Month: April 2025

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread”- on faeries, theft & labour

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Fairy thieves by Herbert Cole

The phrase “by the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread,” reflects the fate of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden, according to Genesis: excluded from Paradise, they will have to work to get their food. Curiously, this line from the Bible also has some faery parallels.

There is a story about faery theft of human food that appears in several versions in the folklore record- from Northamptonshire, in the south-east Midlands, through Suffolk and down to Sussex. The most famous version, perhaps, is the Suffolk one, a tale widely known as ‘Brother Mike.’

“There once was a farmer who had a large amount of wheat stored on his barn. However, his heaps of wheat got smaller and smaller, and he had no idea how. At last, he hid himself near the barn one moonlit night where he could see the barn doors and, just when the clock struck midnight, a crowd of ‘little tiddy frairies’ appeared, running. They were ‘little bits of things,’ only as big as mice and they wore little blue coats, yellow breeches and tiny red caps with long tassels hanging down behind. They ran right up to the barn door and it opened wide as if by itself; then they hauled themselves over the threshold. Once the faeries were all inside, the farmer crept nearer and nearer and looked in. The ‘little frairies’ danced round and round for a while and then they each picked up an ear of wheat and shouldered it to carry it off. There was, though, one faery who was so small that he could hardly lift his ear of wheat and he kept saying as he walked: ‘Oh, how I du twait, a carrying o’ this air o’ wate’ (Oh, how I sweat, carrying this ear of wheat). When he got to the threshold, the little man was unable to get over, and the farmer reached out and seized him. The poor faery cried out “Brother Mike! Brother Mike!” as loud as he could, but the farmer dropped him in his hat and took him into the house for his children, where he tied him to the kitchen window. The poor little thing wouldn’t eat anything and pined away and died.”

There’s plenty to say about this. I’ve described captive faeries (and their fates) in a previous post (and they often cry out to relatives for help when they’re caught), but we might also remark upon the diminutive size of the beings- no bigger than mice and sharing the same habits. The Northamptonshire poet, John Clare, drew the same parallel in one verse: saying that “Mice are not reckoned greater thieves” (than faeries); he likewise regarded them as tiny and well suited to sneaking undetected into homes and shops.

Alongside their small stature is the faeries colourful and quaintly antique clothing along with an ingratiatingly childish nature: the faery thief lisps “twait” (or sometimes “twit”) rather than ‘sweat.’ A comparable speech impediment is found in a story of a Shetland trow who wants to borrow a sieve from a mortal family, but asks for a “piftan pif” (sifting sieve). This is either to be understood as a sign of immaturity or as an indicator of disability but, whichever explanation we choose, the closeness of faery physical development to our own is notable. Not only can they speak our language, but they may suffer comparable defects in performance too.

In contrast to the Suffolk faery, the character in the Sussex version of the story can pronounce the word correctly. He says to his companion “I’m sweating, Puck, are you?” to which the farmer angrily responds, “I’ll sweat you, you little rascals.” The man doesn’t catch them, though, and he’s punished with a poor harvest that year because he denied the faeries their rightful share of his crop. In another Suffolk telling, the interfering farmer receives a blow to his head, and is dead within the year; what’s more, in this case the faeries had not be stealing the corn but had been feeding it to the cart-horses, something they cease to do, so that the beasts waste away as well. As I have observed before, faery vengeance may be harsh as well as inexorable.

The core of the Borther Mike story seems to be the constant faery trait of living upon the fruits of human labour, whether there is some brownie-like work provided in return for this- threshing grain or caring for livestock- or whether it is pure larceny. There may be something of a Biblical joke worked into this- the struggle faced by fallen man is magnified by the fact that fallen angels (now the faeries trapped on earth between heaven and hell) prey upon them. Furthermore, part of the punishment of those angels may be that they too have to toil and sweat to acquire their ill-gotten gains.

Lastly, the question of faery perspiration is a subject few of us contemplate, I imagine. As I described in my book The Faery Lifecycle, as well as in a posting on faery poo, there are records of faery excretion which make it clear that they are physiologically very like us. It follows that sweating is another bodily function we will have in common- another reason why the faeries want to bathe regularly- but it is mentioned even less often than other processes. Nonetheless, as the story of Brother Mike shows, it is a normal fact of faery life.

Austin Osman Spare- occult artist

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Theurgy, 1928

Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) was a British writer, artist and explorer of the occult. During his life he knew such figures as Aleister Crowley, and his collaborator Victor Neuburg, and he produced a series of volumes of his own on magic and the supernatural. These were illustrated with his very fine pen and pencil drawings, which drew upon the style of Aubrey Beardsley, one of his earliest inspirations, and which were supplemented by inscriptions in his own magical alphabet, a script that was something akin to hieroglyphics, the magical sigils Spare used, and the angelic Enochian alphabet.

Spare was fascinated with spirits and ‘elementals.’ Although much of his life was spent alone, he did not feel solitary, for “I have only to turn my head to see the whole gang of familiars, elementals and alter-egos that make up my being.” He felt that these beings were always with him, visible in hordes around him. The exact nature of these entitites is uncertain, but they seem to be related to his creative powers and, as such, were some sort of manifestations of his “obsessions” or artistic visions. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson expressed this same concept more clearly in his essay ‘A Chapter on Dreams.’ He described how, whilst he was asleep, his ‘Brownies’ or Little People helped the dreamer:

“And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies (God bless them!) who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep and, in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For myself- I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no story-teller at all [and that] the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share…”

For Stevenson, these Brownies were “the little people who manage man’s internal theatre.” They work away behind the scenes, in the subconscious of the writer or artist, “they are near connections of the dreamer” and “often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him… better tales than he could fashion for himself.” These beings are plainly not domestic brownies as we might traditionally know them, but they are nonetheless working for humans in an equally valuable, if immaterial, way.

For Spare, elementals or familiars could also be intrusive, interfering with his moods or- even- with events in his life. As such, in the late 1920s he devised a way to try to control them, using them to make ideas and wishes come true- a form of personal magic that conjured and controlled his ‘faeries.’

Spare, Palimpsest

For Spare, these supernatural beings were very real and tangible, and could sometimes be summoned physically into his presence. One persistent theme in his art was that of satyrs, or of ‘satyrised’ men, characters who seem to stand for his own carnal desires or to symbolise male passions more generally.

An example of the reality of the supernatural to Spare struck me as very familiar indeed. He told a friend about an incident that had occured back in the 1900s when he was staying with friends in the countryside one winter and had gone out for a walk alone. He got lost, and it started to snow, but just at the point that he was exhausted and beginning to despair of his fate, a horse and cart appeared and took him to an inn. It seemed quite an old fashioned establishment but the warmth and shelter were naturally extremely welcome and he was revived with the finest wine he had ever tasted; then, when the snowfall ceased, he was shown the way home. The friends with whom he was staying were puzzled by his story as they knew of no such inn in the direction he indicated and, the next day, they set out to find it. They came across the cart tracks and followed them to a snowy mound- the ruins of a building long since collapsed.

We might interpret this (as I think Spare did) as a magical manifestation of shelter when he so desperately needed it, but it made me think of the numerous incidents when the faeries have conjured buildings out of nothing to provide board and lodging to lost humans- what I’ve called ‘glamour houses.’ I’ve discussed these at length in a previous post, but this story is very similar to the account with which I start my discussion of the subject- it concerns an inn on the Cotswolds that was found by a traveller in the snow and which had vanished by the next day when he came back to try to find it with his puzzled friends.

The eighteenth century minister and writer on Welsh faeries, the Reverend Edmund Jones, described a rather similar faery experience that he had had when he was a boy. He saw a strange apparition of something like a sheep fold, in which people were sitting, as well as coming and going from the structure.  Jones recalled that they “seemed like people who had lived before his time,” by which it appears that he was referring to their old-fashioned clothing styles. In reality, he revealed, there was no sheepfold at the place, only the overgrown traces of the ruins of one (see my Welsh Faeries- The Tylwyth Teg, c.3).

Netheresque, Austin Osman Spare

I’m also reminded of a strange incident reported by Dr. Susan Owens in her book, Spirit of Place- Artists, Writers & the British Landscape (2021). In 1916 the writer Edith Olivier was working with the Women’s Land Army. One October evening she was driving through the village of Avebury, site of a huge megalithic circle: she drove down an avenue of standing stones and decided to park and to climb onto the high banks that surround the stones. From there she saw, in-between the menhirs, a crowd of people attending a fair. They held flares and torches whilst they enjoyed the stalls and games, shouting and laughing to each other; oddly, though, no-one was wearing coats despite the heavy rain that was falling on that autumn evening. The rain got heavier, so Edith returned to her car to carry on her journey. She didn’t go back to Avebury for another nine years, but when she did, she discovered that the last time Avebury had a fair was in 1850 and that the avenue of stones she had driven along had disappeared before 1800…

The world of the faeries seems to have an interface- or to intersect- with the realm of the dead, so that the borders are unclear and the differences between them are hard to define- other than to say that there is no straight equation ‘faery=ghost.’ What’s very clear from the folklore record (as I’ve described in my Faery Lifecycle) is that faes are born, mature, eat, drink, procreate, age, fall sick and, ultimately, die. That being the case, the eerie events described in these three stories are open to being interpreted in several different ways, but in the case of Spare, his interest in the esoteric and the occult must have made him more sensitive or vulnerable to such a contact.

For more information, see Phil Baker’s fascinating Austin Osman Spare- The Life & Legend of London’s Lost Artist– available for all good physical and virtual vendors, etc.

Introduction to A Book of Satyrs, 1928

“Do it thi-sen”- the ‘ainsel’ theme in faery stories

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Herbert Cole, illustration for ‘Ainsel’ in Ernest Rhys, Fairy Gold- A Book of Old English Fairy Tales, 1906

Across Britain, you will find in the folklore record examples of the so-called ‘ainsel’ theme in faery accounts. Whether we are talking about faeries, brownies, each uisge, brollachan, trows– or others- this trope repeatedly appears.

It’ll be helpful to start with a brief discussion of British dialect. ‘Ainsel’ means ‘(my) own self’ (in other words, ‘me’) but variants upon this come from all parts of the British Isles. On Orkney and Shetland you read about ‘mysel’ whilst the title of this post comes (for me) from much closer to home. Being brought up in South Yorkshire during the 1960s and ’70s, I knew there was the ‘proper’ way to talk (at school and at home) and there was the local way to talk- in the playground and in the park (in other words, not when tha wa’ at skoil or at oo-em). When I first came across ainsel stories I straightaway knew what they meant, although in South Yorkshire you would have said ‘mi-sen’ (myself)- and, by extension ‘thi-sen’ (yourself, from thee- ‘you’) and ‘us-sens’ (ourselves) etc. Getting to grips with dialect is, in fact, almost a precondition to faery research, because so much of the folklore was recorded orally word for word. Some was therefore in Welsh and Gaelic, of course, but a lot was in the local dialect, whether that was Sussex, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, the Scottish Borders or Orkney and Shetland. Researching my recent book on trows, I came across a lot of documents in island-speak (a mixture of Scots and Norse). I’ll admit that I could manage short passages, but the longer stories often lost me.

Any road (as we say in South Yorkshire), back to ainsel. The plot of the story is always broadly the same, whatever the exact details of faery type and scenario. A typical one would be along the following lines:

“A woman was alone at home when a faery turned up. His plan was plainly to take advantage of her and she wished to defend herself. He asked her name and she replied ‘Mi-sen.’ He accepted this as her name without question and proceeded to try to seduce or assault her. She happened to be cooking- and there was boiling water/ porridge in the pot over the fire. When the faery got too close, she threw the contents of the pot all over him. He fled in agony and- it turns out- there were other faeries (friends or relatives) waiting quite nearby outside. They asked who’d hurt him and he said ‘It wa’ mi-sen.’ Their response was- in South Yorkshire speak- ‘Well, if tha did it thi-sen, there’s nowt to be done for thi, lad.’ They would have revenged the injury on a third party, but if the faery hurt himself through carelessness or accident, there was no guilty party to be punished.”

There are variations of place (a mill, a shieling) and the cause of the injury can vary- perhaps there was a fight, a trial of strength, a simple accident- but the core interaction of the ainsel stories is always the same. At the heart of the ainsel theme, there are several key principles. Firstly- don’t tell faeries your true name– it gives them power over you or (as in this case) it exposes you to liability and vengeance. Secondly, there has to be a bit of a suspension of disbelief about faery intelligence- as we’ve seen. The human says they’re called ‘Myself’ and the faery believes this and doesn’t say, “That’s not a personal name- what are you really called?” We have to accept this, as otherwise the story doesn’t work; in some cases, the faery may be a child, so we can put it down to the inexperience and ignorance of youth. In other cases, this excuse is not available in the plot and we have to suppose (I think) that the faery is just daft. To a certain extent, this carries over to the friends and relations waiting outside. They don’t ask too many questions and readily accept that the injury is self-inflicted.

The story fits within a broader category of tales which are concerned with the power of personal names, the need to keep these concealed, and how faeries can be outwitted by discovering what they’re secretly called (Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin is the continental version made famous by the Grimm brothers, but there are several British examples). At the core of all of these accounts is the notion that the faeries are a bit dimmer and less canny than humans: they can be careless and can be outsmarted as a result- in the ainsel cases, by simple wordplay. It’s a rather condescending and dismissive view of faery intelligence and one that, given our general fear of offending them, may seem rather ill-advised. I suspect that the ainsel stories are told, nevertheless, because they make us feel better: the faeries have magical powers and can be harmful towards us but– don’t despair- we can sometimes outwit and outmanoeuvre them.

Illustration to ‘Ainsel’ in Hartland, English Fairy & Other Folk Tales, 1890