Scottish Fairies and the Teind to Hell

Air n-Aithesc, 2015

An article looking at the aos sidhe or Good Neighbors in the context of Irish mythology and folklore with some Scottish cultural comparison.

Irish Fairies - A short History of the Sídhe, 2022

Irish Fairies A Short History of the Sídhe For thousands of years the Irish have believed in 'the fairies'. In present-day Ireland however, as in so many modern societies, fairies have been retreating, almost to the point of extinction. Nevertheless, the question might still be asked, what if Irish fairies were not created or imagined, but remembered? Ireland can trace the origins of its fairies to pre-Christian times. The large stone structures and tombs dotting the Irish landscape from the Neolithic Age prompted the immigrant Celts to weave a complex story about the builders, creating a pantheon of early gods. Over time, these evolved into fairy royalty. Their habitations became the brughsídhe or hostels, concentrations of fairy folk in the early medieval landscape. Their residences still stand today. It was generally understood that the fairies, na sídhe, led lives that paralleled human existence, but also stood apart. Living mostly underground, they showed themselves only when they choose to. They also lived close to the death realms-separate, but only just. While Creideamh Sídhe, the fairy faith, has mostly vanished across Europe, Ireland and a few other Celtic countries have been reluctant to forgo their remaining fairy connections. Since the seventeenth century, fairy communities have inveigled themselves into Irish society to remind us that even if we are forgetting them, they have not lost sight of us.

Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period, 2018

In 1647, Cornwall was abuzz with news of Ann Jefferies, a maid of St. Teath, and her meetings with the fairies. Ann reported that she regu larly encountered the beings in her room and that they brought her fairy food, so she could eschew earthly nourishment; they also gave her the ability to heal her neighbors of their ailments. This was a matter of deep concern to the local officials and ministers who came to speak with her. According to Moses Pitt, a boy in the house in which Ann worked, the officials warned her that the fairies "were evil Spirits that resorted to her, and that it was the Delusion of the Devil." After the officials departed, the maid heard the spirits call and, despite protestations from the Pitt family, she went to meet them. She returned with a bible with a page dog-eared at 1 John 4.1: "Dearly Beloved, believe not every Spirit, but

Folk-lore, 2019

In this paper I will be speaking about Irish folklore. By this word I do not mean the folklore which can be readily observed and recorded in the field-rapid development of the Irish economy and society in the last couple of decades has nearly completely destroyed Irish folklore in its traditional form. Our main sources of information on Irish folk traditions are field recordings made in the first half of the 20 th century, but as no distinct new stage in the development of the Irish tradition has begun since that time, in this paper I will use what is called the ethnographic present.

Magic and Witchery in the Modern West, 2019

This chapter examines the influence of literary and folkloric notions of fairies, elves, and related spiritual beings on the folklore of modern Pagan religions. It presents the argument that although modern Pagan conceptions of these beings are deeply rooted in both literature and folklore, the fairies have undergone a significant shift in perception in modern Paganisms, becoming friendlier, less dangerous, and altogether tamer. While this is in part due to their transformation in Victorian children’s literature and twentieth-century animated films, it is also a consequence of the unique Pagan ethos that identifies with alien others. The transformation of the fae from dangerous spirits to companions, protectors, and allies allows many Pagans to cultivate relationships with them through a variety of practices, some traditional, others innovative. Nonetheless, it argues, the phenomenological nature of fairy experiences keeps the fae from becoming too tame: they remain in a liminal cat...

Shai Feraro and Ethan Doyle White, eds., Magic and Witchery in the Modern West. Palgrave MacMillan., 2019

Prepublication copy of chapter in Shai Feraro and Ethan Doyle White, eds., Magic and Witchery in the Modern West (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). Traces the development of contemporary representations of fairies as helpers and protectors of the environment through literature and film in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and explores how fairy narratives among contemporary Pagans reflect these themes. I argue that environmental narratives about fairies among contemporary Pagans reflect literary and popular culture rather than oral tradition.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017

Copyright (c) 2017 by Audrey Robitaillié and Marjan Shokouhi. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for access. According to folk beliefs, people say that the fairies are out on the night of Samhain: "Deireann na daoine go mbíonn sidheogaí amuigh oidhche Shamhna", in the words of an informant for the Schools' Collection (NFCS 249). And so is this special issue of Estudios Irlandeses entitled "New Perspectives on Irish Folklore"! Far less risky than venturing out on the festival night, but equally audacious, this volume explores the rich traditions of Irish folklore and the various ways it is being/has been reused, repurposed and reinvented. The contributions to this issue explore multiple aspects of folklore today: from the tribulations of the folklore collectors to the reimagining of folklore for the stage, and its reuse in literature and musical compositions. Marina Warner asserts that "Every telling of a myth is a part of that myth: there is no Ur-version, no authentic prototype, no true account" (8). The same could be said of folklore, which is intertwined with mythology on many levels, for that matter. There are multiple variants of a tale type, many interpretations of a folk tune, and numerous versions of a rhyme, which all depend on the circumstances of the transmission, the informant, their locations, and so on. Folklore is a living, multi-faceted process that has as many shapes and forms as there are individuals who engage with it. It has therefore proved quite challenging to define. The Irish word for it, béaloideas, which literally means "oral instruction" (see Ó hÓgáin), embodies the orality which appears to be a common feature of the many attempted definitions. Seán Ó Súilleabháin explains it thus:

This article re-examines the evidence of the Scottish witchcraft trials for beliefs associated by scholars with 'elf-shot'. Some supposed evidence for elf-shot is dismissed, but other material illuminates the interplay between illness, healing and fairy-lore in early modern Scotland, and the relationships of these beliefs to witchcraft itself. In all, I accept ten printed trials to pertain meaningfully to elf-shot in some sense. This is a small corpus, though widely spread geographically. Despite the small sample, some patterns are apparent. It emerges that the schot of elf-schot denotes sharp pains rather than projectiles in our early evidence, and that compounds of elf with words for ailments--such as elf-schot (noun and past participle) and elf-grippit--occur in or imply narratives about members of human communities healing harm probably thought to be done by fairies. By contrast, four of the five trials mentioning elf-arrow-heidis concern their use by human witches in maleficium. The differences in vocabulary in the trials reflect differences in their narratives. I have interpreted material from as early as 1576 to suggest a system in which healers acted from within the community against illness caused by an external, more powerful group, the fairies. Meanwhile, the use of elf-arrow-heidis in witches' maleficium is attested from 1590 (with reference to 1576-77). These two systems for the aetiology of illness--fairies and witches--must have co-existed for centuries, but the evidence hints that over time, fairy-beliefs were incorporated into witchcraft-beliefs. The later accounts reorientate the construction of supernatural disease from deriving primarily from outside the community to deriving primarily from within: fairies, it can be argued, which in older belief-systems were an independent, external threat, became in these trials an adjunct of witches. By paying close attention to the language of our texts we can revise old assumptions about the character of Scottish beliefs at the time of the witchcraft trials. By situating this linguistic evidence in its narrative contexts, and adducing appropriate interpretative models, we can tell stories about Scottish fairy-belief quite different from those which dominate the narrative sources. These provide convincing, if only occasional, alternative perspectives on the culture in which the Scottish witchcraft trials took place.