Archaic England Part 18

[223] "Morien," _Light of Brittania_, p. 27.

[224] Anon, _A New Description of England and Wales_ (1724), p.

121.

[225] Dennis, G., _Cities and Centuries of Etruria_, p. 31.

[226] Munro, R., _Prehistoric Britain_, p. 223.

[227] _Barddas_, p. 222.

[228] Kains-Jackson, _Our Ancient Monuments_, p. 112. Fergusson states "about 330 feet".

[229] Vol. vi., p. 64.

[230] Vol. vi., p. 66.

[231] Gray, Mrs. Hamilton, _Sepulchres of Etruria_.

[232] Vol., iii., p. 73.

[233] _Golden Legend_, vol. v., p. 184.

[234] Simpkins, J. E., _Fife_, p. 4; _County Folklore_, vol. vii.

[235] Simpkins, J. E., _Kinross-s.h.i.+re_, p. 377.

[236] _Ibid._, p. 241.

[237] _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_, p. 336.

[238] I am unable to lay my hand on the reference for this Elen's Causeway in Westmoreland.

[239] Anon., _A New Description of England_, 1724, p. 318.

[240] _Symbolical Language_, p. 37.

[241] _Golden Legend_, vol. v., p. 189.

[242] _Cornish Feasts and Folklore_, p. 131.

[243] _Golden Legend_, vol. v., p. 181.

[244] Jubainville, D'arbois de, _Irish Mythological Cycle_, p. 140.

[245] Shakespeare, _Love's Labour's Lost_, iii., 1.

[246] Ossian, the hero poet of Gaeldom, is represented as old, blind, and solitary.

[247] _Cf._ Windle, Sir B.C.A., _Remains of the Prehistoric Age_, pp. 197-8.

[248] Salmon, A.L., _Cornwall_, p. 88.

[249] Wilson, J.M., _The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales_, i., p. 484.

[250] Anwyl, E., _Celtic Religion_, p. 39.

[251] "L.V.," London (undated).

[252] I do not think this proverbially loving couple were exclusively Scotch. The _darbies_, _i.e._, handcuffs or clutches of the law may be connoted with Gascoigne's line (1576): "To bind such babes in _father Darbie's_ bands".

"_Old Joan_" figures as one of the characters in the festivities of Plough Monday, and in Cornwall any very ancient woman was denominated "_Aunt Jenny_".

[253] Gray, Mrs. Hamilton, _Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria_, p. 131.

[254] _The Mythology of the British Islands_, p. 125.

CHAPTER VI.

PUCK.

"Do you imagine that Robin Goodfellow--a mere name to you--conveys anything like the meaning to your mind that it did to those for whom the name represented a still living belief, and who had the stories about him at their fingers' ends? Or let me ask you, Why did the fairies dance on moonlight nights? or, Have you ever thought why it is that in English literature, and in English literature alone, the fairy realm finds a place in the highest works of imagination?"

--F. S. HARTLAND.

In British Faerie there figures prominently a certain "Man in the Oak": according to Keightley, Puck, _alias_ Robin Goodfellow, was known as this "Man in the Oak," and he considers that the word _pixy_ "is evidently Pucksy, the endearing diminutive _sy_ being added to Puck like Bet_sy_, Nan_cy_, Dix_ie_".[255] It is probable that this adjectival _si_ recurring in _sw_eet, _so_oth, _su_ave, _sw_an, etc., may be equated with the Sanscrit _su_, which, as in _sw_astika, is a synonym for the Greek _eu_, meaning soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious. When used as an affix, this "endearing diminutive" yields _spook_, which was seemingly once "dear little Pook," or "soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious Puck". In Wales the fairies were known as "Mothers'

Blessings," and although spook now carries a sinister sense, there is no more reason to suppose that "dear little Pook" was primarily malignant than to suggest that the Holy _Ghost_ was--in the modern sense--essentially _ghastly_. Skeat suggests that _ghost_ (of uncertain origin) "is perhaps allied to Icelandic _geisa_, to rage like fire, and to Gothic _us-gais-yan_, to terrify". Some may be aghast at this suggestion, others, who cannot conceive the Supreme Sprite except as a raging and consuming fury, will commend it. In the preceding chapter I suggested that the elementary derivation of ghost was _'goes_, the Great Life or Essence, and as _te_ in Celtic meant good, it may be permissible to modernise _ghoste_, also _Kostey_ of the egg, into _great life good_.

That there was a good and a bad Puck is to be inferred from the West of England belief in Bucca Gwidden, the white or good spirit, and Bucca Dhu, the black, malevolent one.[256] Puck, like Dan Cupid, figures in popular estimation as a _pawky_ little pickle; in Brittany the dolmens are known as _poukelays_ or Puck stones, and the particular haunts of Puck were heaths and desert places. The place-name Picktree suggests one of Puck's sacred oaks; Pickthorne was presumably one of Puck's hawthorns, and the various Pickwells, Pickhills, Pickmeres, etc., were once, in all probability, _spook_-haunted. The highest point at Peckham, near London, is Honor Oak or One Tree Hill, and Peckhams or Puckhomes are plentiful in the South of England. One of them was inferentially near Ockham, at Great and Little Bookham, where the common or forest consists practically solely of the three pre-eminently fairy-trees--oak, hawthorne, and holly. The summit of the Buckland Hills, above Mickleham, is the celebrated, box-planted Boxhill, and at its foot runs Pixham or Pixholme Lane. On the height, nearly opposite Pixham Lane, the Ordnance Map marks Pigdon, but the roadway from Bookham to Boxhill is known, not as Pigdon Hill, but Bagden Hill. In all probability the terms Pigdon and Bagden are the original British forms of the more modern Pixham and Bok's Hill.

In the North of England Puck seems more generally Peg, whence the fairy of the river Ribble was known as Peg O'Nell, and the nymph of the Tees, as Peg Powler.[257] Peg--a synonym for Margaret--is generally interpreted as having meant pearl.

The word _puck_ or _peg_, which varies in different parts of the country into pug, pouke, pwcca, poake, pucke, puckle, and phooka, becomes elsewhere bucca, bug, bogie, bogle, boggart, buggaboo, and bugbear.

According to all accounts the Pucks, like the Buccas, were divided into two cla.s.ses, "good and bad," and it was only the clergy who maintained that "one and the same malignant fiend meddled in both". As Scott rightly observes: "Before leaving the subject of fairy superst.i.tion in England we may remark that it was of a more playful and gentle, less wild and necromantic character, than that received among the sister people. The amus.e.m.e.nts of the southern fairies were light and sportive; their resentments were satisfied with pinching or scratching the objects of their displeasure; their peculiar sense of cleanliness rewarded the housewives with the silver token in the shoe; their nicety was extreme concerning any coa.r.s.eness or negligence which could offend their delicacy; and I cannot discern, except, perhaps, from the insinuations of some scrupulous divines, that they were va.s.sals to or in close alliance with the infernals, as there is too much reason to believe was the case with their North British sisterhood."[258]

The elemental Bog is the Slavonic term for G.o.d,[259] and when the early translators of the Bible rendered "terror by night" as "bugs by night"

they probably had spooks or bogies in their mind. In Etruria as in Egypt the bug or maybug was revered as the symbol of the Creator Bog, because the Egyptian beetle has a curious habit of creating small pellets or b.a.l.l.s of mud. In Welsh _bogel_ means the _navel_, also _centre of a wheel_, and hence Margaret or Peggy may be equated with the nave or peg of the white-rayed Marguerite or _Day's Eye_.[260]

It must constantly be borne in mind that the ancients never stereotyped their Ideal, hence there was invariably a vagueness about the form and features of prehistoric Joy, and Shakespeare's reference to Dan Cupid as a "senior-junior, giant-dwarf," may be equally applied to every Elf and Pixy. It is unquestionable that in England as in Scandinavia and Germany "giants and dwarfs were originally identical phenomenon".[261]

In the words of an Orphic Hymn "Jove is both male and an immortal maid": Venus was sometimes represented with a beard, and as the Supreme Parent was indiscriminately regarded as either male or female, or as both combined, an occasional contradiction of form is not to be unexpected.

The authorities attribute the contrariety of s.e.x which is sometimes a.s.signed to the Cornish saints as being due to carelessness on the part of transcribers, but in this case the monks may be exonerated, as the greater probability is that they faithfully transmitted the pagan legends. The Moon, which, speaking generally, was essentially a symbol of the Mother, was among some races, _e.g._, the Teutons and the Egyptians, regarded as masculine. In Italy at certain festivals the men dressed in women's garments, wors.h.i.+pped the Moon as Lunus, and the women dressed like men, as Luna. In Wales the Cadi, as we have seen, was dressed partially as a woman, partially as a man, and in all probability the ca.s.sock of the modern priest is a survival of the ambiguous duality of Kate or Good. In Irish the adjective _mo_--derived seemingly from Mo or Ma, the Great Mother--meant _greatest_, and was thus used irrespective of s.e.x.

The French word _lune_, like _moon_ and _choon_, is radically _une_, the initial consonants being merely adjectival, and is just as s.e.xless as our _one_, Scotch _ane_. In Germany _hunne_ means _giant_, and the term "Hun," meant radically anyone formidable or gigantic.

The Cornish for _full moon_ is _cann_, which is a slightly decayed form of _ak ann_ or _great one_, and this word _can_, or _khan_, meaning prince, ruler, _king_ or great one, is traceable in numerous parts of the world. _Can_ or _chan_ was Egyptian for _lord_ or _prince; can_ was a t.i.tle of the kings of ancient Mexico; _khan_ is still used to-day by the kings of Tartary and Burmah and by the governors of provinces in Persia, Afghanistan, and other countries of Central Asia. In China _kong_ means _king_, and in modern England _king_ is a slightly decayed form of the Teutonic _konig_ or _kinig_. The ancient British word for _mighty chief_ was _chun_ or _cun_, and we meet with this infinitely older word than _king_ as a participle of royal t.i.tles such as _Cun_obelinus, _Cun_oval, _Cun_omor and the like. The same affix was used in a similar sense by the Greeks, whence Apollo was styled _Cun_ades and also _Cun_nins. The Cornish for _prince_ was _kyn_, and this term, as also the Irish _cun_, meaning _chief_, is evidently far more primitive than the modern _king_, which seems to have returned to us through Saxon channels. Prof. Skeat expresses his opinion that the term _king_ meant "literally a man of good birth," and he identifies it with the old High German _chunig_. Other authorities equate it with the Sanscrit _janaka_, meaning _father_, whence it is maintained that the original meaning of the word was "father of a tribe". Similarly the word _queen_ is derived by our dictionaries from the Greek _gyne_, a woman, or the Sanscrit _jani_, "all from root _gan_, to produce, from which are _genus_, _kin_, _king_, etc."