Chapter 12
There is a very particular form of perilous contact with the Good Folk that must be examined separately, which is the taking of adults, children, and babies from the human world. The risk of abduction has been a source of deep anxiety for people for many centuries, but the real interest of this subject is what it has to tell us about the Fae: about their motivations, their methods, and the ways in which they may be overcome and the abductee rescued. The tenor of these accounts is of a society besieged: humans face constant alert hostility and must perpetually be on their guard. I’ve stressed before the constant proximity of the Good Folk and their eavesdropping proclivities. This perception of them as always watchful, always waiting to pounce, adds a sinister aspect to our relationship.
Taking Adults and Children
The faeries are known for their propensity to steal people away. This occurs far more often than the very occasional capture of a faery by a human. It is without doubt the most fraught part of our interaction with the Fae and, as such, the most revealing.
The fate of the abductee varies. Some stay in Faery forever; some are held for a term of years, and are then released, and some provide a service (for example musicians and midwives) but are then allowed to go home. Even then, the returnees may not find that the world they return to has changed—or that they have changed.
Who’s Taken and Why?
Adults may be taken for their skills—especially if they are talented fiddlers or pipers. Women are frequently taken as nursemaids: it seems human milk is very beneficial to supernatural infants and that faery women produce little of their own. In consequence, mothers recently delivered of their babies who have not yet been “churched” have always been considered especially vulnerable. By way of contrast, it’s interesting to note that human midwives and nurses will almost always be dealt with on a temporary and commercial basis: they will be taken to the faery hill when their help is required but will be returned home once the baby is safely delivered (and will suffer no ill effects from any differential passage of time).
Children seem to be abducted more frequently than adults, most especially boys. This is said to be because of a faery belief that such a mortal infant, if brought up and indoctrinated in the faery ways, may become the faeries’ champion on reaching adulthood and then lead the Fae hosts to victory against humans.320 Some children are simply wanted as playmates for faery offspring. As I’ve already mentioned, and as will be clear from these stories, these stolen children will be well looked after in Faery. Nonetheless, mortal families would still dread the theft of their offspring and go to considerable lengths to protect them, such as dressing boys as girls as a way of disguising them from the watchful Fae. In one interesting Scottish story, a girl used to regularly play with the faeries under the Hill of Tulach at Monzie. One day the faeries cut a lock of her hair and told her that next time she visited she would stay with them forever. The girl informed her mother what had happened and the woman immediately took various (unspecified) magical precautions and never let her daughter out to play again.321
Some abductions are only temporary and appear much more like what we’d now term a “possession.” In one Shetland story two children appear at the Yule revels; they dance with unnatural skill yet have staring eyes and fixed grins. When their unsuspecting mother sees them there, she utters a blessing which causes them to vanish. After a search, they’re found dead in the snowdrifts the next day. The mother had forgotten to bless the boys before going out for the night and, thus unprotected, they were left vulnerable when the trows came looking for a human form to use so that they could join in with the dancing. This seems a very harsh and utilitarian exploitation of the infants, using their bodies up and then casting them off, but it typifies the faery attitude in many such circumstances.322
Nonetheless, abductions don’t always seem forceful or against the human’s will. It is not uncommon for a person to be lured into the faeries’ abode under the pretence of being invited in as a guest. The visitor will be treated well and offered food and drink; accepting this hospitality is the dangerous thing. Once you’ve partaken of faery fare, you’re trapped with them for seven years at least. If you’re on your guard and refuse what’s offered, you may well be lucky and find yourself released. Enticing men and women to join the faeries’ dancing is the other very well-known means of entrapment. Other traps have been tried: in one reported case the Fae attempted to lure a farmer’s sons away from their work thrashing grain with invitations to play with them, and a poem describes how the faeries tried to persuade a farmer to accept the honour of milking the faery queen’s cow. The man was suspicious of their offer and refused to go with them, which was undoubtedly wise: the faeries want humans not primarily for their company but because they can provide some sort of service. Women, for example, often end up seemingly enslaved and responsible for cooking and cleaning for the whole faery community. In fact, the faeries’ general preference in the older stories for females and children probably reflects the fact that they were known to be the ones who had to do most of the household chores in the human world. I guess that the Fae attitude was that these groups could therefore fairly easily be compelled to suffer the drudgery in Faery too, freeing their captors for more pleasurable activities, such as feasting, dancing, and playing pranks on humans.323
Faery Host
There’s a particular form of abduction that is especially prevalent in the Scottish Highlands, which is for a person to be snatched up and carried along with the sluaghsith (slooashee), the faery host. This flock of spirits is believed to fly about the night sky “like starlings,” fighting battles between themselves and injuring men, women, and beasts on the ground.
The host rides over the countryside and even over the sea into foreign lands. Sometimes humans are invited to journey with them; sometimes they overhear the magic words that launch the faeries into the air and travel with them that way; sometimes they are abducted. This is a temporary form of taking, although it may happen repeatedly to the same individual. For example, I mentioned earlier a man trapped on cliffs on the island of Barra who wished to be saved and who was lifted to safety by the faeries; the price he paid for his rescue was to be snatched up at any time of day or night to travel with them.324
The sluagh may travel high above the clouds or they may move at ground level as a whirlwind of dust. The trips may be for pure pleasure, to visit inns or to raid wine cellars, or they may have a more malign purpose, quite often to shoot elf bolts at people and their livestock. It’s said that the host themselves can’t discharge these arrows, which is why they capture humans to take along with them.325
One way of rescuing a person carried off like this is to throw a piece of iron or handful of earth into the whirlwind; instantly, the victim is set free. In an interesting Cornish variant upon this phenomenon, a whirlwind was used to blind a mother to the taking of her baby and its substitution with a wizened old changeling.326
The actual experience of travel with the sluagh can be unpleasant. Not only are you suddenly snatched away, you may fly at terrifying height or so low to the ground that you’re buffeted by bushes and trees. The Reverend Jones in South Wales told of a man who was carried off one night and spent his time being dragged through thorns and briars. Part of the time he was insensible and he came back looking sick with exhaustion and scared.327
Protecting Adults against Abduction
Over the centuries, people have developed a range of tried and tested methods to repel the faeries and to prevent abductions. All of these are more or less magical and there is considerable crossover between this section and some of the matters discussed in the next chapter.
Amongst the simple and effective protections are
• blessing yourself or someone else with a Christian invocation scattering holy water around a property;
• carrying a Bible—or even a single page from one debating with the faery who’s threatening you and outwitting its magic with your superior wits. In one Scottish faery song the faery thief tries to persuade a young mother that her child is sickly and would be better off living on the moors tending the faeries’ sheep and cattle; she counters every argument with its opposite and thereby saves the boy; 328
• wearing or carrying lucky charms. These have included a bone taken from a sheep’s head and worn as an amulet, an iron knife or a piece of torch fir. Dressing children in the morning whilst holding them upside down (easier said than done), tying a red thread around their necks, or giving them a rowan cross to wear are all effective means of protecting them exploiting the power of the herb called mothan (pearlwort). In the Scottish Highlands, if a cow grazed on this plant, its magical properties would infuse the milk. If that milk was then made into cheese, anyone who ate the cheese would gain protection from the faeries, as would all their property; 329 and
• protecting yourself with burnt items. This was especially effective. At New Year the Highland practice was to burn a special strip of skin cut from the chest of a sheep slaughtered over the Christmas period. It had to be oval in shape and could not be removed with a knife. The head of each household would set it alight and then pass it around the family members sunwise, getting each to smell the fumes in turn. If it went out, it was bad luck for whomever happened to be holding it. Burnt hide from the neck of a cow was equally protective and beating a cow hide on New Year’s Eve also helped drive the faeries away from the farmstead. Lastly, if you’re out and about and meet with a faery whom you fear has designs against you, drawing a circle around yourself and declaring “God be about me” or lying down and sticking a knife in the ground at your head.330
On Shetland, if a child began to “dwine,” to sicken, and appeared to be in imminent danger of being “trow-taken,” there was a special procedure to protect it. This was a meal composed of “nine women’s meat,” which involved the mother visiting nine neighbours whose firstborn children were sons and begging from each of them three items as ingredients for the dish. If the child didn’t recover after being fed this mixture, nothing more could be done; it was said that “the grey men’s web was about the bairn,” meaning that the infant would inevitably be taken. A comparable treatment from the east coast of Scotland involved families cutting oak and ivy branches in March. These faery plants were woven into garlands and preserved until the autumn. If anyone in the family started to look lean or like they were pining away, they would be passed three times through the garland.331
These precautions may be effective, but bear in mind that the Good Folk won’t necessarily react well to their plans being thwarted. Taeder, a Shetland man, had just escorted the midwife home and was returning to his wife and newborn child when he saw the trows approaching his cottage. He managed to get ahead of them and placed a razor blade before his door, preventing the abduction of his family. This success notwithstanding, the next day he found the blade broken on the path and his best cow gone. Another Shetland man who managed to save his brother’s wife and child from abduction later lost one of his own sons instead.332
Rescuing Abductees
If the preventative measures don’t work, all is not lost. In fact, releasing a captive from faery thrall can be often achieved by the same means as would protect someone in advance. For instance, blessing a taken person will instantly break the spell placed over them. Usually, however, rather more effort is needed.
Persons lured into faery dances can only be freed again a year and a day later and that by means of reaching into the circle, where they will still be found dancing. The dancer may then be dragged out or may simply be touched with a long stick made of that efficacious wood, rowan (prencriafol in Welsh). It’s further believed in Wales that, even after the rescue has been successful, the recovered person still needs to be watched. Cold iron should not be allowed to touch their skin, otherwise they may become invisible and may be taken again. As an illustration, a Welsh farm girl taken for a year and a day by the faeries was rescued from their dance and for a while seemed to be her old self once more. One day, however, she was helping to saddle a horse when the metal bit touched her hand; she instantly disappeared and was never seen again. A belief related to this was that those who have willingly partaken of faery food are able to return to their earthly homes after seven years but, nonetheless, they will be reclaimed by the faeries and disappear forever after another seven years.333
Sometimes quite complex rituals are needed to free a person who’s been taken. A very good illustration of this is a story from Stanhope in Northumberland. A little girl had been picking primroses by the side of the River Wear. This was a known faery haunt and the flowers, being yellow, were known faery blooms, so her father rightly feared that she might very soon be taken. He sought the advice of a local wise woman who counselled him to defend his home by making sure everything was completely silent. He locked up all his livestock and stopped all the clocks but he overlooked a little dog that slept on the bed with his daughter. It barked when the faeries arrived and, as a result, the girl was abducted. To recover her, the father had to go to the faeries’ caves holding a sprig of rowan and bearing three gifts for them: a light that shone without burning (he took a glow worm), an animal that had no bones (he took an unhatched egg), and a limb shed without the loss of a drop of blood (he took a tail shed by a lizard). The faeries had no option then but to free the girl. A similar rescue in Scotland required a man to put three knots in his wife’s bridal shawl before going to the faery knoll to recover her and their child.334
Apparently, some captives are able to negotiate their way out of Faery. In one Scottish story a nursing mother had been taken but she was able to escape by agreeing to give the faeries the family’s best milking mare. It was eventually returned to the owners when the faeries had no further use for it, but it came back looking very lean.335
Lastly, there are a few Scottish stories of abducted wives that are interesting for the fact that the husband doesn’t recover the woman. Curiously, abductees often seem to be able to come back to ask their family for help and to give instructions on how they may be saved. Frequently this rescue will involve throwing an item into the faery rade as it passes and claiming the victim (faeries are unable to refuse this demand for an exchange, regardless of what’s being swapped, so a cap will often save a captive). However, in the case of failed rescues, fear generally seems to inhibit the husband. In one case the elders of his church advised the man against recovering his wife as she had been in the land of the dead and would never be accepted again by the community. You can see the wisdom of this advice, but you also can’t help wondering if sometimes the man wasn’t secretly glad to be rid of his spouse. In a few of the stories an added complication is that the husband has remarried in the interim. Often, he genuinely believed that his spouse was dead, because he has buried a “stock” in the form of his wife’s corpse. In a few cases, you suspect he may not regret his restored bachelor status. For sure, in the last case described, after the husband has failed three times to rescue her, the aggrieved wife reappears and curses him so that his luck fails, all his cattle die, and he has to surrender his farm.336
Taking Cattle
We know already how partial faeries are to milk products. They will persistently steal from the dairy and they may also take the milk cattle themselves. How this might be done is illustrated by an incident from Shetland. A man out early one day saw two “grey men” approaching a cow lying down in a field. They walked up to it and then ran away from it backward; the cow immediately stood up and followed them to the limit of its tether. It died later that day, a clear sign that the trows had abducted it.
On the assumption that faeries are averse to Christian religion, making a habit of regularly blessing your livestock has been recommended as a sure way of protecting them.337 Many have felt safer employing more elaborate preventative measures, though, and the treatments mentioned include
• wrapping a page from the Bible around a cow’s horn;
• giving the cattle water in which an elf shot (a flint arrow head), a crystal gem, or an “adder stone”—that is, a stone with a natural hole through it—has been dipped;
• using iron tethers for the cattle in the byre;
• mixing “dirk grass” into their bedding (contact with this plant defeats the Fae);
• feeding the cattle “mothan” (pearlwort)—as seen earlier, eating this herb protects the cow as well as anyone consuming its milk; and
• drawing a cat or a hot coal the length of the back and around the belly of a calved cow.338
Other chattels might also be pilfered by the Good Folk. It was believed that “adder stones” were also a cure for whooping cough and were valued accordingly; one recorded example was kept in an iron box to protect it from the faeries, though whether this was to stop them taking it or from damaging its healing properties (or even both) is not entirely clear.339
Stocks and Substitutes
The Fae often like to cover their tracks when making off with living people
and livestock. The question of living changelings exchanged for human babies will be discussed in the next section; here we’re concerned with inanimate decoys.
In place of an adult a so-called wooden “stock” might be left, made from a piece of timber such as alder or moss oak; the trows of Shetland and Orkney were renowned for their particular skills in this malign craft. In one account from New Deer in North East Scotland a man overheard the faeries discussing the stock they were making in the likeness of the local blacksmith’s wife. He immediately ran to the couple’s house and blessed the woman. A thump was heard outside and, when they looked, a piece of bog fir in her rough likeness was discovered. A cabbage stalk or ragwort stem might be left in place of a child.340
A story from Craignish in the Western Highlands encapsulates many of our themes. A shepherd’s wife who had gone out to tend his flock was found dead on the moor, her body unmarked. A week after the funeral the man came home to his children to be told that their mother had been with them during the day and had told them to let him know that she was alive and well, having been taken by the faeries, and that only a stock had been buried. If he could have her coffin disinterred, only a dry leaf would be found inside it. The husband sought the advice of his local minister, who told the shepherd to pay no attention to such nonsense. A few days later, both the priest and his pony were found dead out on the moor. This may have been the revenge of the frustrated wife or of the faeries, whose existence and powers had been doubted.
Not just whole people might be taken. In Shetland it’s thought that if a person is paralysed or loses the use of a limb, this is because the faeries have taken the good member and have left a log behind. The lack of feeling in the limb is demonstration of its substitution. By way of example, a tailor sleeping in a cottage one night was awoken from his slumbers by a faery dance taking place in the main room of the house. He could not restrain himself from saying a blessing—at which point the revel vanished, but not before one faery woman had touched his toe, leaving it numbed for the rest of his days.341
Occasionally it is not an animated log that is left behind, but a faery impersonator. A couple lived at Braemore in the far north of Scotland. One day the wife went out visiting and, on her return, didn’t seem quite the same as she had been. She did however become more efficient and productive in her domestic chores, an improved state of affairs which continued for a year until she suddenly fell sick and died. After another six years the original wife returned, believing herself to have merely been absent for the space of one dance under a faery hill. It was clear that, to conceal the abduction for a while, a faery woman had taken her place, although it seems that the faeries can only live in human form for a year at the most. This substitute was a kind of changeling for an adult, but a lot more agreeable than the usual infant kind (see next section).342
In the case of cattle, the faeries will always leave something resembling it in its place. This is often a slaughtered cow’s hide stuffed to look something like the stolen live beast. Sometimes, rather like a changeling, the hide contains an old faery. To the farmer, the animal will appear to have taken ill. It will lie immobile and won’t fatten or produce milk but it will still display a ravenous appetite. Somewhat akin to these incidents are the stories in which the faeries are seen to slaughter and eat a prize cow. They save the hide and the bones, though, and at the end of the feast bundle them all up together and bring the cow back to life, as healthy and whole as it was.343
Changelings
This section considers the theft of very young children and babies and their substitution with a faery—termed “the changeling.” The changeling phenomenon is a particularly strong feature of faery belief: “among the wicked propensities of the faeries is their inclination to steal children, in which they display particular sagacity,” as one authority put it.344 Whilst a healthy human infant is removed, an old or infirm faery seems always to be left in its place. This contrasts with the situation just described, where an adult woman was replaced by a faery who undertook, and even performed better at, her chores—and this with the ostensible aim of concealing the substitution. In changeling cases, no effort is made to disguise what’s been done.
In the case of children, it appears that the Fae anticipate reciprocity from humans and so will leave one of their own behind in exchange for the stolen child. The process is therefore a mutual, if involuntary, exchange of care.
Although nowadays we have developed a generally beneficent and indulgent view of pixies, it’s fascinating to learn that in the past they were regarded as being amongst the worst culprits when it came to stealing children. “Devonshire is, above all other lands, the land of changeling boys and girls” one writer declared—and a contemporary of his felt that in Victorian times there was a changeling to be found in every Dartmoor village.345
Who’s Taken and How?
A widespread belief is that pretty, fair-haired, and blue-eyed babies are the most vulnerable to being snatched away. Along the border between England and Wales it was said that “fine and solid” country babies were preferred. From the Cornish story of Selena Moor we gather two key facts: first, that faery babies are born rarely, which explains the need for human recruits; and, secondly, that in late Victorian times there was some concern over a decline in the human stock, which was said by the pixies not to be as strong as before “for want of more beef and good malt liquor.” 346
Contemporary of Shakespeare George Puttenham encapsulated many aspects of the belief in these words:
alluding to the opinion of Nurses, who are wont to say that the Fayries use to steale the fairest of children out of their cradles and put other ill-favoured in their places, which they called changelings or Elfs.347
Babies, whether in bed with their mothers or alone in their cots, were consistent targets. In the circumstances, it often fell upon those caring for the new mother to ensure that the proper steps were taken to protect both her and her offspring. The mother would be too exhausted and distracted to take precautions, so midwives, friends, and families had to be alert instead. It was common practice indeed, in the Highlands, for as many as a half-dozen women to stay with the new mother for three or even eight days around the birth. They would stay awake and watch over the cradle. In Shropshire the safeguards extended even further: it was thought to be risky to speak of an expected baby, as this would only serve to alert the faeries to its impending arrival. In Wales it was said that Midsummer, around St. John’s Eve, was the time of year when children were particularly vulnerable to being exchanged, presumably because it was a magical season of the year when the tylwyth teg were frequently out and about.348
One source from the sixteenth century includes an oath taken by midwives “not to suffer any other bodies child to be set, brought or laid before any woman delivered of her child in the place of her natural child.” Amongst the means used by midwives and neighbours to protect mothers in labour were
• sprinkling salt around the house;
• hanging fern or oatcakes over the threshold;
• blowing across a Bible into the mother’s face, or copying out powerful holy words on slips of paper and hanging them about the bed; and
• weighing down the mother in labour with nine blankets—a lucky number.349
Once the child was delivered, a further range of protective measures was available. These included
• the use of the preservative powers of iron. At night parents would pin the baby’s clothes to its cot and fasten its curtains with pins in a cross shape. During the daytime a baby might be pinned closely to its mother’s clothes so that it was never far from her. Nails driven into the bedstead or an iron tool left beneath it or on the window sill were also sensible precautions. That said, it seems this remedy isn’t completely foolproof. In one instance from Suffolk a mother awoke during the night to find the faeries in the act of undressing the baby before taking it away. They were carefully removing the pins in its swaddling clothes and laying them out head to head. Her intervention saved the babe and, after that, she took greater care to sleep with the infant between her and her husband and to ensure that its clothes were pinned to the pillow and sheets so as to make any attempted theft much harder; 350
• use of milk from a cow that had grazed mothan. Dairy products made from this milk, if left on a table in the same room as the mother and baby, would be as powerful as iron in excluding the Fae;
• tying a red thread around the baby’s neck. This was a simple and effective protection; so too were a man’s shirt or the mother’s bridal gown thrown over the cot;
• putting salt in a baby’s mouth or marking its forehead with soot;
• putting out cream and new baked cakes for the faeries. Providing a meal like this seems to be both an offering and a distraction to the faeries, hoping that if they’re well fed they’ll either decide not to take the family’s child or they’ll just forget why it was they were there in the first place; 351
• blessing the mother and her new child and ensuring a prompt and early baptism. These were extremely important, but holy words and symbols provided defence in other ways. A page of scripture sewn into a baby’s clothes would be efficacious, as would crossed sticks at the doorway or placing an open Bible on the newborn’s pillow; and
Invoking faery aid against the faeries was even a possibility. In the next chapter we’ll mention the faery called Elaby Gathen: midwives could invoke her to watch over and guard sleeping babies.
More actively offensive measures might be taken. A sprinkling of maistir, urine that’s being saved for clothes washing, will repel the faeries. Perhaps on the same basis, carrying the mother over the drain from the cow shed is reckoned to be equally effective. Sprinkling the house with water in which an ember had been quenched is efficacious and, if one of the Good Folk is actually spotted in the vicinity, pelting them with burning peat is predictably good at driving them off.
As we’ve seen already, burning items to produce offensive smells is a common folk remedy for a range of ills and was judged effective in repelling changelings. Thus, a shoe burned on the fire can help protect a baby from abduction. Carrying a burning peat seven times sunwise around the new mother’s bed, or around the outside of the house if space in the bedroom is restricted, is considered excellent protection in the far north of the Scottish mainland.
What Is a Changeling?
What differentiates the changeling phenomenon from other faery abductions is the element of exchange that is central to it. An infant is not just forcibly seized; some substitute is left in its place, only incidentally with a view to disguising the fact of the kidnapping—but more importantly, perhaps, because human care is desirable and appreciated.
What remained behind in the cradle might be a wax image—the “stock” as described in the last section—or it might be another living being, a faery substitute called a “changeling.” The widespread conviction was that whoever was left would appear to have mental and physical disabilities—a “natural fool” or a lunatic as some writers put it. The child would be peevish and prone to weeping and by these characteristics would its true nature be disclosed. The Reverend Edmund Jones, writing in the 1780s, had personal experience of attempted and interrupted abductions and also met a changeling boy, elfin son of Edmund John William of Church Valley. The “idiot child” lived until he was ten or twelve years old (longer than was usual for his kind) and “was something diabolical in aspect” making disturbed motions and a disagreeable screaming sound. He was dark or tawny in complexion, unlike his family. Generally, Jones said, those exchanged were “of no growth, good appearance or sense.” 352
On Shetland the saying is that an “idiot” cannot ever sneeze. The belief relates to “oafs” or changelings and a newborn child was thought to be under the spell of the trows until it sneezed for the first time—at which point all danger was passed and it was proved not to be a changeling.
Despite the disagreeable looks of most changelings and their short life spans, they need not all be backward, repulsive, and crippled. Some changelings had preternatural knowledge: one Devonshire witness recalled an elderly female in his village who was said to have talked like a woman of fifty from the age of five and who spent all her time collecting wild honey. In another Dartmoor story, Jimmy Townsend swears that his sister Grace was changed by the pixies when he was a young boy. Nonetheless she grows into her twenties and is a healthy and marriageable young woman, whatever her brother had to say. In due course she marries, although Jimmy warns that the union is unlikely to be happy. At first his forecasts seem to be disproved, but then the new husband loses his cow, followed by his litter of pigs, and then his geese. He has to give up farming, but every other line of work he tries is cursed with misfortune as well—a run of bad luck that locals take as proof that the man had chosen a pixie wife.353
So, the changed child was almost always disabled—an oaf or elf. This is the human perception, but that is the view of communities whose members have been stolen against their will, leaving substitutes that are unwanted and, in their eyes, unhealthy. Is this fair, though? The human perspective is only half the story and there’s good reason to infer that the faeries see it rather differently. As we shall discover in the next section, they still care enough about those members of their society who have been left in the mortal world to protect them from any threat of harm and, as mentioned earlier, the infants taken seem to be well looked after. Harsh as their methods are, then, perhaps the faery motivations are in some way to do with care: the aim is ensuring that an elderly elf receives constant human attention and providing a good upbringing for a mortal infant. We know that humans are appreciated as wet nurses for faery offspring, in light of which changelings can be seen as being just another version of the practice.
Bearing these suggestions in mind, it’s interesting to read an account from the Isle of Man in which the faeries replaced the human child moments after abducting it. A woman went to harvest corn in a field and laid her baby down whilst she worked. Seeing an opportunity, a faery snatched up the baby and set a changeling in its place. The elf child cried out and the human mother naturally made to pick up what she thought was still her infant. One of the men in the field prevented her and when it became apparent that the changeling was going to be being ignored, the faery replaced the human baby and departed. This account seems to confirm that the Good Folk are as concerned for the proper care of their own offspring as for any advantage they may gain by taking a human child.354
Exposing the Changeling
The consensus was that changelings were ugly and frail and prone to shrieking. That constituted the primary way in which they would be identified. Further proof might come by means of a ploy intended to expose the elf’s great age. For example, a conversation might be started about music and dancing; the suspected changeling might be involved and asked questions in the hope that it would be caught off guard and would reveal itself by joining in. The trick of pretending to brew beer in eggshells was a very popular way of getting the elf to exclaim upon the fact that, despite its age and worldly wisdom, it had never seen such a thing (incidentally confirming faeries’ long life spans). Sometimes the changeling would blow its own cover, for example by asking for whisky or by performing some adult task such as playing the bagpipes or threshing grain. Once the problem had been diagnosed, there were then plentiful remedies available for reversing the situation.355
Expelling the Changeling
Changelings tend to have short life spans and it was said that, when the sickly infant does die, “the faeries have got their own.” In other words, it’s returned home to be with its own kind. Understandably, few parents could tolerate waiting for this dismal outcome and instead they sought to drive away the faery and get back their own offspring before it was too late.356
Desperate families have often resorted to desperate measures to recover their infants. One writer observed that parents were “apt to mischief” the elf child left behind. This is something of an understatement given the kind of mistreatment that was inflicted upon suspected changelings. Such ill treatment was intended to drive off the cuckoo infant and to force the faeries to return the abducted child. As will be seen, it was often ferocious and must have taken deep conviction and a resolute will to carry it through. Of course, it must have helped to tell yourself that the faeries had already acted violently and maliciously and that they were being repaid in the only terms they would understand and respect. It must have assisted, too, to know that this mistreatment had been found to get results, although any hesitation or mistake by the parents might lead to failure.
A range of escalating techniques was deployed by desperate families. At the end of all of these tortures, the expectation was that the changeling would flee and the stolen infant would be deposited safe and sound by the faeries outside the home.
If you come across the faeries in the act of carrying off a baby, there is one foolproof means of rescue that relies upon their unshakeable belief in a fair bargain. The human instantly cries out “what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine” and throws to them some item, generally a small piece of clothing, in return for which the faeries are obliged to surrender the abducted child in their arms. Even blessing a cradle very shortly after an abduction could be enough to stop the faeries in their tracks. This might seem to be too late and to be a case of “bolting the stable door” but it seems to indicate that, until the child is actually taken within the faery dwelling, it is more easily recoverable.357
If it was too late for one of the moment-of-crisis remedies, one of the longer and more violent means of retrieval would have to be considered. On Shetland, if a child had been “taken from the ground,” there was a special and lengthy ceremony to follow to protect it. This involved, first, collecting a bucket full of seawater from the breaking surf. This was boiled by throwing in three red-hot seashore pebbles and the suspect child was then bathed in the water, being turned three times in each direction. After this the baby was placed on a wet blanket and was passed through the flames of a peat fire before putting it to bed swaddled in the blanket. An effigy of the child was then burned. This remedy was laborious for the parents and possibly uncomfortable for the child, but it probably did no great harm. That was not always the case.358
Changelings could be driven away, forcing the faeries to return their infant captive, by exposing them to a range of unpleasant conditions. One of the mildest involved the stale urine mentioned earlier. A suspected changeling could be laid on top of the pot in which the liquid was being stored and, because the faeries object strongly to nasty smells, this might be enough to expel it.
Alternatively, the changeling might be exposed to the elements. In the Highlands, leaving the creature overnight at a faery well or at the junction of three shires or three rivers was recommended. A special receptacle for the baby might exist for these purposes. Near the Moray Firth in the north of Scotland, there was once a stone trough at St. Benet’s spring which was called the “faeries’ cradle.” Placing a suspected changeling in this overnight would recover the real baby from the Fae. Whether for good or ill, the trough was destroyed during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.359
On Shetland similar treatment was known to have worked. We have already seen the first part of this story in an earlier section: a man’s quick action saved his newborn nephew from being taken, but his own family was then the subject of the faeries’ reprisals. One of his children had cried for eight days and then slept for eight days, after which it seemed different. Convinced that the faeries had exchanged it, the father put the cradle outside—“beyond the shadow of the lintel.” When he then looked at the baby in the cot, it was revealed to be just a lifeless image of the kidnapped child. Incidentally, this is not the only Scottish example of the protector being punished by the cheated faeries. A Perthshire herdsman saw a faery band approaching a cottage where he knew there to be a woman and newly delivered baby. He dashed to get there first and drew lines (circles) around the mother and child to protect them. This worked, but when he left the house, he was promptly carried off through the air for six or seven miles and back again before being dropped down through the smoke hole of his father’s cottage.360
Another Highland cure was even more sinister. A shallow grave had to be dug in a field and the changeling was placed in it overnight in the expectation that the abducted infant would be returned by the next dawn. From the west of Scotland comes a detailed version of a related remedy. The baby had to be taken to a known faery haunt—a place where the wind is heard to sough in a peculiar way in the trees and one that is often near to a cairn, standing stone, green mound or dell, or a stone circle. Certain words were said and the child was left with an offering of food. After a wait of an hour or two, around midnight, the parent would return to find the food gone and the lost child restored.361
Direct physical violence intended to drive out the changeling was common. A Cornish remedy was to place the baby on the ash heap, beat it with a broom (with the help of neighbours) and then leave it naked under the church stile. Fortunately, merely suggesting harm to the changeling might succeed. In one case a Scottish mother was advised by the local wise woman to throw the “shargie” child in the river; it overheard the plan, took fright, and left of its own accord. Similarly, in Sutherland the practice was to take the changeling to the local smithy and lay it on the anvil. The blacksmith would then pick up his hammer and threaten to pound the baby to a jelly; this would be enough to drive off the elf. To be sure, once a changeling had fallen for such a trick and given itself away, very little compunction might then be shown over whipping the creature, casting it on the fire, or dropping it off a bridge.362
Violence might even be used against a faery mother. In one case from Rousay on Orkney, the advice to the mother of the taken child was to go to a well-known rock outcrop known to be haunted by the Fae. There the mother had to thrust a steel wedge into a prominent cleft in the rock until a door appeared and opened. Entering this, she would find a faery woman with a baby on her lap. Without uttering a word, the human mother was to strike the other three times in the face with a Bible. Leaving the rock and returning home, she would find her own child there, restored to her.363
Fire was often a key ingredient of any rescue attempt. Once again, the threat alone might work: in several Scottish cases a stock had been left and simply stoking the fire was sufficient to drive it away. In Cornwall one more elaborate cure required the parent to make a smoky fire with green ferns and, when the house had completely filled with fumes, to go outside and turn around three times.364
Heat was definitely seen as a key part of the process of expelling changelings. In a case from Scotland a wise woman advised the family that their child had been changed and what was in the cradle was really a “croupin,” but a ready remedy existed. The fire had to be lit all night and all the requests of the child had to be ignored. The first night this was tried the suspected changeling kept begging for water and was eventually given a drink. The parents thereby failed to break the faery spell. They succumbed too on a second attempt but on a third were deaf to all entreaties by the infant. Eventually it got out of bed, rolled around on the floor for a while and finally disappeared in a blue flame. To actually throw the changeling on the fire in the hearth or, at least, to hold it in the smoke and heat above the flames was the last resort, albeit one that was deemed highly effective. In one example from Dumfries and Galloway, a complex ritual led up to this. The parents had to sit on either side of their hearth, with a candle between them that had been lit using sparks from a hag stone. The suspected changeling was bound hand and foot with red cloth and then held in the smoke of a rowan fire. After considerable cursing, spitting, and screaming, the elf shot up out of the smoke hole in the roof.365
It may be a little comfort to know that it wasn’t always the child that suffered. A remedy from North East Scotland recommended holding a black hen near to a very hot fire. The hen would naturally struggle to escape and would fly up the chimney, at which point the elf would also depart and the kidnapped baby would come back. This remedy aside, most traditional ways of expelling changelings did involve at least discomfort, if not peril, for the suspect baby. For this reason, they are now widely disapproved of and have fallen into disuse.366
The expectation behind all these remedies was that the stolen child would swiftly be returned. The faeries still care about and actively monitor the welfare of the changeling left behind and therefore will act promptly to prevent harm to it. If the changeling had been disposed of away from the house, on the parent’s return home their infant would be found restored; if the oaf was held over the fire, the baby would immediately be heard outside.
We must admit, however, that even when the original child was restored, it might still be marked by its experiences. This may be because steps had already been taken by the faeries to make the stolen infant more like themselves, a process which may involve dipping the child in a magic well or anointing it with special ointment. An illustration of this comes from the Cornish story of the child beaten with brooms and exposed near the church. The abuse of the changeling meant that the woman’s son came back to her from faeryland, but he never seemed right again: he spent his time alone tending animals and died at only thirty years old.367
It would be wrong, too, to present the faeries as entirely selfish and oblivious to the human parents’ reactions. From Almscliffe Crag in West Yorkshire comes a mid-Victorian account of two children stolen from a woman whilst she was working in the fields at harvest. So great was her distress at their disappearance, and so prolonged her weeping, that the local faeries took pity on her and gave the children back. Even so, it’s interesting to note the local belief that, despite their short time away, the kids were permanently affected by their experience and grew up distinctly smaller than others of their age.
Explaining Changelings
In previous centuries, murders of children obviously did occur during attempts to expel changelings.368 Nowadays, plainly, child protection legislation is far more effective and none of this treatment should be possible. What’s important though is the attitude that is revealed. The preparedness of parents to contemplate almost any steps to retrieve their lost child is predictable; their attitude to Faery is more surprising. Kidnapping was accepted as being a key characteristic of the Fae, something to be anticipated and fought against. It may be seen as another form of our traffic with the faeries—an extreme version that is involuntary and unbalanced, admittedly—but part of our constant dealings with them. This aspect of our relationship with the Good Folk, in particular, reinforces my frequent impression that they act toward us, in many respects, like a colonial power. For the Fae, humans can be a resource to be exploited; we are not to be treated as equals with rights, rather we are subjects; we are curious and amusing, but we only have any value insofar as we are useful to them.
Despite all the foregoing, we should acknowledge that the abuse of supposed changeling children might actually prove to be shortsighted. In one Scottish story a nursing mother was approached by a faery woman asking her to care for her child as well. She agreed to this and looked after the baby so well that she was rewarded with cloth, faery medicines, and good fortune. From Suffolk we hear of a mother who accepted and cared for the changeling as her own, finding money left for her every morning as payment for her extra trouble. Happiest of all, in a case from Dartmoor the human mother who accepted the changeling and cared for it lovingly as her own so pleased the pixies that they returned her baby, which grew up endowed with good fortune.369
Finally, as the last story demonstrates, faery childcare is generally good. They like (perhaps even need) human children and they will usually care for them well and return them in good health. Even so, this is not universally the case: in one changeling story from Glengarry in the Highlands the elf was expelled by being thrown in a deep pool and the human child duly reappeared, but during its absence in Faery it had been underfed, neglected, and reduced to skin and bone.370
Elf-Addled
As I mentioned in Chapter 2, our Anglo-Saxon forebears diagnosed a number of ailments which they ascribed to malign faery intervention, one of which was called ælfadl (which we may roughly translate as elf-addle today). Its nature is uncertain—it appears to have involved some degree of internal physical pain—but I have co-opted the name here to describe more broadly the health effects of contact with our faery neighbours. The more traditional term is “faery taken.” This denotes not just the act of abduction but the medical consequences of this as well.
Physical Risks of Faeryland
It’s pretty widely known that a visit to faeryland and any time spent “in the hill” can have serious physical consequences. Indeed, in the Scottish Northern Isles the adjective “trowie” (trow-like) was synonymous with sickly.
At the very least, the experience can be unpleasant and isolating. A Manx man was taken by the faeries for a space of four years. He said that, whilst he was away, he could still see his friends and family, but he could not be seen by them nor could he communicate with them in any way. When he returned to this world, he said it was like awaking from unconsciousness. This latter remark suggests some of the confusion and disorientation that the state of being elf-addled denotes. In another account from Perthshire in the Highlands, a man was working in his garden when the faeries came and abducted him for three days. When he was returned from the knoll he was in a dazed state and could hardly describe what had happened to him. He sickened and within two days was gone.371
Because time may pass more slowly in Faery, the returning visitor may discover that their few hours away were really years or centuries, so that they return to a land wholly unfamiliar to them and where they often crumble away to dust as soon as they have contact with the food or soil of the mortal world. For instance, a year and a day seem like a night, a few minutes are really twenty-three years, and what is experienced as a few hours turns out to be many decades. A vivid example of this temporal difference comes from Herefordshire. Some young people returning from a fair came across some faeries dancing in a ring. One man in the party joined them and only returned a year later, but the oranges and biscuits from the fair that were in his pockets were still fresh. He, however, quickly sickened and died. The time differences can be baffling and disorientating. In a story from Wales a boy was sent by his mother to fetch some barm (the froth of fermenting malt) from a neighbour’s house. He was gone a year and a day, but when he reappeared, he was still holding the barm bottle his mother had given him and was under the impression he’d been absent barely minutes. In a related version of this story, the boy returns from his errand with the item he was sent to fetch in his hand; he had delayed on the way only a few minutes to listen to faery music but he comes home a very old man. Anticipating our next section, he then searches desperately for the way back into Faery, but is unable to find it.372
Closely related to these last cases is the condition of those who are taken in faery dances. Whilst they are with the faeries, they feel that almost no time has passed and they have hardly danced enough. Once rescued, they frequently collapse with exhaustion because they have in fact been dancing nonstop for a year and a day; they may also be reduced to starved skeletons because they have had no chance to eat during all that time.373
A sojourn of any duration in faeryland may change the body so that it cannot revert to its old life. This is the result of physical alterations caused by consumption of faery food. Though freed, the returning captive often dies soon afterward as a reaction to touching human food, which is now effectively poisonous.
The ill effects may be less drastic and more insidious than this, but nevertheless contact with the otherworld can lead to permanent physiological changes. On Shetland girls taken young by the trows were said to return strikingly beautiful, but they were also prone to die young.
Psychological Risks of Faery
Less well-reported are the psychological ill effects of a sojourn with the Fae. Abductees might be released from faeryland after a conventional captivity of seven years, but they can seldom settle again or feel like they fit in with human society. It is said that returnees often remember next to nothing of their time away, but they are nonetheless left blighted. A man called Iago ap Dewi of Llanllawddog in Mid Wales was taken for seven years by the tylwyth teg. When he finally returned, he never spoke a word about his experiences. Perhaps fear of betraying what he’d seen and heard was a part of this (and we know how highly discretion is valued by the faeries), but the disorientating and alienating effect of exposure to an otherworld must also be part of the explanation.374
We can piece together the mental ill effects of a visit to Faery from various sources across the centuries and the evidence we have is consistent: people who return from Faery are never the same again. There are many descriptions of this. In seventeenth-century England John Aubrey collected a story concerning a shepherd, employed by a Mr. Brown of Winterbourne Bassett in Wiltshire, who had seen the ground open and had been “brought to strange places underground” where music was played. As Aubrey observed of such visitors, once they had witnessed faery pleasures, they could “never any afterward enjoy themselves.” 375
Later the same century the Reverend Robert Kirk met a woman who had come back from Faery; she ate very little food and “is still prettie melanchollyous and silent, hardly seen ever to laugh. Her natural Heat and radical Moisture seem to be equally balanced, lyke an unextinguished Lamp, and going in a circle, not unlike the faint Lyfe of Bees and some Sort of Birds that sleep all the Winter over and revive in the Spring.” 376
The main symptoms seem to be a sense of bereavement and a longing to retrieve the joys of Faery. For example, those who returned home in Scotland “never again took kindly to the works and ways of their fellow men. They loved the sunny braes, glens and woods that lay far from the abodes of men … With dreamy, longing eyes, gazing out for something that they could not reach, they pined away the rest of their days, beings apart.” 377
An identical description of the affliction comes from Cornwall. Those abducted were described as unhappy creatures who never again settled to work but “roamed about aimlessly, doing nothing, hoping and longing one day to be allowed to go back to the place from which they’d been banished.” 378
For returnees, mortal life becomes a pale substitute for what they have glimpsed and they can only linger on here, awaiting or hoping for escape. In James Hogg’s famous poem “Kilmeny,” the heroine suffers all these symptoms: “nae smile was seen on Kilmeny’s face /… still was her look, and … still was her e’e.” Although she could not describe to her family where she’d been nor what she’d seen, her birthplace “wasna her hame, and she couldna remain.” In bitter contrast to her parents’ joy and relief at her return, she was desperate to leave “the world of sorrow and pain.”
Perhaps most upsetting and difficult for families and friends is the fact that those who’ve been taken seem unable to talk about their experiences. The Shetland trows would take children for a while but released them at puberty. Back with human society, they always maintained “an unbroken silence regarding the land of their captivity.” Indeed, that silence could be physically enforced: in Ireland it was believed that “the wee folk puts a thing in their mouth that they can’t speak.” In modern terms, we might even see this as some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder: those at home can never understand what the returnee has been through.379
Irish poet W. B. Yeats was fascinated by the elf-addled condition and made a special study of it. He linked various physical symptoms to the distraction and sorrow suffered. A person who’s been taken will have pale skin, a cold touch, and a low voice. They will suffer from fainting fits, fatigue, languor, long and heavy sleeping, and wasting. Being dazed and even trance-like, returnees seldom take care of themselves properly.380
Sometimes, of course, it’s hard to determine whether the after-effects are primarily psychological or physiological (though one may lead to the other). All we can say for certain is that those who’ve been away are never the same again and that their return to this world is seldom the happy event that we might anticipate.
Cornish Case Studies
An example of being elf-addled comes from the well-known story of “The House on Selena Moor.” 381 Pixie-led on Selena Moor in the far west of Cornwall, a Mr. Noy finds a farmhouse at which a celebration is taking place. As he approaches, he meets Grace, a former lover, whom he thought to have been dead, but who has actually been captured and enslaved by the faeries. She warns him not to touch the faery food and drink, as she had done, and tells him something of the faery life she now shares. The experience of seeing the faeries, and of knowing his lost love still to be alive in faeryland, deeply affected him:
From that night … he seemed to be a changed man; he talked of little else but what he saw and heard there … Often at dusk of eve and moonlight nights, he wandered round the moors in hopes to meet Grace, and when he found his search was all in vain, he became melancholy, neglected his farm, tired of hunting, and departed this life before the next harvest. Whether he truly died or passed into faery-land, no one knows.
Noy had had no physical contact with Grace nor had he partaken of the faery fruit and beer—otherwise he would never have been able to return home at all. Nevertheless, what he saw and heard was enough to take away his pleasure in the mortal life.
A very similar story from the same area is that of Richard Vingoe, who discovered Faery down a long passage under the cliffs near Land’s End. He too met there a former lover who he believed had died but who had, in fact, been “changed into the faery state.” She saved him from her fate and led him back to the surface, but nevertheless he was never as he had been before, took to drinking, and died young and unmarried.382
In both these cases the lot of the lover who’s been abducted doesn’t seem especially happy, but nevertheless the men pine to be reunited with them. Perhaps this was just love-sickness, but it seems too that the glimpse of another world beyond our own is part of the cause of their unhappiness.
Faery Haunting and Girdle Measuring
It isn’t necessary to be abducted bodily to Faery to suffer the ill effects of faery contact. We’ve already looked at some of the other ways in which sickness can arise from proximity to the supernatural in this world. For example, in Wales the mere look of an elf was believed to be dangerous, and in Scotland it’s been said that seeing a dwarf will mean that you’ll fall ill within a year, whilst a faery’s breath can instantly cause boils and sickness. As has also been mentioned, being pixy-led and travelling with the sluagh can both prove debilitating or fatal experiences.383
In fact, it appears that any prolonged physical exposure to the Good Folk could prove fatal. In one Scottish story a man awoke to find three little men gathered in front of his peat fire, enjoying the heat. As they warmed themselves, the three leaned back against his legs. The next morning his limbs felt heavy and he couldn’t move them. As the days passed, they got more and more painful so that, within a week, he was dead.384
In addition, it has been widely accepted across the British Isles that faeries purposely can inflict harm upon humans, striking them with illness or disability whether by elf shot or by some mysterious “blast.” This illness was so familiar in the past as to be known as “the faery,” the symptoms of which might also be described as being “faery-taken” or “haunted by a faery.”
On closer analysis, the situation turns out to be more complicated still. There are the straightforward cases of people who are made ill in this world by the faeries; secondly, there are those who continue to be present corporeally but whose soul is absent. It turns out that some visits to faeryland don’t have to involve a physical journey: rather, the person’s body remains behind, apparently struck down by sickness, while their spirit is transported. It is believed that part of their substance has been stolen, just as the nourishing part of food is abstracted. To friends and family at home, the absentee appears to have fallen into a dream or to be “as still as stones in the street.” The patient who has been “taken” has been afflicted with a languishing disease termed “the phairie”—they are struck dumb and lose the use of their limbs. For example, on Shetland it was believed that the trows might steal part of a new mother, the part that remained at home seeming “pale and absent.” W. B. Yeats described how Irish sufferers (especially women soon after childbirth) would take to their beds, perhaps for weeks and not uncommonly for years (frequently for the magically significant period of seven years, but sometimes for decades or even for the remainder of their lives), lying in a state of unconsciousness, as if in a trance. During this time, they were believed to be living in Faery.385
Many mystery illnesses were blamed on faery influence in the past. In 1677, in his book The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, John Webster had this to say on the belief: “… the common people, if they have any sort of Epilepsie, Palsie, Convulsions and the like, do presently perswade themselves they are bewitched, fore-spoken, blasted, faery-taken or haunted with some evil spirit and the like …” A range of maladies and symptoms might be ascribed to supernatural causes and, this being the case, medical practitioners had to be able to respond with accurate diagnoses and effective cures.386
Furthermore, the condition of being taken was not necessarily just a one-off illness. Some individuals seem to have had multiple attacks or relapses. This explains a detail of the record of the accusations made against Isobel Sinclair, who was tried for witchcraft on Orkney in 1633. The court heard that she had been “six times controlled with the faery.” In light of the above, we may conclude she had a half-dozen periods of illness when she was unconscious and was assumed by her family and neighbours to have been abducted to “Elfame.” 387
The coma-like state associated with “faery haunting” seems to have had consistent, recognisable symptoms, as a result of which healers felt confident that they could identify and treat cases of “taken” individuals. Very frequently this was done by means of “measuring.” This was an ancient diagnostic practice worldwide, but in Western Europe it can be traced back at least to the time of Pliny. It was used in England until the late sixteenth century and in parts of Wales into the nineteenth century. A change in the size of a girdle or belt could indicate that a person had been invaded by a faery or evil spirit—clearly there are suggestions of demonic possession in this. Charms and prayers could exorcise the spirit and the belt might also be cut up as part of the cure. In Ireland headaches were treated by measuring the sufferer’s head, whilst in Wales a range of conditions including depression, jaundice, nervous complaints, consumption, and being the subject of witchcraft were all detected by means of ritual measurement from the elbow to fingertip, or by tying a cloth or rope around the body or limbs. Suspected Scottish witch Bessie Dunlop, who learned her herbal medicine from the Fae, was also given a lace by them. She would tie this around a woman in childbirth to help ease the delivery.
Girdle measuring was explicitly used to identify and to help cure those who had been “taken” by the faeries. Here are a few examples: In 1438 Agnes Hancock in Somerset was found by the church authorities to be treating children afflicted with “feyry” by inspecting their girdles or shoes. In 1566 Elizabeth Mortlock of Pampisford, Cambridgeshire, was offering the same cure. She repeated a series of Catholic prayers and then measured the child’s girdle from her elbow to her thumb, asking God to confirm if the girl was haunted with a faery. If the girdle or belt was shorter than usual, the nature of the affliction was clear. Mortlock claimed that she had assisted several children in this manner. In about 1570 another woman, Jennet Peterson, was accused of using witchcraft before the ecclesiastical court at Durham. According to Robert Duncan of Wallsend she had practised the “measuring of belts to preserve folks from the farye.” Like Elizabeth Mortlock, Jennet seemed to have been making a good living by identifying and curing faery blights upon her neighbours. Lastly, Lady Gregory told a story of an Irish changeling child that had seemed to be thriving until a neighbour called into the house. The visitor proposed to measure both her own child and the changeling with the string from her apron. From that point on the infant did not thrive and was always screaming.388
I wonder if the process of girdle measuring is somehow concerned with gaining control over the faery’s magic. In a story from Ardnamurchan in the Highlands, a man called Luran outwitted the faeries who had been reaping his crop at night by leaving a wise old man in the field. The faeries appeared from a knoll and started to harvest the crop; the guard then counted their number out loud and by this simple means banished them forever. There’s certainly something magical and powerful about numbers, but usually the folklore works the other way around and in the faeries’ favour. Staying in Scotland, the belief in the North East was that baked cakes should never be counted as the faeries will eat half of them or they will go off quickly. On Shetland, counting any of your possessions—sheep, horses, fish, or chattels—was thought to attract bad luck. Presumably again, enumerating them put them in the faeries’ power—a case perhaps of “counting your blessings.” 389
Summary
A visit to faeryland need not be harmful. Many travellers come and go unscathed. Some are even transformed for the better by the experience. As alluded to earlier, girls might be abducted by the Shetland trows but returned to their homes when they reached adulthood; they would be restored to their families “in maiden prime with a wild unearthly beauty and glamour on them.” Nevertheless, we should recall that many are harmed in body or mind by the experience and that some people never return from Faery; they are abducted and are simply never seen again.390
The Good Folk weren’t intentionally malicious when they stole people away. Rather, they were simply oblivious to the human consequences, as their needs were given complete priority. It may be significant that reports of faery abduction are very much reduced nowadays. Perhaps the Good Folk’s opinion of us has changed as we have become more technically sophisticated; perhaps, instead, they prefer to try to work cooperatively with us now.
To close, time spent in Faery must always be viewed as potentially perilous. Even if the person is neither enslaved nor entrapped, they can still feel the effects of their adventure long-term.
320. Aitken, Forgotten Heritage, 5.
321. Murray, Tales from Highland Perthshire, no. 33.
322. Jones, Appearance, no. 67; Edmonston, The Home of a Naturalist, 141.
323. Wilson, Folklore and Genealogies of Uppermost Nithsdale, 76; Gregor, Notes on the Folklore, 62; Jones, Appearance, no. 46; Leather, Folklore of Herefordshire, 43; Graham R. Tomson, The Ferlie.
324. MacPherson, Barra, 178.
325. Jones, Appearance of Evil, paras 67 & 68; Sutherland, Folklore Gleanings, 28; Murray, Tales from Highland Perthshire, nos. 88, 157, 191 & 204.
326. Bord, Fairies, 209; J. Harte Explore Fairy Traditions,146; Tregarthen, North Cornwall Fairies, 185.
327. Appearance of Evil, para. 68.
328. Campbell, Waifs & Strays of Celtic Tradition, vol. 5, 140–148.
329. Gregor, Notes on the Folklore, 136.
330. Grant Stewart, Popular Superstitions, 114; Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney, 36.
331. Spence, Shetland Folklore, 147; & Edmondston, A View of the Zetland Isles, 217; Saxby, Shetland Traditional Lore, 130; Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends, 41.
332. Edmondston, A View of the Zetland Isles, 214.
333. Lewes, Queer Side, 120; & Grant Stewart, Popular Superstitions, 91; Davies, Folklore of West and Mid-Wales,109; Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends, 16.
334. Grice, Folk Tales, c. 15; MacGregor, Peat Fire Flame, 5.
335. Gregor, Notes on the Folklore, 62.
336. Murray, Tales from Highland Perthshire, nos. 15, 27 & 201.
337. Miller, Scenes and Legends, 16.
338. Pennant, A Tour in Scotland, 99; County Folklore, vol. 2, 37 & vol. 7, 32.
339. Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, 141.
340. Gregor, Notes on the Folklore, 62; and see the tale of Sandy Harry; Aitken, Forgotten Heritage, 16; Browne, History of the Highlands, 111; Anon, Folklore & Legends, 52.
341. Edmondston, A View of the Zetland Isles, 77; S. Hibbert, A Description of the Shetland Isles, 194.
342. Sutherland, Folklore Gleanings, 24.
343. County Folklore, vol. 3, 26; Edmondston, A View of the Zetland Isles, 211; Macgregor, Peat Fire Flame, 9.
344. Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends, 39.
345. Bowring, “Devonshire Pixies,” Once a Week, vol. 16 (1867), 205; Richard King, “The Folklore of Devonshire,” in Fraser’s Magazine, vol. 8, 1873, 781.
346. Simpson, Welsh Border, 73; Bottrell, Traditions & Hearthside Stories, vol. 2, 94.
347. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 1589, Book III, chapter XV; see too Richard Willis, Mount Tabor, 1639, 92–3.
348. Firth, Reminiscences, 74; Palmer, Shropshire, 150; Davies, Folklore of West and Mid-Wales, 133.
349. Stewart, Ben Nevis, 261; Grieve, Colonsay and Oronsay, 281.
350. Printed Extracts, Suffolk, 37.
351. Owen, Welsh Folklore, 70.
352. Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 4, 436; Scot, Discourse, Book II, chapter 4; Jones, Appearance of Evil, para. 66.
353. Bowring, “Devonshire Pixies,” Once a Week, vol. 16 (1867), 205; Crossing, Tales of Dartmoor Pixies, c. 5.
354. Choice Notes & Queries, 1859, 26.
355. Aitken, Forgotten Heritage, 9; Sutherland, Folklore Gleanings, 26.
356. Harland, Lancashire Legends & Traditions, 220.
357. Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends, 43 & 39.
358. Spence, The Fairy Tradition in Britain, 147.
359. Grant Stewart, Popular Superstitions, 115.
360. Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, 538; Murray, Tales from Highland Perthshire, no. 204.
361. Browne, History of the Highlands, 115; Miller, Scenes and Legends, 105; Napier, Folklore, 42.
362. Courtney, Cornish Feasts, 126; Leather, Folklore of Herefordshire, 47; Sutherland, Folklore Gleanings, 26.
363. Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney, 83.
364. Grant Stewart, Popular Superstitions, 109; Courtney, Cornish Feasts, 126.
365. Fergusson, Rambling Sketches, 127; Aitken, Forgotten Heritage, 12; Browning, Dumfries & Galloway Folk Tales, 53.
366. Gregor, Notes on the Folklore, 61; a comparable remedy involving roasting a black hen is reported from Wales: Jenkyn Thomas, Welsh Fairy Book, “The Llanfabon changeling.”
367. Pegg, Argyll Folk Tales, 35; Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories, vol. 2, 199.
368. Dalyell, The Darker Superstitions of Scotland, 538.
369. Aitken, Forgotten Heritage, 14; Printed Extracts, Suffolk, 37; Bray, Description, 177.
370. Sutherland, Folklore Gleanings, 26; MacDougall, Folk Tales, 117.
371. Murray, Tales from Highland Perthshire, no. 179.
372. Leather, Folklore of Herefordshire, 45–46; MacPherson, Barra, 173; Owen, Welsh Folklore, 48.
373. Davies, Folklore of West and Mid-Wales,110; Owen, Welsh Folklore, 37.
374. Davies, Folklore of West and Mid-Wales, 110.
375. Briggs, Fairies in Literature & Tradition, 12.
376. Kirk, Secret Commonwealth, chapter 15.
377. Gregor, Notes on the Folklore, 62.
378. Courtney, Cornish Feasts, 121; see too the story of Cherry of Zennor.
379. Spence, The Fairy Tradition in Britain, 262.
380. Yeats, Unpublished Prose, vol. 1, 418 & vol. 2, 281; see too Jones, The Appearance of Evil, paragraphs 70, 68, 82, 56, 62, and 69.
381. Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories, vol. 1, 94–102.
382. Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories, vol. 2, 102.
383. Crofton Croker, Fairy Legends, 116.
384. Murray, Tales from Highland Perthshire, no. 219.
385. William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals, Book I; Mr. S., Gammer Gurton’s Needle, 1562, Act I, scene 2; Dalyell, Darker Superstitions, 538; Young & Houlbrook, Magical Folk, 132; Yeats, note 39 to Lady A. Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Dublin (1920), 287–8.
386. Webster, 323.
387. See The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/Research/witches/.
388. A. Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, 237, but see generally her chapter IV, “Away.”
389. J. G. Campbell, c. 2; Gregor, Notes on the Folklore, 65 & 157; County Folklore, vol. 3, 162.
390. Young & Houlbrook, Magical Folk, 132; Davies, Folklore of West and Mid-Wales, 122.