The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries Part 12

Some persons are certainly more susceptible than others to these unknown forces. Most people know reliable instances of telepathy and presentiment amongst their acquaintances. It seems not at all contrary to reason that both matter and mind, in knowledge of which we have not gone so very far after all, may exist in forms as yet entirely unknown to us. After all, beings with bodies and personalities different from our own may well inhabit the unseen world around us: the Fairy Hound, white as driven snow, may show himself at times among his mundane companions; _Fenodyree_ may do the farm-work for those whom he favours; the _Little People_ may sing and dance o' nights in Colby Glen. Let us not say it is 'impossible'.

PEEL, ISLE OF MAN, _September_ 1910.

ON THE SLOPES OF SOUTH BARRULE

I was introduced to the ways and nature of Manx fairies in what is probably the most fairy-haunted part of the isle--the southern slopes of South Barrule, the mountain on whose summit Manannan is said to have had his stronghold, and whence he worked his magic, hiding the kingdom in dense fog whenever he beheld in the distance the coming of an enemy's s.h.i.+p or fleet. And from a representative of the older generation, Mrs.

Samuel Leece, who lives at Ballamodda, a pleasant village under the shadow of South Barrule, I heard the first story:--

_Baby and Table Moved by Fairies._--'I have been told of _their_ (the fairies') taking babies, though I can't be sure it is true. But this did happen to my own mother in this parish of Kirk Patrick about eighty years since: She was in bed with her baby, but wide awake, when she felt the baby pulled off her arm and heard the rush of _them_. Then she mentioned the Almighty's name, and, as _they_ were hurrying away, a little table alongside the bed went round about the floor twenty times.

n.o.body was in the room with my mother, and she always allowed it was the _little fellows_.'

MANX TALES IN A SNOW-BOUND FARM-HOUSE

When our interesting conversation was over, Mrs. Leece directed me to her son's farm-house, where her husband, Mr. Samuel Leece, then happened to be; and going there through the snow-drifts, I found him with his son and the family within. The day was just the right sort to stir Manx memories, and it was not long before the best of stories about the 'little people' were being told in the most natural way, and to the great delight of the children. The grandfather, who is eighty-six years of age, sat by the open fire smoking; and he prepared the way for the stories (three of which we record) by telling about a ghost seen by himself and his father, and by the announcement that 'the fairies are thought to be spirits'.

_Under 'Fairy' Control._--'About fifty years ago,' said Mr. T. Leece, the son, 'Paul Taggart, my wife's uncle, a tailor by trade, had for an apprentice, Humphrey Keggan, a young man eighteen or nineteen years of age; and it often happened that while the two of them would be returning home at nightfall, the apprentice would suddenly disappear from the side of the tailor, and even in the midst of a conversation, as soon as they had crossed the burn in the field down there (indicating an adjoining field). And Taggart could not see nor hear Humphrey go. The next morning Humphrey would come back, but so worn out that he could not work, and he always declared that _little men_ had come to him in crowds, and used him as a horse, and that with them he had travelled all night across fields and over hedges.' The wife of the narrator substantiated this strange psychological story by adding:--'This is true, because I know my Uncle Paul too well to doubt what he says.' And she then related the two following stories:--

_Heifer Killed by Fairy Woman's Touch._--'Aunt Jane was coming down the road on the other side of South Barrule when she saw a strange woman'

(who Mr. T. Leece suggested was a witch) 'appear in the middle of the gorse and walk right over the gorse and heather in a place where no person could walk. Then she observed the woman go up to a heifer and put her hand on it; and within a few days that heifer was dead.'

_The Fairy Dog._--'This used to happen about one hundred years ago, as my mother has told me:--Where my grandfather John Watterson was reared, just over near Kerroo Kiel (Narrow Quarter), all the family were sometimes sitting in the house of a cold winter night, and my great grandmother and her daughters at their wheels spinning, when a little white dog would suddenly appear in the room. Then every one there would have to drop their work and prepare for _the company_ to come in: they would put down a fire and leave fresh water for _them_, and hurry off upstairs to bed. They could hear _them_ come, but could never see them, only the dog. The dog was a fairy dog, and a sure sign of their coming.'

TESTIMONY OF A HERB-DOCTOR AND SEER

At Ballasalla I was fortunate enough to meet one of the most interesting of its older inhabitants, John Davies, a Celtic medicine-man, who can cure most obstinate maladies in men or animals with secret herbs, and who knows very much about witchcraft and the charms against it. 'Witches are as common as ducks walking barefooted,' he said, using the duck simile, which is a popular Manx one; and he cited two particular instances from his own experience. But for us it is more important to know that John Davies is also an able seer. The son of a weaver, he was born in County Down, Ireland, seventy-eight years ago; but in earliest boyhood he came with his people to the Isle of Man, and grew up in the country near Ramsay, and so thoroughly has he identified himself with the island and its lore, and even with its ancient language, that for our purposes he may well be considered a Manxman. His testimony about Manx fairies is as follows:--

_Actual Fairies Described._--'I am only a poor ignorant man; when I was married I couldn't say the word "matrimony" in the right way. But one does not have to be educated to see fairies, and I have seen them many a time. I have seen them with the naked eye as numerous as I have seen scholars coming out of Ballasalla school; and I have been seeing them since I was eighteen to twenty years of age. The last one I saw was in Kirk Michael. Before education came into the island more people could see the fairies; now very few people can see them. But _they_ (the fairies) are as thick on the Isle of Man as ever _they_ were. _They_ throng the air, and darken Heaven, and rule this lower world. It is only twenty-one miles from this world up to the first heaven.[42] There are as many kinds of fairies as populations in our world. I have seen some who were about two and a half feet high; and some who were as big as we are. I think very many such fairies as these last are the lost souls of the people who died before the Flood. At the Flood all the world was drowned; but the Spirit which G.o.d breathed into Adam will never be drowned, or burned, and it is as much in the sea as on the land. Others of the fairies are evil spirits: our Saviour drove a legion of devils into a herd of swine; the swine were choked, but not the devils. You can't drown devils; it is spirits they are, and just like a shadow on the wall.' I here asked about the personal aspects of most fairies of human size, and my friend said:--'_They_ appear to me in the same dress as in the days when they lived here on earth; the spirit itself is only what G.o.d blew into Adam as the breath of life.'

It seems to me that, on the whole, John Davies has had genuine visions, but that whatever he may have seen has been very much coloured in interpretation by his devout knowledge of the Christian Bible, and by his social environment, as is self-evident.

TESTIMONY OF A BALLASALLA MANXWOMAN

A well-informed Manxwoman, of Ballasalla, who lives in the ancient stone house wherein she was born, and in which before her lived her grandparents, offers this testimony:--

_Concerning Fairies._--'I've heard a good deal of talk about fairies, but never believed in them myself; the old people thought them the ghosts of the dead or some such things. They were like people who had gone before (that is, dead). If there came a strange sudden knock or noises, or if a tree took a sudden shaking when there was no wind, people used to make out it was caused by the fairies. On the 11th of May[43] we used to gather mountain-ash (_Cuirn_) with red berries on it, and make crosses out of its sprigs, and put them over the doors, so that the fairies would not come in. My father always saw that this was done; he said we could have no luck during the year if we forgot to do it.'

TESTIMONY GIVEN IN A JOINER'S SHOP

George Gelling, of Ballasalla, a joiner, has a local reputation for knowing much about the fairies, and so I called on him at his workshop.

This is what he told me:--

_Seeing the Fairies._--'I was making a coffin here in the shop, and, after tea, my apprentice was late returning; he was out by the hedge just over there looking at a crowd of _little people_ kicking and dancing. One of them came up and asked him what he was looking at; and this made him run back to the shop. When he described what he had seen, I told him they were nothing but fairies.'

_Hearing Fairy Music._--'Up by the abbey on two different occasions I have heard the fairies. They were playing tunes not of this world, and on each occasion I listened for nearly an hour.'

_Mickleby and the Fairy Woman._--'A man named Mickleby was coming from Derbyhaven at night, when by a certain stream he met two ladies. He saluted them, and then walked along with them to Ballahick Farm. There he saw a house lit up, and they took him into it to a dance. As he danced, he happened to wipe away his sweat with a part of the dress of one of the two strange women who was his partner. After this adventure, whenever Mickleby was lying abed at night, the woman with whom he danced would appear standing beside his bed. And the only way to drive her away was to throw over her head and Mickleby a linen sheet which had never been bleached.'

_Nature of Fairies._--'The fairies are spirits. I think they are in this country yet: A man below here forgot his cow, and at a late hour went to look for her, and saw that crowds of fairies like little boys were with him. [St.] Paul said that spirits are thick in the air, if only we could see them; and we call spirits fairies. I think the old people here in the island thought of fairies in the same way.'

_The Fairies' Revenge._--William Oates now happened to come into the workshop, and being as much interested in the subject under discussion as ourselves, offered various stories, of which the following is a type:--'A man named Watterson, who used often to see the fairies in his house at Colby playing in the moonlight, on one occasion heard them coming just as he was going to bed. So he went out to the spring to get fresh water for them; and coming into the house put the can down on the floor, saying, "Now, little beggars, drink away." And at that (an insult to the fairies) the water was suddenly thrown upon him.'

A VICAR'S TESTIMONY

When I called on the Rev. J. M. Spicer, vicar of Malew parish, at his home near Castletown, he told me this very curious story:--

_The Taking of Mrs. K----._--'The belief in fairies is quite a living thing here yet. For example, old Mrs. K----, about a year ago, told me that on one occasion, when her daughter had been in Castletown during the day, she went out to the road at nightfall to see if her daughter was yet in sight, whereupon a whole crowd of fairies suddenly surrounded her, and began taking her off toward South Barrule Mountain; and, she added, "I couldn't get away from _them_ until I had called my son."'

A CANON'S TESTIMONY

I am greatly indebted to the Rev. Canon Kewley, of Arbory, for the valuable testimony which follows, and especially for his kindness in allowing me to record what is one of the clearest examples of a collective hallucination I have heard about as occurring in the fairy-haunted regions of Celtic countries:--

_A Collective Hallucination._--'A good many things can be explained as natural phenomena, but there are some things which I think cannot be.

For example, my sister and myself and our coachman, and apparently the horse, saw the same phenomenon at the same moment: one evening we were driving along an avenue in this parish when the avenue seemed to be blocked by a great crowd of people, like a funeral procession; and the crowd was so dense that we could not see through it. The throng was about thirty to forty yards away. When we approached, it melted away, and no person was anywhere in sight.'

_The Manx Fairy-Faith._--'Among the old people of this parish there is still a belief in fairies. About eighteen years ago, I buried a man, a staunch Methodist, who said he once saw the road full of fairies in the form of little black pigs, and that when he addressed them, "In the name of G.o.d what are ye?" they immediately vanished. He was certain they were the fairies. Other old people speak of the fairies as the _little folk_.

The tradition is that the fairies once inhabited this island, but were banished for evil-doing. The elder-tree, in Manx _tramman_, is supposed to be inhabited by fairies. Through accident, one night a woman ran into such a tree, and was immediately stricken with a terrible swelling which her neighbours declared came from disturbing the fairies in the tree.

This was on the borders of Arbory parish.'

The Canon favours the hypothesis that in much of the folk-belief concerning fairies and Fairyland there is present an instinct, as seen among all peoples, for communion with the other world, and that this instinct shows itself in another form in the Christian doctrine of the Communion of Saints.

FAIRY TALES ON CHRISTMAS DAY

The next morning, Christmas morning, I called at the picturesque roadside home of Mrs. Dinah Moore a Manxwoman living near Glen Meay; and she contributed the best single collection of Manx folk-legends I discovered on the island. The day was bright and frosty, and much snow still remained in the shaded nooks and hollows, so that a seat before the cheerful fire in Mrs. Moore's cottage was very comfortable; and with most work suspended for the ancient day of festivities in honour of the Sun, re-born after its death at the hands of the Powers of Darkness, all conditions were favourable for hearing about fairies, and this may explain why such important results were obtained.

_Fairy Deceit._--'I heard of a man and wife who had no children. One night the man was out on horseback and heard a little baby crying beside the road. He got off his horse to get the baby, and, taking it home, went to give it to his wife, and it was only a block of wood. And then the old fairies were outside yelling at the man: "_Eash un oie, s'cheap t'ou mollit!_" (Age one night, how easily thou art deceived!).'

_A Midwife's Strange Experience._--'A strange man took a nurse to a place where a baby boy was born. After the birth, the man set out on a table two cakes, one of them broken and the other one whole, and said to the nurse: "Eat, eat; but don't eat of the cake which is broken nor of the cake which is whole." And the nurse said: "What in the name of the Lord am I going to eat?" At that all the fairies in the house disappeared; and the nurse was left out on a mountain-side alone.'

_A Fairy-Baking._--'At night the fairies came into a house in Glen Rushen to bake. The family had put no water out for them; and a beggar-man who had been left lodging on the sofa downstairs heard the fairies say, "We have no water, so we'll take blood out of the toe of the servant who forgot our water." And from the girl's blood they mixed their dough. Then they baked their cakes, ate most of them, and poked pieces up under the thatched roof. The next day the servant-girl fell ill, and was ill until the old beggar-man returned to the house and cured her with a bit of the cake which he took from under the thatch.'

_A Changeling Musician._--'A family at Dalby had a poor idiot baby, and when it was twenty years old it still sat by the fire just like a child.

A tailor came to the house to work on a day when all the folks were out cutting corn, and the idiot was left with him. The tailor began to whistle as he sat on the table sewing, and the little idiot sitting by the fire said to him: "If you'll not tell anybody when they come in, I'll dance that tune for you." So the little fellow began to dance, and he could step it out splendidly. Then he said to the tailor: "If you'll not tell anybody when they come in, I'll play the fiddle for you." And the tailor and the idiot spent a very enjoyable afternoon together. But before the family came in from the fields, the poor idiot, as usual, was sitting in a chair by the fire, a big baby who couldn't hardly talk.

When the mother came in she happened to say to the tailor, "You've a fine chap here," referring to the idiot. "Yes, indeed," said the tailor, "we've had a very fine afternoon together; but I think we had better make a good fire and put him on it." "Oh!" cried the mother, "the poor child could never even walk." "Ah, but he can dance and play the fiddle, too," replied the tailor. And the fire was made; but when the idiot saw that they were for putting him on it he pulled from his pocket a ball, and this ball went rolling on ahead of him, and he, going after it, was never seen again.' After this strange story was finished I asked Mrs.

Moore where she had heard it, and she said:--'I have heard this story ever since I was a girl. I knew the house and family, and so did my mother. The family's name was Cubbon.'

_The Fenodyree's (or 'Phynnodderee's') Disgust._--'During snowy weather, like this, the Fenodyree would gather in the sheep at night; and during the harvest season would do the thres.h.i.+ng when all the family were abed.

One time, however, just over here at Gordon Farm, the farmer saw him, and he was naked; and so the farmer put out a new suit of clothes for him. The Fenodyree came at night, and looking at the clothes with great disgust at the idea of wearing such things, said:--

_Bayrn_ da'n chione, doogh da'n chione, Cooat da'n dreeym, doogh da'n dreeym, Breechyn da'n toin, doogh da'n toin, Agh my she lhiat Gordon mooar, Cha nee lhiat Glion reagh Rushen.