A Recent "Popular" Case: A Big Jump Forward In Time

          
           THE RECENT CASE OF CUTTING A SHADOW

I'm violating my previous pattern of Little People posts today. The reason is that the case I'll discuss is sort of running rampant around Fairyworld conversations and has popped up in my communication exchanges in three different ways over the last few days. SO .... I feel moved to write it up here and talk, just a little, about it. Hopefully you'll like the approach.

Where this case came from: There is a wonderful Canadian documentary which was mentioned on this site by a reader. It is entitled THE FAIRY FAITH and it is by John Walker who did a great job. 

There are lots of interesting things therein. But one, this case, stands out. 

I didn't catch the year (sometime within the past ten --- whoops just found out that the documentary isn't really brand new, so, place this case in about the 1990s) near Glasgow, Scotland at a place called Fairy Hill  (Perthshire) a single man, a laborer, was doing something that he often does and enjoys: walking on the hills and enjoying Nature. Out of a clear sky, he was surprised by the development around him of a dewy fog, complete with a beautiful rainbow. He was thrilled by the atmosphere --- delighted by what he felt was a privileged moment. 

As he reached the crest of a small decline, the Sun broke through and cast his shadow down the hillside. He stood there now hearing enchanting harp like "fairy music."

Then something even more strange: Down the hill, near the head of his shadow, stood a little four foot tall man. He seemed to nod at him. But more so: there near him at the feet of his shadow, knelt a female version of the man. The two had tanned faces, he bristly facial hair without a true beard. The texture of their skin seemed "wizened." They wore small sewn caps and badly stained leathery clothes, as if somehow they had spent time in a boggy place. AND most alarming of all, the female was apparently attempting to cut away his shadow from his shoes.

The witness yelled "OYE!!" and the two fairy folk just popped out of existence, or at least out of sight.

This witness appeared on the film in an attitude and presentation which was one of the best I've ever seen. HIGHLY impressive as a good commonsense even-keeled fellow, who anyone would like and trust. I liked him and it.

........... but what could this shadow business have been about? No one could know the meaning of this of course, but we can throw a few ideas out.

In the Greek world, and following the Roman world, there was The Land of Shades --- Shadows --- something so fundamental to the nature of human beings that they were almost the equivalent of "the Soul" or "the Ghost" or some extremely significant revenant or left-over of the person post-Death. Such ideas exist in cultures all over the world --- Japan, Africa, ... nearly anywhere. The connection which almost all the old cultures felt between the person's shadow and the person's life in this world was seemingly obvious. Some cultures even felt that when you lay down to sleep, your shadow absorbed into your body while your consciousness temporarily left the world.

In Japan, there also was an idea that there existed creatures which did not have shadows at all. These creatures were felt to be "demons", but my reading of these demons is that they are more like "tricksters" than devils. In that, they might even be thought of as Celtic people thought of some of The Little People.

Do Little People have shadows? Or are they part of a parallel appearing but non-physical form of reality, which is not founded upon the textbook physical laws (like, light interrupted  by matter creates a shadow.)

All of that is me BSing about things that I cannot know well enough to have earned an opinion. But, taken with that humility, one can still daydream about a denizen of a world without shadows (Faery) symbolically cutting off a human's shadow. Could such an action be seen as a precedent for taking the human away into fairyland? Or, was this fairy "kidding" to just mess around with a person as a trickster would do?

That's all I've got for now. The case is a very neat one, and worth putting out there.

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Very Olde Critters Again

(Still in Leprecat pp. 2-3 ... and whatever follows. "Trying to mop up the pre-1900s" I guess is the best way to characterize my frazzled approach to this.)

OFF WE GO AGAIN.

Well, it's a fine bunch of folks we have here.

ISLE of SKYE, UK 1870s.  The story comes from Katherine Briggs who, along with writing her many charming books about the fairy world, also did the field work of actual interviewing. In this incident it was the wife of one of the participants (deceased) that told her husband's encounter. 

When I began collecting these reports, it was a powerful hunch that the northwestern islands of Britain would be, along with Wales, the best shot one would have to have one's own encounter. Now, after looking into this case, places like the Isle of Skye scream "Faery" at a glance. The event to be described did not occur in quite so wild a place as the above pictured, but all of Skye seems touched with Faery green.

... see what I mean?

In a village on the island a young boy (the witness referred to previously) and his sister were being watched after by their grandmother, as their mother had to be away at the next village. A third child joined them and also another elderly woman dropped by to visit the grandma.  As the playtime wore on, the children were behaving somewhat "negatively" (tired and ornery)  outdoors. Grandma felt that she had to intervene before this got out of hand. And so did her visitor.

This visitor happened to be not just any visitor, but was what was then called a "Wise Woman." She might have been suspected of being a witch in former less-sane times, and she had "The Second Sight." She went to the children and asked them if they would like to see something unusual. And of course they would.

Hand-in-hand, the four of them went for a walk down a path and across a glen (maybe one of Skye's famous Fairy Glens), and sat down on the grass beside a stream. Shortly, across the stream there was a fire burning. It was dusk, and the fire seemed bright, and then, all around it, fairies appeared and began to do their circling dance. The Little People (their size is not described) were dressed all in green and their dance was enthusiastic ("merry"). 

I suppose that after a while the vision went away and the Wise Woman and the children went back home. The children returned to the site with others the next day but there was no sign that there had been a fire. The young boy, when older, and he a minister, told his wife that he felt that the only reason that they saw the fairy circle dance was because the Wise Woman was there and they all held hands. Whether that is true, who can say? 

But it is a pretty decent case.

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ISLE of MAN, 1884.  This one, I believe, is a bit of a gem. 

This tale was gathered by a lawyer who was visiting the Isle of Man, and following his passion for collecting folklore. He was a member of The Folk-Lore Society and was happy to write up the report in their journal in 1902. The incident happened in 1884, and the interview was taken by the lawyer three years later with the prime witness. That is a pretty good beginning in the credibility department (since our reporter also vetted the witness to a degree and thought the man "sober and honest.")

The story: The witness was a postal carrier. His typical job was to drive his horse-drawn cart from a central office around the small towns nearby and to collect the mailbags for their later delivery. This job was a late night affair, covering hours around midnight and the early morning period. 

He was well into his route and had many mail packages on board. He was due back at his home area at 1:30am but did not arrive until 5:30. Here's what happened: coming into his home stretch, only six miles from home, he came across a troop of fairies in the road. This troop was dressed sharply in red uniforms and many carried lighted lanterns. Whether they were offended by the entry of the mailman and his horse, or whether they were just looking to make mischief, they swarmed upon the cart, attacking the man and grabbing and throwing the mail bags all over the road. They began dancing around the bags riotously, and pushing the helpless postman around when he attempted to make them stop. 

This physical harassment went on for four hours, only ceasing when the Sun began to cast some dawn light at the horizon. It took the exhausted postman some time to regain his wits and he then began to retrieve his mail and go on with his route. With this the story ends. 

Hmmmm .... a good well-known witness, interviewed by an intelligent interviewer, neither or whom added any dazzling fairytale-like details to the story. In fact, this is a posterchild for the typical believable tale: an astonishing interaction which some other reality, which has the feel of an accidental intersecting of two lines of reality, and which contains no "profundity", or messages, or moral. 

A good one, I think.

.... neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet .... but watch out for that Gloom of Night stuff. 

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St. Ives, Cornwall. c. the late 1800s. 

The source of this story seems good, or at least probably good. Here's what I think that I know: The primary publication of this is in a book by AKH Jenkin. Cornwall and the Cornish, published in 1933. The prime witness is named as an old lady named Mrs Rebecca Noall, who had died in 1927. Jenkin was not the interviewer, but got the story from a lady named Mrs JH Hodge. Hmmm.... a tougher nut to crack than ideal.  I still think that the chain of investigation is OK; here's why: 

Jenkin had just finished a book on the history of Cornwall mining  and it was considered a good piece of work. He wanted to follow that up by a book on Cornish folklore (this book.) The locals seem to have felt that he was a good scholar, and the Introduction was written by a famous local lawyer and politician, Isaac Foot, who was also an expert in mining. Mrs JH Hodge was a member of a very well-known entrenched St. Ives family, and her husband (I believe) wrote a piece on folk culture in the regional journal of the time. Either Rebecca Noall or a relative also wrote such a piece. The picture that I get is one of a trusted author getting information from a good folklore source. 

So, with some confidence, the Tale: It was common in the day that many of the girls of Cornwall worked jobs late into the evening. Rebecca was no different. Her father usually came by at eleven or midnight or so to escort his daughter back home. Thus father and daughter were walking back to their home when the following occurred. 

At a lonely spot on one of the streets, they saw approaching a troop of Little People. These were marching on both sides of them, in precision as in some ceremony. They were arm-and-arm and dressed alike in scarlet cloaks with tall peaked black hats. They proceeded "with the greatest decorum and dignity." Rebecca's father whispered to her that she should remain absolutely silent and show no sign of recognition. Thus the trooping fairies passed "safely" by, and father and daughter went safely home. 

Again, seemingly a good one. Good witness (and apparently multiple); fine closeness of encounter; good if not full detail (ex. no specific size stated but "small"); and the feeling of an accidental intersection of lives. (with no grandiose message nor moral.) 

Can't help it --- I like it.

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I've run out of the original group of three illustrations, but let's go for another anyway. 

Mouth of the Bush River, Ulster, Northern Ireland, c. early-mid 1800s. 


This one is difficult to tie down as far as the story collector is concerned. Although seen in Elizabeth Andrews' Ulster Folklore (1913), the source is really the 1858 Ulster Journal of Archaeology Volume 6. The collector is unnamed due to a very puzzling (to me) and unhelpful cultural habit of authors remaining anonymous.
(I couldn't even find a set of initials.) The author says that he went to Ulster on the request of the editor of this journal to do just this sort of tale retrieval, so maybe it's OK. The witness was then an old man, but one of the two primary witnesses and the tale vivid and oft-told. 


The incident: There is a small village near the mouth of the Bush River (about six houses only) where lived farmers who also fished for salmon in the nearby Bush. Two young men were as usual looking after cattle grazing, and it was around dawn. They'd just gotten up to see after the cattle. The river was extremely high, far higher than almost any other time and in full flood. The whole atmosphere was violent with wind pushing tides up the mouth of the Bush with violence. 


"We stood looking at the wild picture before us, when all at once we saw the tall figure of a man standing on one of the pillars in the middle of the Bush, with a long grey cloak on him .... " Who did they think that he was?


There is a legend in this area of a giant from pre-mediaeval times who came to Ireland to fight with another giant of a man, Finn MacCoul. When Finn defeated his adversary, he invited another local giant to a feast, the Grey Man of the Path. I don't know a lot about this character, but he seems to present an awesome figure (7 to 9 foot tall) and a supernatural danger. 

This being, standing in the river on a stone pillar (which was under water), and facing into the tempest, was what the two young men thought they saw.  One was scared witless by the vision; he cowered. The other was shocked but still called out. The being didn't move at all. Somewhat later, it moved, but not yet to face the witnesses. The cowering witness demanded that they leave "Come away, Aleck, we're too long here!" 

They went home shaking. Both felt that they had seen the giant Grey Man. 

Did they see a folklore giant? If so, it's our first in this run of stories.

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Till next time, folks.
 

Did Henry Hudson See American Fairies??

HUDSON RIVER, NY  1609 

This is one of the more attractive claims of a famous person contacting dwarf-like people. It is a claim which appears all over the internet. Did it happen? 

Here's the story as claimed: Henry Hudson was on early sailing missions to the New World, and ends up cruising the eastern seaboard and go up the to-be-named Hudson River looking for a passage to the "Northwest" and a shorter path to the Orient. While going up the Hudson, he and his crew allegedly encountered the North American version of the European dwarves. 

The claim is that Hudson and his men during the 1609 expedition encountered many native peoples along the Connecticut coast and day-by-day up the River. These people were sometimes friendly sometimes not. As the River narrowed, headway became basically impossible, and Hudson sent men on shore (he had done this previously) to see what he could learn. At the last stop, he encountered a dwarf people playing music, dancing around a fire, and drinking. They were small (c.2-3 feet tall) and dark complected, and quite hairy, especially regarding facial hair. After merry-making to no practical end, Hudson and his men turned back down river and ultimately returned back to Europe. The claim was that anyone could read this material in Hudson's own trip diaries.

Well, Great, eh? 

The trouble with this is that I can't find any source for the story which is credible. I ploughed through all of Hudson's diaries line-by-line and right up the river --- nothing.

I had a very bad memory which excited me about this thing before I dipped into it. I thought that it was a Janet Bord case, and so felt extremely confident that the research was good. But the excellent Ms. Bord was NOT the claim author. Who then was? 

I went to the internet hopefully. I looked at ten resources (it might have really been more.) The claim was all over. 8 of the ten came to the same source: some essay by a person named S E Schlosser. This person writes the tale in fine detail, leaving the reader to believe that this is definitely in Hudson's notes. I don't like to call names, so I'll leave it there. THE ALLEGED REFERENCE DOES NOT (TO MY READING) EXIST. 

The other two references go back to a legitimate source: Charles M. Skinner. MYTHS and LEGENDS of OUR OWN LAND. 1896. In THAT book there is still no listing/description  of a Henry Hudson interaction, but rather a linking of interactions with fairies with Rip Van Winkle, who is clearly a fiction character. Still, try as I might to coalesce the Rip Van Winkle tale with the Henry Hudson story (the resource clumsily smears the two awkwardly and obviously fictionally),  I can't see this as an excuse for the previously mentioned sloppy claims.

Good Lord I hate this sort of thing. Is there any way to save this post entry? I think that we can. I have, by an odd piece of good fortune, two somewhat unusual resources which could help.  The first is below: 

This is just a serendipity. In this volume of the Bureau of Ethnology is a long study by a great ethnologist named Frank Speck. Here he was (early in the 1900s and the late 1800s) studying a remnant of Native American persons in the New York and Connecticut region. One of the people he extensively interviewed was a very old woman, who was perhaps "the last of the Mohegan-speaking people." (Speck thought so)

Speck's passion was the preservation of the cultural histories and languages of "disappearing peoples." Finding the last surviving speaker of a language was the ultimate in his quest. That speaker was Fidelia Fielding.

 She lived alone on her small plot of land, tending her gardens and bemoaning the state of the world as she saw it. She kept a rudimentary diary in her near-extinct language, and, simplistic as most entries were, it was for me fascinating. This grand old lady had a direct and clear-eyed view of things and was willing to write bits of that down. 

It was, however, not in her diary, but in interviews conducted by Speck, that she informed him about the Little People who had frequented this area in older times. 

Speck was quite interested in all of this, and had collected other such tales from Native Americans of slightly different linguistic stocks living nearby. Perhaps, just perhaps, these memories of "dwarf indians" living or appearing nearby and even in these Hudson River locations reflect something about the Henry Hudson claims which began this post. 

I'm going to post Speck's map of the local remnant linguistic areas below, which show the various types of people reporting, and note that beyond the map to the northwest are areas of forested hills quite near and like the Catskills today, which abut the Hudson River valley. Then I'll try to describe these dwarves.

What were these creatures like? According to Mrs. Fielding, they were like "little indians" about the size of small boys. They were dark complected and hairier than local indians. They cared about nature. They would sometimes interact with humans, but usually did not want to. When they DID want to, it was to get some favor. If granted, they gave something back in return. In these latter ways, they were astonishingly like British gnomes or what Agricola would have called Coballos of the rural and forested areas. She called the dwarves "makiawisag" in the Mohegan language. Best translation?: The Little Boys or The Little People.



Can we say much more? Mrs. Fielding, although she cited actual people who had lived around her plot, stated that the people who had personally seen these little indians had passed away, and no one had probably seen the creatures for several decades. (including of course herself --- Mrs Fielding said that the only fairy-like thing that she perhaps had seen was a Will-o-the-Wisp like light which had moved slowly and mysteriously in the hills nearby.) But, maybe, there are other sources not in this volume.

John Roth is a marvel and a huge storehouse of Native American fairy lore. If you are interested in these matters, you should own a copy of his book. 


Roth classifies cultural groups as do the professionals, and then lists however many little people (and other related folklore) references he has been able to find --- which are always MORE than anyone can delve into. Under "The Algic of Southern New England", Roth not only lists the Mohegan culture and its neighbors, but also has (already) heard of Speck's talking with Mrs. Fielding. There is probably little that is factual that he does not know. 

It turns out that there are many folktales of Little People up and down the coast, and they differ in detail. This was interesting, but it gave me problems: did makiawisag equate to any of the others? I can't solve it. But I'll BS a try and then you can dive in and do better. 


If I was making my best guess as to a compromise appearance of these entities, it would be:
two to two-and-a-half feet tall, dark-complected Native American appearance, but stockier (i.e. more dwarf-like), clad in well-made skins, sometimes only to the waist, facial dark hair, perhaps slightly slimmer than British gnomes, living in hills or old stone pile/fort areas underground, not unkind but not particularly friendly either. 


Many of the other legends picture different looking beings, but I'm trying to center around Mrs. Fielding's opinions here, and add small amounts of cohering detail from elsewhere. THUS:
the following drawing is my cartoon pictorial for her makiawisag.

  ... and what else you should know is that this is another person's rendition of Little People from the American Central Great Lakes and Pacific coast areas. 

Is there any chance that Henry Hudson saw some beings like this? Who knows? There doesn't seem to be any real evidence for that claim. But might the ancestral neighbors of Mrs. Fielding have seen them? THAT is a lot more believable once all the rest of the more modern sightings come in. 

OK. Done again. Harder than I'd planned  ... again. At least this had a happier ending than the last. I might begin to do smaller and smaller chunks of this so I don't burn out. I'll post Leprecat page #2 next time and see if there is anything there worth writing/thinking about. 

Till then ... Bless and Keep you all.