In Ireland, almost more than any other country in Europe, the fairies have, or had till recently, an almost god-like status. In Evan Wentz's exploration into Celtic Fairy Beliefs, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, published in 1911, we have a report collected near Ben Bulbin in County Sligo, which gives this status to The Gentry. The speaker was an old man whose ancestors had lived for four hundred years under the shadow of Ben Bulbin and who was thoroughly imbued with the traditions of the county.

The gentry take a great interest in the affairs of men, and they always stand for justice and right. Any side they favour in our wars, that side wins. They favoured the Boers, and the Boers did get their rights. They told me they favoured the Japanese and not the Russians, because the Russians were tyrants. Sometimes they fight among themselves. One of them once said, 'I'd fight for a friend, or I'd fight for Ireland.'

It was considered very important to retain the goodwill of the fairies, and careless talk about them was to be avoided, particularly out of doors, for the wind would carry anything that was said to fairy ears. Seemingly impossible tasks could be performed with fairy help, but this was often dearly paid for, as in the Rumpelstiltskin stories, Tom Tit Tot, Hard Weather and Whuppity Stoorie. However some of the boons bestowed were purely benevolent like the spinning of Habetrot, the tutelary fairy of spinning. Another skill frequently bestowed by the fairies is that of piping or fiddling.

A tale called 'Finger Lock' is in the archives of the School of Scottish Studies, recorded by Hamish Henderson from Walter Johnson. It is a variant of the Cinderlad story and is woven round the McCrimmon Brothers, the famous Scottish pipers. 'Finger Lock' is the name of a well-known pipe tune.

There were three McCrimmon brothers and two of them were great pipers, and used to go piping about everywhere, but they just kept the youngest one for a slave. Once at a time of the Games the youngest one asked if he might go too to hear the piping. The eldest hit him across the face, and told him to bide at home, and mind the cows. So the two went off and locked the door so that the laddie shouldn't steal any food, and left him at the burnside, watching the cows. He was lying there very sadly when a wee green man came up and asked what was the matter.

'I wanted to go to the games with by brothers, to hear the piping,' said the laddie.

'I'll give you a piping,' said the fairy, and he played the loveliest tune of a strae. 'Now you play,' he says.

'I canna play,' says the laddie, 'not even the chanter, and my brothers has the pipes with them, and the door of the house is locked forbye.'

'That's easy enough,' said the fairy, 'just blow in the lock, and put your wee finger in and turn it.' The laddie did that and the door opened. 'Look in the old kist,' said the fairy, 'and you will find your pipes.'

There was an old kist there he had never seen before. He opened it, and there was a set of pipes mounted in gold and the finest kilt you ever saw. The laddie put it on and he looked grand.

'Play a tune on your pipes,' said the wee green man. The laddie played, and a tune seemed to come out of his head, the like of which he'd never heard before. 'The name of that tune is "The Finger Lock"' said the wee green man.

He went off to the Games, and everyone sat in a dream, listening to him playing 'The Finger Lock'. He got the prize before everyone, but the fairy had told him to be home early, so he slipped away and when his brothers came back, everything was back in the kist, and there he was in his old clothes, watching the cows by the burn. He asked his brothers how the playing had gone and they said the grandest player had come and played the finest tune that ever was heard.

'What was the name of it?' said the laddie.

'It was called "The Finger Lock"'.

'Ach!' says he, 'I can play that tune myself.'

'You!' says they. 'You canna so much as play on the chanter.'

'Wait here a wee minute,' he says and he went off to the kist and put on his kilt and took up the pipes, and played 'The Finger Lock' over to them. After that the two elder McCrimmons never went to the Games and Gatherings, but the youngest went to them, and was the best piper of the three. And that was how 'The Finger Lock' was first played.

Another fairy power was that of healing, and the fairies sometimes benevolently bestowed that on poor men, though the well-intended gift occasionally turned into a source of danger. Such a double-edged gift entered into history and was twice mentioned in informal accounts of witch trials it is the story of The White Powder.

Durant Hotham mentions the incident in the Preface to his Life of Jacob Behmen, published in 1654, which contains several passages of some interest, and Webster in his Displays of Supposed Witchcraft, more than twenty years later expands the account, for he himself had been present at the trial.

He tells us that the man was a very ignorant, poor person, who had found means to keep himself and his family by the use of white powder, which brought him under the suspicion of witchcraft. He goes on:

The judge asking him how he came by the powder, he told a story to this effect. 'That one n night before the day was gone, as he was going home from his labour, being very sad and full heavy thoughts, not knowing how to get meat and drink for his wife and children, he met a fair Woman in fine cloaths, who asked him why he was so sad, and he told her it was by reason of his poverty, to which she said, that if he would follow her counsel she would help him to that which would serve him to get a good living; to which he said he would consent with all his heart, so it were not by unlawful ways; she told him that it should not be by any such ways, but by doing of good and curing sick people, and so warning him strictly to meet her there the next night at the same time, she departed from him, and he went home. And the next night at the time appointed he duly waited, and she (according to promise) came and told him that it was well he came so duly, otherwise he had missed of the benefit, that she intended to do unto him, and so bade him follows her and not be afraid. Thereupon she led him to a little Hill, and she knocked three times, and the Hill opened, and they went in, and came to a fair hall, wherein was a Queen, sitting in great state, and many people about her, and the Gentlewoman that brought him, presented him to the Queen, and she said he was welcome, and bid the Gentlewoman give him some of the white powder, and teach him how to use it; which she did, and gave him a little wood box full of white powder, and bid him give 2 or 3 grains of it to any that were sick, and it would heal them, and so she brought him forth of the Hill, and so they parted.' And being asked by the Judge whether the place within the Hill, which he called a Hall, were light or dark, he said indifferent, as it is with us in twilight; and being asked how he got more powder, he said when he wanted he went to that hill, and knocked three times, and said every time 'I am coming, I am coming,' whereupon it opened, and he going in was conducted by the aforesaid Woman to the Queen, and so had more powder given him.

The jury either believed his story or judged it to be a harmless delusion, for they acquitted him. The judge was harsher or more critical, for he said that if he had had his way he would have had the man whipped to the Fairy Hill, but fortunately he did not have his way, and no one took up the man's challenge to go with him to the Hill.

Here we have a legend of purely benevolent fairies, who did good to a poor man out of pity and without payment. If the story of a fairy association was an attempt to put a more favourable gloss upon help given by a herbalist who might have been suspected as a witch the man selected a story which gained a certain amount of credence. It seemed the fairies were accepted as more creditable associates than even white witches would have been.

Skill in crafts was sometimes bestowed as well as in music or dancing. Evan Wentz collected a legend from an old piper in the Isle of Barra about skill in boat-making bestowed on a young prentice. A boy apprenticed to carpentry was working with his master on building a boat on the shore. He found he had forgotten a tool and ran back to the workshop to fetch it, but disturbed a crowd of fairies hard at work on carpentry. They scattered as he ran in, and one little fairy woman was so flustered that she dropped her silk girdle as she ran, and the boy picked it up and put it in his pocket. In a minute the little woman came back to look for it and asked the boy to give it to her. He refused, and she promised to give him full skill in his trade without further apprenticeship, so he restored it to her, and she ran away with it happily. Next morning the boy got up very early, and fitted two planks into the boat so perfectly that the master asked him if he knew who had been there, for they were set in by a master who could teach him his trade. So the boy told the master his story, and his skill stayed with him all his life, in spite of his mention of a fairy gift.

There are various other boons given by the fairies, though good luck and health are generally the best tokens of their favour.

However valuable fairy help might be to mortals, yet it will be seen that the fairies were in many ways even more dependent upon human help and nourishment. The food served at their banquets may appear delicious, but it is spiced and dressed by glamour. It can serve no human need and is insufficient even for the fairies, unless it is reinforced by thefts from human food, the 'foyson' or goodness stolen out of mortals' milk or cheese or grain, or the food itself stolen away as if by birds or mice. According to St Collen, the fairies, if left to themselves, fed upon the glamourized leaves of a tree; J. G. Campbell gives them rather more choice of diet, for grain they grew barley in the subterranean world, roots of silverweed, stalks of heather and milk of red-deer and goats made up the rest of their diet. The medieval Green Children had a more austere world with an exclusive diet of green beans, traditionally the food of the dead. The foyson of human food has presumably been transformed into food proper to the fairies, which was unsuitable for human consumption, for those who ate it became fairies themselves andn unable to return to the human world. It may be that some of the fairy individuals who depended on human food were, like Malekin, captives in Fairyland who were still hoping to return to humanity, but the instances of fairy thefts were too frequent to lead us to suppose that this would always be so. In the tale of The Tacksman of Auchriachan two of the inhabitants of the fairy house had once been human, but all of them made their meal from the foyson of the Tacksman's ox and cakes, and there are so m any evidences of fairy thefts as to make it seem their most usual custom. D. A. KcKenzie in his Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life quotes a story from a book published in Inverness in 1891 which records a large-scale theft of milk. This was give as part of the evidence at Lord Lovat's trial in 1746.

John Fraser prospered for a time and supplied milk of excellent quality to his Inverness customers. Then suddenly 'a famine of mile set in'; the cows gave little or no milk. At last no more could be supplied for sale to Inverness. The very bairns in the town cried out for milk which could not be had. 'Through summer, autumn, winter and spring the scarcity of milk continued.'

One evening, 'early in the summer of the year following that when the dearth began', Fraser was standing near a rowan tree near his mill. He saw approaching a strange dwarfish man clad in curious attire. The careworn and elderly aspect of his face contrasted with his 'youthful locks of brown hair'. This stranger carried over a shoulder 'a long tapering sapling of hawthorn that seemed as if it would break beneath the load of some invisible burden that was attached to its slenderest end'. He did not speak to Fraser when he reached the rowan tree, nor did Fraser speak to him.

Fraser suddenly suspected that the stranger had some evil intent and, seizing the end of the hawthorn sapling, severed a portion of it with his gulley knife. The old man walked on as if unaware of Fraser's action and 'disappeared over the rising ground towards the Leachkin.'

The Narrative continues:

As he vanished from the sight of Fraser, a rushing sound came from the cut twig that had fallen...Rich, creamy milk flowed as in a stream - it overspread in all directions the field where the miller stood...A rivulet of milk flowed towards the River Ness, giving it for a time 'a milky appearance.' Thus did John Fraser cut the fairy spell and let loose the milk that had been stolen from the cows of the valley for so many months. No longer did the cows refuse their milk, but gave it even more plentifully than before, and it was noticed that the field where the switch had been cut from the old man's wand yielded a richer crop of grass for years after.

This is the tale of theft on a large scale. Often the fairies proceeded in a gentler way of borrowing, and a willing loan brought a blessing with it.

Lady Wilde give two stories of fairy dealings with cows in her Ancient Legends of Ireland. One is the straightforward anecdote of the milking of a cow by a fairy woman. Like the cow Daisy in the Cornish story, a cow refuses to let her milk down and goes night and morning to stand under a hawthorn tree. One day the farmer watches and sees an old woman in red come out of the trunk of the hawthorn and milk the cow. He consults a 'fairy doctor,' who brings the trouble to an end by singing, incantations, a herbal draught, and a red-hot ring drawn round the hawthorn tree. No ill fortune follows this treatment. In the second tale, however, there is cooperation and good feeling between mortals and fairies. A cow was being lured into a fairy rath and the little her boy, the son of the farmer, was trying to drive it back when an old fairy woman appeared and coaxed him to lend the cow for a year, for their queen needed the taste of fresh milk. At the end of the year, she said, the cow would come back to him with a beautiful calf. She spoke so pleasantly that the boy was willing to do anything for her, so he too a hazel stick as she asked him and tapped the cow three times with it, and the old woman and the cow vanished together into the rath. The boy had to go back and tell his father as best he could. The father kept the date in mind, and on that very day next year he sent the boy to the rath, and there was the cow waiting quietly for him, with a beautiful little calf beside her. So all was well between that farmer and the fairies.

Fairies as always grateful for human help in mending or making utensils for them. There are several variants of 'The Fairy Ped' and 'The Fairy Peel,' always ending in a gift of food from the grateful fairies, and good luck following on its acceptance. A short version of this legend is to be found in Leather's Folklore of Herefordshire.

One day a man was working in the fields when he heard the fairies talking over their baking; they said they had no peel. He said 'I'll find a peel.' He made one and left it out in the field where they could easily get it. Next day it was gone, and it its place the fairies had given him a batch of delicious cakes. But they were invisible all the time: he never saw then, only heard them talking. A peel is a flat iron shovel, with a long wooden handle, used for putting bread or loaves into an oven and taking them out.

One of the most widespread of the traditions about intercourse between fairies and humans is that of their visits to human houses by night. In a way it cannot be described as intercourse because the fairies wanted the living quarters left to them, neat and clean, ready for their use, with water set out and a clear fire burning. The owners of the house were supposed to be upstairs, with their eyes shut and preferably asleep. This is well illustrated in Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, in the evidence taken by Evan Wentz in the Isle of Man.

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 Keroo Kiel (Narrow Quarter), all the family were sometimes sitting in the house of a cold winter night, and my great grand-mother 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 they could never see them, only the dog. The dog was a fairy dog, and a sure sign of their coming.

All was well when things were performed in order in this way, but the fairies can take a grim revenge if their desires were not met. Wentz collected an example of this from Glen Rushen in the Isle of Man.

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.

Here the fairies behaved like vampires; and though they do not often suck human blood they are supposed to have a constant need to reinforce the dwindling stock of fairy life and energy. This is the explanation generally given of the fairy theft of human children and of beautiful girls to be wives to fairy men and bear their half-human children. It is constantly said in Ireland that humans are borrowed to take part in fairy games of hurling and in faction fights. This belief is tersely illustrated in evidence given to Evan Wentz in North Galway.

Fairy Warfare - When the fairy tribes under the various kinds and queens have a battle, one side manages to have a living man among them, and he by knocking the fairies about turns the battle in case the side he is on is losing. It is always usual for the Munster fairy kind to challenge Finvara, the Connaught fairy kind.

In this short extract the phrase 'living man' seems significant, and the introduction of Finvara, King over the Dead, as one of the combatants. The sense of the dwindling powers of the fairies is strongest where the connection between the fairies and the dead is strong. In Cornwall the fairies are generally described as the pagan dead, who were not bad enough for Hell and not good enough for Heaven. In Ireland, Finvara of Connaught is always described as leading a host of the Dead. He and his wife, Oonagh, are a kind of Pluto and Persephone. This dependence of the fairies upon human strength and the illusory nature of the fairly delights may be a part of that strand of fairy belief which identifies or connects them with the dead.

K. Briggs, The Vanishing People. Fairy Lore and Legends. New York: Pantheon, 1978, pp. 133-140, 190.

Dependence of fairies upon mortals. The FAIRIES appear to have an independent existence of their own, to lead their lives in subterranean or subaqueous countries, or on enchanted islands across the sea. They rise, revel, dance and hold their FAIRY MARKETS, they pursue their own crafts, spin, weave, make shoes and labour in the mines; and yet from time to time we come across extraordinary examples of their dependence upon humanity. The commonest stories about them are of their thefts of human babies and their periodic need of a human MIDWIFE TO THE FAIRIES. It is possible that these last may be for the human brides stolen, but here again we see the fairy dependence. Mortal blood seems needed to replenish the fairy stock. Sometimes it is needed literally: in the Isle of Man it was believed that if water was not left out for the fairies to drink, they would suck the blood of the sleepers in the house. This was reported by Evans Wentz in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries...

The other most obvious example of dependence was on human food. Again and again we are told of FAIRY THEFTS of grain, milk or butter, or of them carrying away the FOYSON or goodness of food or cattle and leaving only a simulacrum behind. In some of the stories, such as the medieval tale of MALEKIN, the explanation might be that it was a human CHANGELING who wished to return to the world again and so refrained from FAIRY FOOD, but the instances are too frequent to allow of that as the sole explanation. In the friendly intercourse of FAIRY BORROWING, they sometimes beg for a suck of milk from a human breast for a fairy baby, or a load of human skill to mend a broken too such as a BROKEN PED. In Ireland in particular human strength is needed to give power to the fairy arms in faction fights or in HURLING matches. Evan Wentz gives a report of this...KIRK suggests that many of the spectacles seen among the fairies are imitations or foreshadowings of human happenings, as some of the FAIRY FUNERALS are supposed to be. Indeed, however much the fairies may seem to resent human prying and INFRINGEMENTS OF FAIRY PRIVACY, it would appear that the affairs of humanity are of more importance to them than they would wish us to suppose...

K. Briggs, An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural Creatures. New York: Pantheon, 1976, pp. 96-97.

For Further Reading