Chapter 8
A regular point of contact between humankind and the Good Folk is in their leisure activities, when they are dancing or feasting, for example. This chapter looks at these different aspects of faery culture and how we humans should best approach them.
Faery Leisure
Although I’ve just described faery crafts and building skills, our abiding image of the Good Folk is of a people living an uninterrupted life of leisure. This seems, on the whole, to be pretty accurate.
The Fae are a highly social people and many of their pastimes are participatory, whether it’s playing music, dancing, or taking part in games. The Good Folk enjoy team sports such as hurling and football and, in fact, the earliest pixie sighting in Cornwall was of a hurling match held in a cornfield at Boscastle in August 1657. The supernatural identity of the players was confirmed by their disappearance over a cliff into the sea and the fact that there was no sign of damage to the crop afterward.
Given the faeries’ contrary nature, they may sometimes react violently if they are intruded upon in these activities, but they equally may welcome humans joining in. We’ll see this particularly with musicians, but there are comparable accounts of men being asked to make up numbers in a team for a sports match.
Faery Music
The faeries’ liking for music and song is a key aspect of their pleasure-seeking nature. According to John Dunbar of Invereen in the Highlands, the faeries were “awful for music, and used to be heard often playing the bagpipes.” In the Shetland Isles the trows were renowned for their love of both music and dancing (although their dancing appeared ungainly and ludicrous to humans—they crouched and hopped about the floor).188
As mentioned already in connection with faery rings, dancing used to be regarded as the faeries’ distinctive activity—their major preoccupation. Now it’s seldom witnessed, being mentioned in only around 9 per cent of modern reports. Perhaps this is because the faeries are busy doing other things—like working—or because they have retreated from their former dance sites as we humans have got more numerous, more noisy, and more intrusive. Equally likely, as we’ll see soon, is the possibility that the Fae may simply have moved inside more convenient human buildings for their revels.
Whilst dances are seen less frequently, hearing faery music is still reported, nonetheless: it’s a feature of 16 per cent of the most recent sightings. We can seldom dance with the faeries (not least because it’s a dangerous thing to do, as it’s often the way they lull people into a false sense of security before abducting them) but we may often and more safely hear their music, which is renowned for its enchantment and otherworldliness. Where may you hear faery music and what will it sound like?
Music Hills
The Fae’s music is often heard coming from particular knolls, hills, or barrows, in which the faeries are taken to reside. This is a very common local report and it can be found all over Britain from the Faery Knowe on Skye to the “music barrows” of Southern England, for example at Bincombe Down and Culliford Tree in Dorset and at Wick Moor, near Stogursey in Somerset.
The otherworldly nature of the music nevertheless quite often gives witnesses problems trying to judge exactly where the tunes are coming from. Firsthand accounts not infrequently seem to find it hard to place the source. For example, music heard at Ditton Priors on the Clee Hills in Shropshire was “up in the air” and this wafting, immersive impression is common. Other witnesses have located the music “from the ground,” “in the air all around,” and “in the air as faint as a breath dying away and coming back again.” It might even be described as sub-audible, something you are aware of without hearing it—in fact, something that ceased to be audible as soon as you tried to focus upon it.189
Irish mystic and friend of poet W. B. Yeats Ella Young had many experiences of hearing faery music. She described a further problem with saying exactly where it came from. To her, the orchestral sound was something that was in motion; it was a “wave or gush of wind.” Fascinatingly, a witness in the Clent Hills near Birmingham during the 1960s was caught up in something similar—“a real singing whirlwind”—and another in Ireland experienced the music as sweeping around her house.190
Learning Faery Tunes
Faery musical skills—and even instruments—can be granted to fortunate humans. There are several sets of bagpipes in Scotland that are alleged to have been faery gifts.
The receipt of faery musical ability can be a blessing that makes a man and his heirs rich and famous. The favoured player might just be well paid: one Jeems o’ da Klodi on Shetland was given a bag full of threepenny coins, for example. Another Shetland fiddler on his way to perform at a wedding was waylaid by a “little grey man.” The musician said he hadn’t time to play at the trows’ dance, but was assured that, if he agreed to perform for them, he’d still get to his first appointment on time and that outstanding skill on the fiddle would run in his family for nine generations. On that basis the man agreed to go under a hill to the dance, although once there he found himself rooted to the spot and unable to stop playing until the trows freed him from their spells and delivered him to the wedding party.
Faery skills could also be a curse, too: the favoured one might die young, being taken back by the faeries to play for them, or he might lose his wits. As is always the case with faery transactions, discretion is the key. A man carried off into the air by the Shetland trows was kept by them for a whole twelve months; when he returned home, he never spoke of what he saw or heard, other than to play a tune he’d learned whilst he’d been away. Another Shetland fiddler, John Scott of Easting, so impressed the trows with his playing that he was told he would never want for money—he had simply to put his hand in his pocket and coins would be there. Eventually, he got drunk one night and spilled the beans to his drinking companions—and his endless supply of cash was gone.191
Musical skills might be willingly shared with some. A man called Fyfe from Reay in Perthshire spent many hours with the faeries, enjoying their music and honing his own skills on the bagpipes. Because of the time he spent with them, his music became imbued with a magical charm that made him much in demand at dances. Even better, Fyfe could rely upon the faeries always to carry him to his destinations, so that he was sure to arrive on time whatever the weather. Sometimes this conferring of musical ability seems almost incidental: A faery woman visited a Perthshire home and tuned the family’s bagpipes for them. She played a few tunes and then left, but the three sons of the family were endowed with great prowess as pipers thereafter.192
Conversely, talented human musicians were from time to time abducted to satisfy the powerful faery need for music and dance. Almost always they met the fate of all those who tarry in Faery. They believed that they had played for just a night, but found all transformed on their return home.193
Despite what’s been said, faery music can prove notoriously hard to remember. In his 1779 history of Aberystruth parish, the Reverend Edmund Jones reported that “everyone said [the music] was low and pleasant, but none could ever learn the tune.” On the Isle of Man, one musician had to return three times to the same spot where he’d heard faery music to be able to commit it to memory. It’s only very occasionally that humans are able to learn a faery tune and then contribute it to the mortal repertoire. One such is “Be nort da deks o’ Voe” from Shetland, but there are several such so-called “ferry tüns” from the far northern isles. Two Welsh examples are “Cân y Tylwyth Teg” (“The Faery Song”) and “Ffarwel Ned Pugh” (“Farewell to Ned Pugh”). There’s a downside to this too. Rather like the price that may be paid for having the faery musical gift, it’s said that some of those who commit faery music to memory will be otherwise addled for the rest of their lives.194
Faery Orchestras
There’s a conceit, which may be almost entirely poetic rather than being based upon experience, that faery music is produced not from instruments but by animals. Anna Bray, for example, said that the Dartmoor pixies danced to tunes played by crickets, grasshoppers, frogs, bees, and owls. This notion is predominantly part of the literary tradition of exaggerating the perceived quaintness and tininess of faeryland, but one modern experience lends substance to the idea. A woman visiting a rainforest in New South Wales during the 2000s heard “something off by the river, almost like music—but all natural sounds.” She went on: “I could tell it was the sound of crickets, the wind, the river, and frogs [but] they were all harmonized with a distinct tune.” 195
Most witnesses, however, agree that faery music is played on instruments or is sung by choirs. Irish poet and mystic George William Russell (AE) first listened to the music in the air on a hillside in County Sligo. He heard “what seemed to be the sound of bells, and was trying to understand these aerial clashings in which wind seemed to break upon wind in an ever-changing musical silvery sound.” Over the summer of 1917 and into 1918, AE’s friend, Ella Young, repeatedly heard the ceol sidhe and reported that this faery music was played by a “myriad, myriad instruments” among which she identified cymbals, bells (both silvery tinkling and deep tolling), trumpets, harps, violins, drums, pipes, organs, bagpipes, and “stricken anvils.” The very recent Faery Census has also reported music played on bells, accompanied by pipes and drums.
Interwoven with this instrumentation might be voices singing in an unknown tongue, either solo or resembling Gregorian chant. Faery author Lewis Spence once heard “faerie singing, wordless and of wonderful harmony” whilst a Cornish witness described domestic pixies singing in the evenings “like a Christmas choir.” 196
Several times, though, Ella Young was unable to compare the sounds to anything she knew from earthly ensembles: she heard “very high notes—higher than any human instrument could produce,” “something like a Jew’s harp,” and “a curious reedy instrument.” Young isn’t alone in being unable to say how the sounds were produced. On the Isle of Man in the 1720s islanders would hear “Musick, as could proceed from no earthly instruments” and a modern hearer on Iona felt that she could not ascribe anything so beautiful to an earthly source.197
Faery Scores
If it’s hard for listeners to say what the ceol sidhe is being played on, it’s unsurprising to discover that they’ve also frequently struggled to say what it sounds like. Everyone seems to be agreed that it surpasses most human compositions but saying anything more definite than that has proved difficult.
Some witnesses struggle with vague terms: “tunes not of this world, unlike anything a mortal man ever heard, being the finest, grandest and most beautiful kind.” Music that ravished those listening at Holderness in East Yorkshire was described as “delectable and harmonious”; a Lake District writer recalled “aerial music, which for rich and thrilling harmony far surpassed the most exquisite warblings of the Swedish nightingale.” In the 1880s some gypsies camping near Ditton Priors in Shropshire heard unearthly music that was “wonderful clear and sweetsome.” 198
Modern witnesses are scarcely more informative. We have impressionistic offerings such as “tiny—and soft and quick and light” or “plaintive yet joyful.” Ella Young spoke of “orchestral [music] of amazing richness and complexity.” Its melodies could be exquisite, she said, with “delicate and intricate rhythms” in a variety of tempos—sometimes like very fast reels, at others slow and wistful. On August 27, 1917, she described “a certain monotony like slow moving waves with a running melody on the crests.” Ultimately, she despaired of her descriptive abilities: it was “not music I can describe … it is beyond words.”
Comparison to other genres may be a little more informative and such descriptions as “weird folk,” Middle Eastern, medieval, and traditional Irish have all been offered. One witness even suggested “a mixture of birdsong and Celtic.” 199
What stands out most clearly, perhaps, is the otherworldly character of faery music and the range of responses it evokes. It’s not modelled on the familiar scales or time signatures nor can it conveniently be described with our conventional terms. Some people mention mysterious long chords; some hear repetitive, circular tunes; others are amazed by rich melodies. To some hearers it’s melancholy, to others joyful.
The best summary of ceol sidhe I can offer may be to say that it is lovely, complex, and immersive. What is consistent in all the witnesses’ descriptions is the wonder it evokes.
The Effect of Faery Music
Whatever its nature, the experience of faery music can be powerful, not least because it has an aura of mystery. It can have a magical or enchanting effect on listeners: Ella Young described the “sense of freedom and exultation” it gave her. Some people find it “intoxicating;” a recent Irish witness heard “Streams of music which was hypnotic, but made me feel sick!” Coleridge in his poem “The Eolian Harp” rightly described the “soft floating witchery of sound / As twilight Elfins make.” 200
The response may not be solely emotional. Some witnesses from Ireland tell stories of how, on hearing the ceol sidhe, they felt compelled to dance—and then had to continue until they dropped from sheer exhaustion. On the Isle of Man, it could have an opposite effect, freezing people and animals to the spot whilst it lasted, for periods of up to forty-five minutes.201
The Meaning of Faery Music
The music of the Good Folk is one of the ways in which their world intersects with ours—and it is possibly the most beautiful and the most tantalising of these. Hearing the music is rare, but it is an intensely affecting experience because the medium itself is so evocative. Whilst faery encounters are always astonishing, we feel better able to judge the reality of what we see and to trust the evidence of our eyes. We believe we can assess the subject of a vision to determine whether it’s potentially tangible and to estimate its height, distance, weight, and colour. What’s heard is far harder to assess and to locate with certainty. It makes us much more likely to doubt our senses. As Ella Young herself fretted—was it all in her head? Was she going mad? Readers may be reassured to read that hearing faery music is an experience that occurs often enough to be taken seriously and that part of its nature is its elusive and tantalising quality.
For all its ethereal beauty, though, our last word should be a note of caution. Faery music is notorious as one of the ways in which people are lured into faery abduction. For example, a story from St. Allen in Cornwall tells of a boy who wandered off, enticed by the sound of music in some woods, and was absent for several days in Faery. Just like faery beauty, ceol sidhe can be alluring, but we need to keep our wits about us.
Faery Food
There is considerable difference of opinion over what faeries eat, whether we would recognise their food as edible, and even whether they need to eat at all. As I’ve argued already, there’s plenty of evidence to demonstrate that the Fae are as solid and fleshly as we are and, that being the case, I feel sure that they need (and enjoy) food and drink just as much as we do.
Some sources suggest that faery food is not all it seems, though. One Perthshire woman who was abducted to Faery said that the food she was offered looked very tempting, but that when she saw through the faeries’ glamour, it was “only the refuse of the earth.” Another Scottish abductee said grace over a meal and then realised that it was nothing but horse dung. These ideas doubtless explain why faery food has a reputation for being unsatisfying and why inedible fungi are often popularly called “faery butter” and the like.202
To set against these accounts is other evidence that the faery diet is much like our own. The Fae are widely known to bake (as we’ll see) and from both the north of Scotland and (especially) from the Isle of Man come accounts of faery fishing fleets. There are also numerous stories of faeries entering human homes asking to borrow flour or oatmeal. Not only are these loans returned, but they are often repaid several-fold. This has to indicate that the faeries have their own supplies of grain and flour and (of course) that they must be storing it because they eat it.
All of these accounts show, pretty convincingly, that the faery diet is understood to be very similar indeed to the human one. That being so, how do we fit in the experiences where witnesses are served such non-food items as tree leaves to eat (as in the story of St. Collen and the Faery King)? Probably what we’re seeing here is grand displays of faery “glamour” intended to delude and entrap humans and the feasts laid out don’t represent the true nature of faery cuisine.
Vegetarian Fae
There are two very old sources that suggest that faeries avoid meat. In the early twelfth-century reports of the Green Children of Woolpit, when the faery brother and sister are first found, they are pale, their skin is tinged green, and for some time after their discovery they will only eat raw green beans, refusing offers of bread and other human food. Secondly, the writer Gerald of Wales told the story of Elidyr, who had visited faeryland in his youth. He claimed that the little people he met there “never ate flesh or fish” and instead lived upon various milk dishes, made up into junkets with saffron (a junket is a mixture of curds and cream, sweetened and flavoured).The faery preference for dairy products was often mentioned in Elizabethan folklore. There is some good evidence, then, that faeries prefer a vegetarian diet, though not a vegan one.
Overall, however, there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the sources. Elidyr also told Gerald that the tiny beings he visited kept horses and greyhounds. The latter are hunting dogs and the elves were plainly equipped for the chase. In the poem “Sir Orfeo” the hero meets the king of Faery when he is out hunting wild beasts with his hounds; the king is also said to hunt wild fowl, such as mallards, herons, and cormorants, with his falcons. The Gabriel Hounds of Lancashire are faery dogs; they are also called Gabriel Ratchets, a ratchet being a hound that hunted by scent rather than by sight. The Manx faeries too are particularly known for their love of hunting across the island.
The pursuit of all this game was presumably for some purpose other than mere sport. We have to assume that the deer, boars, and birds that were caught were all eaten and that these particular faeries were very far from veggie. The bucca living on the beach at Newlyn in West Cornwall were given a share of the catch by local fishermen and they were doubtless expected to eat those fish. The Highland water horses, the cabaillushtey and the each uisge, both carry off and consume cattle and children, as does the Welsh afanc.
What are we to conclude? The folklore evidence is not unanimous, but then it seldom is. There are different sorts of faery and each will naturally have its own tastes and preferences. Nonetheless, there is clearly a very old strand of belief that some faeries eat a limited diet excluding flesh, perhaps as an indicator of their otherness or of their sympathetic links to the natural world.
Faery Bread
The faeries are known for baking bread and cakes. According to one account, they were inexplicably noisy when doing so. So familiar is the link that certain echinoderm fossils are known as faery loaves and, if you find one, it’s said that you will never want for bread.203
Tantalisingly, one Scottish writer tells us that faery bread tastes like a wheaten loaf mixed with honey and wine and that it will last for a week at least without going stale. Cornish woman Anne Jefferies, who was imprisoned for suspected witchcraft, was fed by the faeries during her captivity and a person who tasted the bread they gave her described it as “the most delicious … I ever did eat, either before or afterward.”
Intriguing as these loaves sound, the same Scottish writer also recorded that the faeries would subsist upon silverweed roots, called brisgein. This was known as “seventh bread” but may well sound a good deal less appetising than the conventional loaf. In fact, the plant has been cultivated since prehistoric times and, in the Highlands, the crop was grown up until the potato was introduced (and was still used subsequently in lean years). The roots could be boiled, baked, or ground into flour and tasted a little like parsnips. The leaves are antiseptic and were used to treat a range of conditions. We should also bear in mind that faery food will be proportionate with its makers: from the Scottish island of Muck comes a report of a meeting between two boys and a faery family in a boat. The boys were offered some bread; the faeries were tiny and so too were their loaves, being the size of walnuts, although they tasted very good.204
The folklore confirms that the Good Folk have their own bread ovens: we’ve heard of the noise they make and that, in the north of Scotland, rain was a sign that the faeries were baking. Just as they might prefer human spinning wheels to their own, they may enter our homes at night to do their own baking. In one story from the Isle of Man, because the maid hasn’t put out any water for them, they take a drop of blood from her toe to mix their dough. They eat most of the cakes they make but conceal bits of some under the cottage thatch before they leave. The next day the girl falls ill, but a visitor who had overheard the faeries at their baking is able to cure her with some of the hidden cake crumbs.205
They have their own delectable loaves, but how do the Fae feel about human bread? On the Isle of Man, the faeries are said to object to baking after sunset, but otherwise they will help with the process so long as a piece of the dough is stuck to the kitchen wall as an offering. If such an offering isn’t made, the baker will face problems. It’s believed that one of the regular pranks of the tylwyth teg is to enter kitchens and to “robin” bread dough—that is, to make it too sticky and stringy to rise. If this happens, the solution is to sacrifice an old slipper (later we’ll see shoes being burned in Scotland too to scare off faeries). A prank of the Cornish pixy is to spoil bread in the oven, making it come out full of “pixy-spits.” 206
Evidently, the faeries have a taste for the results of human baking: this is confirmed by several stories in which Welsh lake maidens are lured to tryst with a mortal man by the offer of bread. They are very fussy about the bake of their loaves though: first the bread will be too hard, then too soft, until finally a happy medium is found and true love blossoms. In another of these Welsh stories, concerning the maiden of Llyn y Fan Fach, the man baits a fishing hook with bread in order to catch himself a faery wife. Once again, he tries first with a hunk from a well-baked loaf—and fails—and then tries with half-baked bread and lands his bride. In addition, it’s not just the quality of the bake that seems to matter: the faeries don’t like salt in their loaves. As a general rule, it’s a substance they can’t abide.207
The Welsh stories just outlined are interesting not just because of the importance of bread in them: as many readers will know, it’s dangerous to eat the food offered when in faeryland because then you will never escape; here that concept is reversed and a faery is lured into the mortal world by consuming our food.
There is something mysterious and semi-magical about bread, certainly. It can provide charmed protection for people or bestow supernatural powers, although the sort of meal used and the manner of preparation seem to vary widely. In one Scottish story a man who has stolen from the faeries is pursued by them and they cry out, “You wouldn’t be so fast if it wasn’t for the hardness of your bread.” In a similar tale, a Perthshire man was troubled by faery cattle eating his crops. He could never catch them until one day, as he futilely chased a dun cow around his land, a faery woman appeared to him and advised that he’d do better if he ate barley bannocks turned on the griddle and milk from black goats. He followed her advice, caught the faery cow and thereafter had the best milk herd in the district. The bread magic works both ways: an incident from the Hebrides involves a mermaid escaping into the sea; she’s nearly caught by a man and she tells him his failure can be ascribed to the dryness of his bread—whereas if he’d eaten porridge and milk, he’d have overtaken her.208
Bread somehow works to protect people from faery ill will. It was widely believed throughout Britain that carrying a crust was a sure way of protecting yourself from malign influences. Witness Stuart poet Robert Herrick’s rhyme:
If ye feare to be affrighted,
When ye are (by chance) benighted,
In your pocket for a trust
Carrie nothing but a Crust:
For that holy piece of Bread,
Charmes the danger, and the dread.
The verse seems to imply that, originally, people carried a piece of consecrated host, but eventually any sort of bread was thought to be just as good. Right across in Scotland oatcakes were thought to have protective powers: a bannock hung over a cottage threshold would protect a mother and her newborn child inside and burning an oatcake would drive off the faeries.
As we’ll see later, new babies are thought to be especially vulnerable to faery interference and bread products are a particularly effective way of safeguarding them. From Cornwall in South West England comes a belief that a child can be protected from faery abduction by baked goods: a mother must take a cake with her to her baby’s baptism and then give it to the first person she meets in the road. This guarantees her child’s safety from the pixies. There’s an identical practice in Sutherland in Scotland, involving oatcake and cheese, whilst on the Isle of Man the practice was to provide “blithe meat” (bread and cheese) for people who came to visit a mother and her newborn child. A portion of this would be scattered around for the unseen visitors, too—partly perhaps to win their favour as “godmothers” and partly to guard against the risk of abduction.209
The Faery in the Dairy
The faery preference for dairy products has already been mentioned and the theme was often employed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Queen Mab loved junkets, according to Milton, and Ben Jonson has her consuming cream, too. In the Scottish story of a goblin called Gilpin Horner, he’s found lost and wandering and is taken in by a farmer. When he’s eventually called home by his parents it’s quite a relief for the smallholder, because the boy consumed so much cream during his stay.
It seems that it’s not just cows’ milk that our Good Neighbours like. They also drink the milk of goats and deer, which explains why the banshee of Glen Nevis is often to be seen driving as well as milking herds of deer. So strong has been the link between faeries and the dairy (its work, as well as its products) that in Sussex the name of the local brownie, Dobbs, was invoked as part of a charm which was repeated three times to help butter to come in the churn. Milk might even have magical properties for the Fae: in the ballad of Young Tamlane part of the spell to free Tam from faery thrall is to dip him in milk.210
The Good Folk will be found haunting dairies, both as helpers and as filchers. They insist upon cleanliness and neatness, but then shamelessly skim the cream from the milk. In these circumstances, a major part of the interaction between farmers and faeries has comprised efforts to protect dairy products from theft.
A range of defensive measures were recorded, some very simple indeed. They were employed at different stages of the dairying process: you might take steps either to defend your livestock or their products. Cows can easily be protected by tying a coin to their tails; a more complex charm involves passing a hot coal over their backs and bellies. Another version of this spell involves a cat drawn around the cow. One common faery pastime was to ride both cows as well as horses at night. A witch-stone or hag-stone (a naturally holed stone) hung just above the animals in their stalls would prevent this. On Shetland it was said that if a farmer suspected that the trows were stealing milk from his cows, he should try to hear them doing it in the byre. This would bring good luck, but to actually try to spy on them as they milked would lead to ill fortune.
Once the animals had been milked, the dairy products could be protected, either directly or indirectly. In Leicestershire hanging a witch-stone over the dairy doorway once again stopped the faeries getting in and tainting the milk; usefully, it also gave more general protection against illness and warts. Twigs of rowan, bramble, or ivy placed under a milk pail could be sufficient to safeguard its contents; sprays of rowan, elm, and witch hazel were tied to churns in Herefordshire to deter the Fae and facilitate the butter making. In Worcestershire, to keep faeries away, the practice was for everyone entering the dairy to stir the cream. Finally, salt thrown in a churn will avoid any interference with the butter making process.211
Despite this list of remedies, we ought to mention that denying the faeries their dairy treats might not be wise. We’ll discuss their reaction to meanness later, but here’s a dairy based example. A Cumbrian farmer had left a churn of milk outside his cottage overnight to keep it cool. Next morning a little of the milk was missing and he guessed the faeries had filched some. Annoyed, he fetched some of the salt he kept in his cottage to ward off evil spirits and threw it into the churn. When the faeries sampled the milk the next night they were outraged by his response and retaliated by spitting it out all over his smallholding. Wherever they sprayed the salty milk, the grass died and would not regrow.212
It might be suggested that we only have ourselves to blame for these problems, as we have encouraged the Fae’s taste for our produce. Milk products were traditionally the recompense given to brownies and Pucks for their household work. For example, in the North of England brownies would expect to receive “oatcakes warm from the mill and spread with honey or cream …” In the Scottish Highlands the same arrangements were in place with local beings such as gruagachs, glaistigs, urisks, and Loireags. If a nightly share of the milking were not left out an angry response was bound to follow: the cattle and goats would be enchanted in the field and their milk taken, or the calves would be put amongst the cows overnight so that there was no milk left for the household in the morning. If the milk offering was forgotten for a second night, worse would follow: the cattle might be let loose in the cornfield or a cow might fall over a cliff. The gruagach at Balieveolan cared for the family and the neighbours’ cattle and was satisfied with a simple bowl of whey every night; however, when one evening a careless servant put out boiling hot whey, she drove the gruagach away forever.213
This situation was further aggravated and complicated by the fact that offerings of milk would be made to the faeries as a whole, seeking their favour and protection, blurring the distinction between rewards and gifts and perhaps creating a sense of entitlement to the produce amongst the Good Folk.
In many parts of Scotland, the practice was to pour milk, or the wort of beer that was being brewed, into a depression on a so-called “brownie stone” to ensure favour and protection from the household spirit. Most districts had such a stone. On the island of Colonsay milk was poured into the rock basins annually. Additionally, on the first occasion each year that the cattle were left out overnight in the summer pastures, a single cow’s whole milking was sacrificed. Similar offerings might be made when bringing the cattle in again at the end of summer, whenever a cow calved or simply when passing one of the stones with a full pail of milk. On Shetland the practice was to sprinkle every corner of a house with milk when butter was to be churned. Neglecting these offerings would ensure loss and bad luck. At least as recently as the 1950s milk was still put out overnight for the pixies on one Dartmoor farm.214
In fairness, we should round off this survey by observing that the faeries didn’t just like to consume other people’s produce—they made their own and would assist human households with their dairy production too. In the Lake District the faeries were particularly known for churning their own butter and it was said to be lucky to eat faery butter (although there may be some confusion here with the fungi called faery butter discussed earlier). Many of the domestic sprites—brownies, dobbies, and the like—are known for their particular aptitude for caring for milk cattle and undertaking dairy tasks. Also in the Lake District, tradition tells of a farm in Little Langdale where the local faeries visited and churned the household’s butter at night. Doubtless their help was welcome, but they were untidy workers, apparently scattering bits of butter in the nearby woods as they left in the morning.215
In conclusion, a good way to show respect for and encourage contact from the Good Folk is going to be offerings of milk, cream, and such. They are almost certain to be better disposed toward you and to start to frequent your home.
Extracting the Goodness
Part of the reason it has sometimes been said that faeries don’t need solid food like humans is the way they steal provisions from us. Frequently, rather than taking a whole cheese or a pail of milk, the faeries will instead extract its nutritional substance—what’s called the foison in England or the toradh in Scottish Gaelic. The advantage of this is that it looks as though nothing has been stolen, although in fact the nourishment in the food stuff is wholly gone. The Reverend Kirk described this effect with cheese, saying that what was left floated like a cork on water.
Something similar happens to food left out overnight specifically for the faeries and the advice has always been to throw it away the next day. Faery contact with food very often taints it for humans in one way or another: eating faery food in faeryland may trap you there and that malign influence can carry over to our world. In a case from Dunadd in Argyll, the Fae one night washed a stolen child in milk left out for them by a farmhouse fire. This milk was wisely thrown away by the farmer the next morning, but his sheepdog lapped it up—and instantly died.216
Conversely, it’s worth remarking here that it seems to be completely safe to eat food provided by faeries outside faeryland. As we’ll see later, they will sometimes feed those they favour or who have helped them. In such cases the gifts of faery meat and drink, consumed in the mortal world, can be accepted confidently.
Faery Sexuality
If we’re concerned with the relationship between humankind and the Good Folk, we must inevitably discuss one of its most difficult aspects—that of personal relationships between humans and faeries. Just as they share our bodily appetites for food and drink, they can be quite as keen on sex as humans. Faery lore expert Katharine Briggs described the Good Folk as “dangerously amorous”—and that’s certainly a good starting point for this discussion.217
We’ve spoken already about faeries’ physical charms and, inevitably, some men and women will want to get better acquainted with the Good Folk. This interest has been heightened by the ways we’ve chosen to present faery culture and morals in our art and literature. Faery has long been imagined as a place of uninhibited pleasure and of sexual freedom.
Many of the most famous paintings of faeryland are full of naked, writhing flesh and the Victorian painters certainly didn’t invent these ideas. Generally, the traditional view of faeries is that they are wanton and libidinous. In the medieval romance of “Sir Launfal,” the knight encounters the faery woman Tryamour reclining upon a couch in a pavilion. It’s a hot summer’s day and she’s loosened some of her clothes. Presented with this alluring prospect, Sir Launfal responds predictably and “for play, lytylle they sclepte that nygt.” The powerful effect of the faery female (at least in the minds of medieval poets) is also attested in the story of “Thomas of Erceldoune,” which is dated to around 1425. Thomas meets the faery queen, a “lady shining bright,” and is so overcome with desire for her that “seven times he lay by her.” Eventually she has to literally push him off, protesting, “Man, you like your play … let me be!”
It is not just that faery females are said to be far more attractive than human women. These physical attributes are combined with an active interest in physical contact with humans, so that there’s a long history of sexual relations between mortals and faeries. This has been known since the Middle Ages at least and several of those accused during the Scottish witchcraft trials claimed to have had faery partners, including the Queen of Elfame herself in at least one case.218 These liaisons were known still to occur in Highland Scotland into Victorian times. For example, describing Perthshire in 1810, one writer complained how “in our Highlands there be many fair ladies of this aerial order, which do often tryst with amorous youths, in the quality of succubi, or lightsome paramours or strumpets, called lean-nan-sith.”
His words echo those of Reverend Kirk, who, around 150 years earlier, had condemned the “abominable” goings on between faeries and humans. It wasn’t just elves and faeries either; men often took mermaids as their brides, whilst in the Northern Isles it was believed that all a woman had to do to attract a selkie lover was to shed seven tears into the sea at high tide.219
Visits by both male and female faery lovers were once thought to have been common but by the early nineteenth century they had grown rare, although there was a shoemaker from Tomintoul, in Moray in the Highlands, who claimed a Leanan sidhe partner. On the Isle of Man, the faery lover, the lhiannanshee, was a very strong tradition. They were believed to attach themselves to men and to haunt them constantly, whilst remaining invisible to everyone else. They would become an intolerable burden to their chosen partners and the men were frequently desperate to escape them, even emigrating to the other side of the world in an attempt to shake them off. In one case, the faery women were said to have lured all the males of the island into the sea.220
The reason for these contacts, over and above simple passion, seems to have been to widen the Fae gene pool.221 Sex with flesh and blood has practical purposes for the Fae over and above any pleasure, but although they may benefit in turn from the faery gifts of knowledge, prophecy, and good advice, it can be a risky interaction for the human partner. Fae can be possessive and even violent lovers sometimes. The relationship can be passionate to the extent of being emotionally obsessive for the human, too, and at the worst a disease called “Night Hag” was said to be the result. Relations between faery men and human women have been said to be solicitous and passionate, but mortal men might be placed under spells and put in danger of their lives by their female faery lovers. These males have been said to suffer from a frenzy and a “wandering madness,” causing them to roam restlessly during the day and to leave their homes at night to rendezvous with their Fae lovers.222
The consensus on faery beauty, coupled with consciousness of their liberated sexuality (or, at any rate, our fantasies to that effect) can impel individuals to make assumptions about the desires and behaviour of the Good Folk and to rashly seek close acquaintance with the Fae. Even today, questions of faery sexuality are a very popular search subject online, as there is a lively interest in the possibility of sexual relations with faeries. As I’ll discuss next, we should hesitate and proceed with care in such relationships, because the Good Folk’s charms are tempered by a jealous and demanding nature. As with several issues that I’ll cover later, we must be alert to the fact that what we think we know about the faeries can often be what we’ve chosen to believe about them—and, as such, possibly says more about humans than about them. They remain independent individuals, acting in accordance with their own principles and aims, and we should never forget that, especially in the case of such intimate relationships.
188. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith, 95; Saxby, Shetland Traditional Lore, 116; see chapter 11 of my British Fairies.
189. Burne, Shropshire Folklore, Part I, 58; Johnson, Seeing Fairies, 60, 231, 330 & 331; Census, nos. 384, 406 & 489.
190. Johnson, Seeing Fairies, 44 & 146.
191. Saxby, Shetland Traditional Lore, 65–66; Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney, 34.
192. Sutherland, Folklore Gleanings, 27; Murray, Tales from Highland Perthshire, no. 186.
193. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith, 40 & 103; MacGregor, c. 2.
194. See Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney, 34; Sikes, British Goblins, c. 7; Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith, 118 & 131—two examples from Man; Young & Houlbrook, Magical Folk, 131.
195. Bray, Description, 173; Census no. 455.
196. Hawker, Footprints, “Old Trevarten.”
197. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith, 61; Young & Houlbrook, Magical Folk, 173; Johnson, Seeing Fairies, 330; Hawker, Footprints.
198. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith, 124 & 24, 32, 47 & 57; Nicholson, Folklore of East Yorkshire, 82; Young & Houlbrook, Magical Folk, 81; Palmer, Folklore of Shropshire, 141.
199. Johnson, Seeing Fairies, 186; Census, nos. 73, 87, 172, 310, 331, 376 & 479.
200. Johnson, Seeing Fairies, 156, 328 & 331; Census, nos. 73, 87, 144, 172 & 310.
201. Evans-Wentz,The Fairy Faith, 69; Waldron, A Description of the Isle of Man, 37 and footnote 53.
202. Graham, Sketches Descriptive, 111; Campbell, Superstitions.
203. Bourne, Antiquitates Vulgares, 1725, c. X; Wright, Rustic Speech, 208.
204. Aitken, Forgotten Heritage 5; Cunningham, Remains, 242; Bord, Fairies, 63.
205. Evans-Wentz, Fairy Faith, 127–128.
206. Moore, Folklore of the Isle of Man, c. III; Lewes, Queer Side, 130 & 114; Davies, Folklore of West and Mid-Wales, 135; Harris, Cornish Saints and Sinners, c. 19.
207. Rhys, Celtic Folklore, 3–6 & 27–30; Roeder, Manx Folk Tales, 14.
208. MacPhail, Hebrides II, 384; Stewart, Ben Nevis, 261; Murray, Tales from Highland Perthshire, no. 167.
209. Deane & Shaw, Folklore of Cornwall, 93; Sutherland, Folklore Gleanings, 26.
210. See Appendix Two of my British Fairies.
211. Printed Extracts 3, Leicestershire, 16; Edmondston, A View of the Zetland Isles, 217; Leather, Folklore of Herefordshire, 18; Wright, Rustic Speech, 210; Cumming, Guide to the Isle of Man, 22.
212. Thomas, Cumbrian Folk Tales, 82.
213. Henderson, Notes on the Folklore, 248 (see too The Cobler of Canterburie, 1608); MacGregor, Peat Fire Flame, cc. 4 & 5; Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, 306 & 320; D. MacKenzie, Scottish Folklore & Folk Life, 218; MacDougall, Folk Tales, 217.
214. Browne, History of the Highlands, vol. 1, 106 & 113; Martin, A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, 391; Grieve, Colonsay and Oronsay, 177; Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, 530; MacGregor, Peat Fire Flame, c.4; County Folklore vol. 3, 47; Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney, 40; Addy, Household Tales, 141; Brand, A Description of Zetland, 169; R. St. Leger Gordon, The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor, 21.
215. Briggs, Remains, 223; H. Cowper, Hawkshead, 308; Hodgson, “On some surviving fairies,” Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, vol. 1, 116.
216. Pegg, Argyll Folk Tales, 35.
217. Briggs, “English fairies,” Folklore, vol. 68 (1957), 274.
218. Browne, History of the Highlands, vol. 1, 108; Metrical Chronicle, 196.
219. Graham, Sketches Descriptive of Picturesque Scenery, 275; Kirk, Secret Commonwealth, c. 11.
220. Hobbes, Leviathan, 436; Grant Stewart, Popular Superstitions, 103–105; I. H. Leney, Shadowland in Ellan Vannin.
221. Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, 534.
222. See Robert Amin, The Valiant Welshman, 1615, Act II, scene 5; Reginald Scot, A Discourse Concerning the Nature and Substance of Devils and Spirits, 1665, Book II, c. 4, 14; J. G. Campbell, c. 1.