, from a mysterious black man with cold hands through to the eating of ‘a piece of unchristened child’s liver’, and a charm of blood and stones used by one Margaret Fulton, a reputed witch whose ‘husband had brought her back from the fairies’.

One particular case of demonized fairies is so intriguing that it merits a little space to itself. Its protagonist was Ann Jefferies, a maidservant of the Pitt family at St Teath, Cornwall. In 1645, aged nineteen, Ann was ‘one day knitting in an arbour in our garden’ when ‘there came over the garden hedge to her six persons of a small stature, all clothed in green, which she called fairies: upon which she was so frighted, that she fell into a kind of a convulsion-fit.’ So related the bookseller and printer Moses Pitt fifty years later, having been six at the time of Ann’s encounter.

What followed looks in many ways like the career of a fairy doctor. Ann seemed to suffer some kind of neurosis about food and allegedly took none from the family for several months, claiming that the fairies themselves fed her. Ann presently cured Mrs Pitt’s leg after a bad fall merely by stroking it, and soon became so famous that numerous people flocked to the house for cures from as far south as Land’s End, and as far north as London. All cures seemed to be done purely by touch, without medicines. Ann showed psychic ability, knowing of her visitors before they arrived. Moses himself never saw the fairies but his mother and sister both did.

This case is already interesting for the way that it echoes those of other fairy doctors, despite the Pitt family (and other affluent patients from London) having no concept of such figures. The element of danger initially seems brief, being limited to Ann’s fear at the first encounter. But presently local ministers began to insist that the fairies were ‘evil spirits’ and that the whole affair was ‘a delusion of the Devil’. A warrant appeared; Pitt’s family and Ann were questioned by local authorities; and magistrate John Tregeagle had Ann locked up – first in Bodmin Jail, and next in his own house, where he kept her without food. Although witchcraft was not explicitly mentioned, it is hard not to suspect that this was on people’s minds. The instability of the Civil War may have further aggravated such fears: the female prophet Anna Trapnel had sparked controversy in January 1645, and Sarah Wight had a similar effect in the weeks after February 1647.

Like witches, fairies were powerful, uncanny and unpredictable. And like witches, or vampires, or any of the world’s numerous magical figures, fairies were scapegoats. They could be blamed for almost anything, from human deaths through to mass famine. In one sense, the fairy as scapegoat was potentially a good thing. For fairies, real or not, could not be harmed. Women taken for witches certainly could be, and were – and after official persecution ended there were hundreds of serious vigilante assaults on them throughout Britain, right through to the end of the nineteenth century. In reality, however, fairy scapegoats did produce a great deal of human suffering. The problem, here, was what people did to real human beings who were believed to be fairy changelings.

Changelings

In August 1909 an old woman of Donegal, Annie McIntire, applied for a pension. She told the Pension Committee that although ‘she did not know the number of her years’, she ‘remembered being stolen by the “wee people” (fairies) on Halloween Night, 1839’. Was she certain of this?

‘Yes, by good luck my brother happened to be coming home from Carndonagh that night, and heard the fairies singing and saw them dancing round me in the wood at Carrowkeel. He had a book with him, and he threw it in among them. They then ran away.’ The applicant added that the people celebrated the event by great feasting and drinking. The committee decided to grant her a pension.

Whatever actually happened that Halloween night, McIntire clearly believed her version until the end of her days. So, too, would many of those around her, young or old. For everyone knew that fairies stole children.

More broadly, fairies again resembled vampires or witches in that all three, very basically, attacked life. The latter pair could suck out your blood, soul or breath, or extract the essence from food. Much later, that iconic Other of our own times, the alien abductor, updated this basic assault with clinical probings or the removal of human eggs or sperm. In the pre-scientific cultures of the fairy or the witch, however, the most potent emblem of life was simply one’s own baby or child.

One ironic result of this was that, for most of history, no child was delighted by fairies. Old people in Cornwall told Evans-Wentz:

if we as children did anything wrong, the old folks would say to us, ‘The piskies will carry you away if you do that again.’ . . . In Tintagel I used to sit round the fire at night and hear old women tell so much about piskies and ghosts that I was then afraid to go out of doors after darkness had fallen.

At Cwmcastellfach farm in Wales a seventy-year-old man told Evans-Wentz that ‘in his childhood days a great dread of the fairies occupied the heart of every child. They were considered to be evil spirits who visited our world at night.’ Even in the less typically fairy-haunted flats of Norfolk, young children growing up around the First World War were told, ‘if naughty . . . that the “hightie sprite” was at the bottom of the garden and would get them’. On the whole, this distinctive East Anglian spirit evoked far less terror than Celtic fairies. There again, one 1980s informant recalled it as ‘a black bat-like figure, man-size, hovering silently in the twilight, waiting to snatch away disobedient children’. While many boys and girls were being enchanted by Rose Fyleman’s ‘fairies at the bottom of our garden’, others still feared vampiric kidnappers at the bottom of theirs.

Writing in 1960, the Dutch scholar Jacoba Hooykaas found child-stealing fairy or elf types were feared in Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Moravia, Greece, Lithuania, Bohemia and Hungary, with a modern-day variant in Bali. In Celtic territories, fairies stole babies and children – especially boys, and especially those with blue eyes and fair hair – leaving fairy substitutes in their place. Having identified such a switch, people did everything they could to make the fairies reverse it. To the end of the nineteenth century, and probably later, such children were ritually abused by their own parents to this end. Immersed in rivers or placed at the margin of coastal tides, stood on hot coals or hung over fires, exposed in freezing weather, bathed in poisonous foxglove essence, beaten, threatened and subjected to forms of exorcism, these babies and children sometimes survived, sometimes not. Ironically, part of the logic of this treatment was the sense that the fairies cared enough about their offspring to rescue them from such abuses and restore one’s child in the process. Even as they tormented these supposed changelings, parents were projecting their own familial love onto fairyland.

Let us imagine a large rural family in which an initially normal, healthy new baby presently begins to seem suspect. He cries almost incessantly, fails to grow, walk or talk, has oddly wizened features and is constantly hungry. At one very basic level, a child continually crying and demanding food, and unable to work like its six- or seven-year-old peers, is a liability in such circumstances. But these problems almost certainly took second place to the real and frightening belief that it was not yours, and that your child had been stolen. Hard as it now is to credit, parents in such cases very probably felt just as distraught as the modern mothers and fathers making television appeals about their missing or abducted children.

While it was clear to educated Victorians that many changelings were disabled children, much more precise clinical parallels were detailed in 1988 by the interdisciplinary scholar Susan Schoon Eberly. The case given above would fit especially well with a genetic disorder affecting metabolism, phenylketonuria (PKU). This and other similar conditions predominate among male children of Irish and English descent. Even brief references from fairy believers give clues to these disorders, talking of children like ‘old men’, perhaps suffering from progeria. Obvious physical deformity, such as the oversized heads of hydrocephalus, or ‘water on the brain’, would be singled out; yet so too might the pretty, blue-eyed, snub-nosed, ‘elfin’ children afflicted with Williams syndrome. Here, as in every magical culture the world over, it was never a good idea to stand out. Eberly also adds that certain of these conditions only manifested some time after birth. This, surely, was the smoking fairy gun: you had known your own baby, and this, now, was not him. All of this painstaking detective work can, in one sense, be collapsed into three letters: ‘oaf ’, a word broadly cognate with ‘elf ’, once meant not a clumsy or stupid person, but, literally, a changeling.

Plain and axiomatic as the real medical causes now seem to us, the majority view, from the ancient Romans to the Edwardian Celts, was intensely superstitious. When Martin Luther recommended drowning a changeling, it was because the child’s appearance showed it to have no soul. In the seventeenth century, even the most rational Christians used ‘changeling’ as a loose synonym for the mentally disabled, with dramatist Elkanah Settle echoing Luther when he talked, in 1694, of ‘some coarse half-souled fairy changeling’. The relatively enlightened physician and philosopher John Locke probably did not believe in fairies, yet did speculate at great length on the souls of the mentally disabled, and whether or not they should be classed as a different species.

With these kinds of attitudes lodged at the heart of Christian and proto-scientific elites in the early modern period, what could changelings expect from true fairy believers? In all households, there were routine precautions aimed to prevent child theft. A very common one involved putting fire tongs over a cradle, because of the fairies’ well-known antipathy to iron. As in McIntire’s case, books also had power over them, and religious ones especially – hence the placing of a Bible or prayer book under a child’s pillow. In Ireland into the 1930s, babies were not believed safe from fairies until they (the babies) had sneezed, so that many infants had pepper thrust under their noses minutes after birth. In Connemara at the same time people still dressed boys and girls alike in red flannel petticoats until the age of twelve, a disguise used to trick those fairies who liked to steal boys in particular.

If such measures failed, the changeling met with violence – this often being advised or performed by the local fairy doctor. In some cases, such rituals were used on actual sick children thought to be ‘fairy-struck’ – though, as we will see, they too could be seen as in danger of abduction. Carole Silver cites changelings killed by foxglove baths in Wales in 1857, and in Donegal in the 1870s and 1890s. Eberly tells of a Scottish case, in Caerlaverock, where the ceaselessly yelling and ill-tempered baby was thrown onto hot coals. In 1952 the Australian-born classical scholar Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) recalled how,

in Ireland, in my own lifetime, a child, who was for some reason reputed to be a changeling, was beaten and burned with irons, the mother being locked out of the room while the invading fairy was exorcised, though unfortunately the child died in the process.

This killing does not seem to have been prosecuted, and many of those which escaped public or legal notice must now have been lost to us. This was nearly the case after the tragic death of a nine-year-old boy, son of Kilkenny labourer Patrick Kearns. Late at night on 7 April 1856, a police patrol met the Kearnses taking their son’s body to an unused burial ground, and insisted on examining him. Thus, instead of an unknown secret burial, there came to light the tale of how the child, confined to bed for three weeks past, was judged to be suffering from a ‘fairy-blast’. Although he was not himself a changeling, it was said that he was ‘being gradually carried off by the fairies’; if he had died naturally it may have been believed that They had taken him. Versions of this affair vary. But it seems that a man called Thomas Donovan, assisted by Patrick Murphy, attempted a ritual test, giving the boy water and getting him to cough. When the boy could not cough, he was dragged violently out of the house and around the yard, strangled and badly beaten. He died early the next morning from his injuries.

Some accounts have Donovan as the ‘fairy doctor’ making the initial diagnosis; others mention an unnamed ‘wise woman’ as doing so. Although one report has Patrick Kearns apparently trying to rescue his son from Donovan, the versions which claim the parents to have agreed with the procedure, even after the boy’s death, match other known cases better. Interestingly, during the trial, the judge briefly mentioned delusions about fairies, emphasizing that these could in no way absolve Donovan (Murphy having by now fled to America). A QC, meanwhile, could see no motive for the crime, and wrongly inferred that perhaps there had been some delusion about the boy being ‘possessed by the Devil’. This already shows the gulf between educated and popul...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• One Origins, Appearance, Locations
• Two Sightings, Meetings, Signs
• Three Fairy Dangers
• Four Literature and Art
• Five Fairy Magic: 1800 to the Present
• Conclusion: The Green Mist
• SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX