 |
| Sir Joseph Noel Paton: 'The Fairy Rade: Carrying Off A Changeling - Midsummer's Eve' |
This
account from an unnamed 'old woman’ of Nithsdale tells of a Fairy Rade or
cavalcade of the fairies which she had witnessed as a lass. It was recorded by Allan
Cunningham and R.H. Cromek in Remains of
Nithdale and Galloway Song (1810) and is repeated verbatim in Thomas
Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828).
It is strangely convincing, as folk accounts often are. (Translation below!)
“In the
night afore Roodmass I had trysted with a neebor lass a Scots mile frae hame to
talk anent buying braws i’ the fair. We had nae sutten lang aneath the
haw-buss till we heard the loud laugh of fowk riding, wi’ the jingling o’ bridles,
and the clankin’ o’ hoofs. We banged up, thinking they wad ride owre
us. We kent nae but it was drunken fowk ridin’ to the fair i’ the forenight.
We glow’red roun’ and roun’ and sune saw it was the Fairie-fowks Rade. We cowred down till they passed by. A
beam o’ light was dancin’ owre them mair bonnie than moonshine: they were a wee
wee fowk wi’ green scarfs on, but ane that rade foremost, and that ane was a
good deal larger than the lave wi’ bonnie lang hair, bun about wi’ a strap
whilk glinted like stars. They rade on braw wee white naigs, wi’ unco
lang swooping tails, an’ manes hung wi’ whustles that the win’ played on.
This an’ their tongue when they sang was like the soun’ of a far-away
psalm. Marion and me was in a brade lea fiel’, where they came by us; a
high hedge o’ haw-trees keepit them frae gaun through Johnnie Corrie’s corn,
but they lap owre it like sparrows, and gallopt into a green know beyont
it. We gaed i’ the morning to look at the treddit corn; but the fient a
hoofmark was there, nor a blade broken.”
Here is
my tamer English version:
In the
night before Roodmas [the Feast of the
Cross, May 3rd] I had met up with a neighbour lass a Scots mile
from home [a Scots mile
was about 220 yards longer than an English mile], to talk about buying
pretty things at the fair. We hadn’t been sitting long under the hawthorn
bushes when we heard the loud laugh of folk riding, with jingling bridles and
clattering hoofs. We jumped up, thinking they would ride over us. We
assumed it was drunken folk riding to the fair in the early evening. We stared
round and about and soon saw it was the Fairy-folk's
Raid. We cowered down as they passed by. A beam of light was
dancing over them, prettier than moonshine: they were tiny little folk with
green scarves on, all but the one who rode in front, who was a good deal bigger
than the rest, with lovely long hair bound about with a band that glinted like
stars. They rode on fine little white horses, with uncommonly long sweeping
tails, and manes hung with whistles which the wind played on. This, and
their voices when they sang, was like the sound of a far-away psalm. Marion and
I were in a broad pasture field, where they came by us; a high hedge of
hawthorn trees barred them from going through Johnnie Corrie’s corn, but they
leaped over it like sparrows and galloped into a green hill beyond it. We
went next morning to look at the trodden-down corn, but devil a hoofmark [ie: not a single hoofmark] was to be
seen, nor a blade broken.
Charming
as this seems, it’s quite clear that the young women’s experience was startling,
even alarming. Hearing the loud, possibly drunken laughter, jingling bridles and
thudding hoofs, they leap up in fear of being trampled – but when they see the
fairy troop, they cower down.
The Lowland Scots word ‘rade’ means
‘raid’. It’s derived from Old English rād
(‘road’) used in the sense of a (usually military) expedition or incursion upon
horseback, ‘a foray, an inroad’ as the OED states. So a fairy rade really is a ‘raid’: an implicitly
threatening intrusion into the everyday world. No matter how beautiful fairies
may be, they are always dangerous, and the Fairy Rade is related to the phenomenon
of the Wild Hunt or familia Herlequini,
the host of the dead. Related, yet no longer the same, for superstitions are in
constant evolution. The Fairy Rade branched off, you might say, from the Wild Hunt, stories of which of course continued to exist in parallel. Jacob Grimm, in his Teutonic
Mythology, connected the Germen wilde
Jagt (wild hunt) or wütende heer (furious
horde) with Wotan – Odin, the wild or mad god who goes ‘driving, riding,
hunting … with valkyrs and einheriar in his train’, and versions of
the Wild Hunt led by demi-gods and legendary characters both male and female
have been recorded across Europe: it was always bad luck to see it – a harbinger of death. But how did the ancient and fearsome host
of the dead evolve into the green-clad trooping fairies of early 19th
century Nithsdale?
 |
The Wild Hunt by Johann Corde
|
In a marvellous book, Elf Queens and Holy Friars (U.
of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Professor Richard Firth Green suggests that
medieval clerical commentators put a deliberately dark spin
on the Europe-wide concept of the Wild Hunt. I’m not entirely convinced by
this, for I suspect the familia
Herlequini had its frightening side well before Christianity. However, it
could certainly be adapted to a Christian agenda, and Green contrasts two of
the earliest accounts. The Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis, writing of an event
‘witnessed’ in 1091, depicts a grim procession of dead knights, priests, ladies
and commoners suffering dreadful torments for their sins. A half century or so
later, Anglo-Norman courtier Walter Map tells in his book De Nugis Curialium the story of the British king Herla who,
returning from attendance at a fairy king’s wedding, finds that centuries have
elapsed and he and his company are now doomed to wander the hills forever.
Green drily comments: ‘People could hardly be allowed to believe that Herla and
his followers were living happily in fairyland.’ Reading this, I was struck by
the memory of Aucassin’s famous defiance – ‘To Hell will I go!’ – in the 13th
century French romance Aucassin and
Nicolette:
For
to Hell go the fine scholars and the fair knights who are slain in the
tourney and the great wars, and the good men-at-arms and all noble men. With
them I will go: and there go the lovely courteous ladies who have two or three
lovers as well as their lords, and there go the gold and silver and ermine and
miniver, and there go the harpers and minstrels and kings of this world: I will
go with them, so only that I have Nicolette my sweetest love beside me.
 |
Aucassin & Nicolette (artist unknown to me)
|
One might well imagine
that Aucassin has Orderic’s gloomy vision of the trooping dead clearly in his
mind, and is deliberately subverting, diverting it. This gaily-clad cavalcade will
surely end up in fairyland – not hell – and Aucassin’s vehement, emotional
rejection of the stark hell/heaven binary may express a more general sense that
alternatives had to be available. Could true love such as Aucassin’s really
be a sin? Where did the unbaptised babies go, and men who died in battle
unshriven, and mothers who died in childbirth.
They
were taken away into fairyland, according to the anonymous author of the late
13th century romance Sir Orfeo,
for when Orfeo is admitted to the fairy king’s subterranean crystal castle, he
sees lying all about him in the courtyard: ‘folk that had been brought here,
and were thought to be dead, but weren’t…’ And there follows a grim catalogue
of the headless, maimed, wounded, mad, drowned and burned… ‘Wives lay there in
child-bed … and wondrous many others lay there too: as they had fallen asleep
at noon each was taken from this world and carried there by fairy magic.’ It’s
got to be better than hell.
‘Queen
of heaven ne am I naught,’ says the fairy queen to Thomas of Ercildoune, in the
medieval Scots romance of that name: ‘For
I took never so high degree,/But I am of another countree.’
 |
| Illustration: HM Brock |
Her counterpart in the much
later ballad of Thomas the Rhymer
(first published in Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border, 1802/3) points out to Thomas three ways that diverge
ahead of them: the thorny path of righteousness, the easy road of
wickedness, and lastly the ‘bonny road that winds about the ferny brae’ which will
lead them to fair Elfland. It must have been tempting! And once you’ve imagined
fairy land as a place, and a sumptuous,
royal place at that, what remains but to wonder what the people of Elfland do? The answer was obvious: they danced,
and they rode out. Not just because of the living tradition of the Wild Hunt,
but because this was the way kings, queens and nobles always displayed themselves to
the people. Like earthly kings, fairy kings and queens rode out in procession
for three main purposes – ceremony, hunting or war – so that the Seelie Court
and the Unseelie Court are aspects of the same thing.
 |
| Les Tres Riches Heures, Musée de Condé, Chantilly, France by the Limbourg brothers |
The medieval romances emphasise the courtly aspect of
the fairies: in Walter Map’s 12th century tale of King Herla, the
unnamed pygmy fairy king is grotesque in appearance but his entourage is
dressed in splendid livery and jewels. He eats and drinks from vessels and
plates carved from single precious stones and his underground palace is lit by
innumerable lamps as if it were the palace of the sun. The fairy king of Sir Orfeo comes by with a company of
over two hundred knights and damsels dressed in white and riding on
snow-white steeds: the king’s crown is made neither of gold or silver, but all of
one precious stone that shines as bright as the sun. And in the late medieval
French romance of Huon of Bordeaux
the child-size fairy king Oberon (‘the dwarf of the fairy’) entertains Huon by
magicking up a beautiful palace, ‘hung with rich cloth of silk beaten with
gold, with tables set ready full of meat’, and he and his guests wash their
hands in ‘basins of gold, garnished with precious stones’ and are seated on benches
of gold and ivory.
 |
| Fairies in a Bird's Nest, by John Anster Fitzgerald |
|
|
By the late 16th century however, literary representations
of the fairy rade had become far more rustic and a lot less serious. Writers
like Shakespeare and Jonson (and in the 17th century, Drayton
and Herrick) popularised the notion of the fairies as amusing miniature
creatures. In part of his Flyting (a poetic duel) against fellow-poet Patrick Hume of Polwart some time
in the early 1580s, the Scots writer Alexander Montgomerie includes a fanciful
account of the fairy rade:
In the hinder end of haruest, on
Alhallow even
When our good nighbours do ryd, gif
I read right,
Some buckland on a bunwand, and some
on a been,
Ay trottand in trupes from the
twilight;
Some sadleand a shoe aip all
graithed into green,
Some hobland on ane hempstalke,
hoveand to the hight.
The King of Pharie, and his curt,
with the Elfe Queen,
With many elrich Incubus, was rydand
that night…
In rough translation:
At the back-end of harvest, on All
Hallows eve,
When our good neighbours [euphemism for the fairies] do ride, if
I'm correct,
Some buckling on a plant-stem and
some a dry stalk [as weapons],
Always trotting in troops from the [beginning of?] twilight;
Some saddling a she-ape all
harnessed in green,
Some jogging on a hempstalk, hovering
to the height.
The King of Fairy and his court,
with the Elf Queen
With many eldritch Incubus, was riding that night…
This may seem whimsical or even cute to us, but the point for Montgomerie is to smear Polwart’s
character and morals. For the Reformation has occurred: the fairies are now regarded as disreputable rather than dangerous, and he continues with a scurrilously imaginative
account of Polwart’s supposedly monstrous origins:
There ane elf, on ane aipe, an
vnsell begat,
Into ane pot, by Pomathorne;
That bratchart in ane busse was
borne;
They fand ane monster, on the morne.
War faced not a cat.
That is:
There an elf, on an ape, begot a
wretch
In a pit near Pomathorn [a place in Midlothian];
That brat was born in a bush;
They found a monster in the morning,
Worse faced than a cat.
You cannot write this
kind of thing if you really believe in fairies. Even though some of the fairy lore is genuine (flying on hemp-stalks, for example), you can tell that Montgomerie's attitude towards these country superstitions is part scepticism, part mockery. A few years later in 1599, King James VI
of Scotland (soon to succeed Elizabeth as James I of England) writes with
disbelief and disapproval in his Daemonology
of the popular belief in spirits called ‘by the Gentiles…Diana, and her
wandering court’ and ‘amongst us, the Phairie… or our good neighbours’:
How
there was a King and Quene of Phairie, of such a iolly [jolly] court and train
as they had, how they had a teynd [tithe], & dutie [tax], as it were, of
all goods: how they naturallie rode and wente, eate and drank, and did all
other actiones like naturall men and women…
He adds that this
is ‘no[t] anie thing that ought to be beleeved by Christians’: in fact, the only
possible explanation is that ‘the devil illuded the senses of sundry simple creatures,
in making them beleeve that they saw and harde [heard] such thinges as were
nothing so indeed.’
But
if poets and playwrights and kings no longer believed in fairies, many ordinary country people and other common folk undoubtedly still did - and they were interested in them, which is why some of the now unfashionable medieval romances ended up as tales in chapbooks or sung as ballads. The 13th
century Sir Orfeo became the Shetland
ballad King Orfeo: it was collected there in
1865 and was still being sung up till the mid 20th century, when two
different tunes were recorded for it. And Thomas
of Ercildoune morphed into the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (collected by Walter Scott), when a fairy queen as richly attired as any of her
predecessors comes riding down past the Eildon tree on her milk-white
steed –though without followers:
Her
shirt was o’ the grass-green silk
Her
mantle o’ the velvet fine:
At
ilka tett o’ her horse’s mane
Hung
fifty siller bells and nine.
The ballad of Tam Lin includes a famous account
of a fairy rade, and one that adds a twist to King James’s dour comment about the
fairy king or queen claiming a ‘teynde’ or tithe on earthly goods. For on
Hallowe’en, young Tam Lin will pay the seven-year ‘tiend’ the fairies owe to
hell – unless his lover Janet can save him.
Just at the mirk and midnight hour
The fairy folk will ride;
And they that would their true love
win,
At Milescross they maun bide.
…
About
the middle of the night
She
heard the bridles ring;
This
lady was as glad of that
As
any earthly thing.
First
she let the black pass by,
And
syne she let the brown
But
quickly she ran to the milk-white steed
And
pu’ed the rider down…
This is as
serious a treatment as it could be, far removed from the satire and whimsy of
Mongomerie, and untouched by the notion that trooping fairies were diminutive.
The oral tradition preserved the gravity of the fairy kingdom. But writers couldn’t take fairies
seriously and expect to be taken seriously themselves: they had to guy it up. It’s not that you can’t find any fairy
lore in the poetry of Robert Herrick (1591-1674), it’s just that he’s at such pains
to make it all light, decorative, amusing. In his poem The Beggar to Mab, the Fairy Queen, the
beggar pleads with Mab to feed him:
Give me then an ant to eat,
Or the cleft ear of a mouse…
Or, sweet lady, reach to me
The abdomen of a bee…
 |
The Fairy Queen's Messenger, by Richard Doyle
|
Contrast such elegant
flippancy with the genuine shiver we get at the end of the ballad of Tam Lin when the fairy queen, furious
that she’s lost her knight, swears that if she had known ‘what now this night I see,/I
wad hae ta’en out thy twa grey een,/And put in twa een o’ tree.’
Andrew Lang, in The
Book of Dreams and Ghosts, tells of a man called Donald Ban who fought at
the battle of Culloden and was afterwards troubled by a bocan (boggart) which
made great difficulties for him. The bocan was thought to be the spirit of a
man who had died at the battle, and it once led Donald to dig up some
plough-irons which had been hidden while he was alive: as Donald lifted them,
‘the two eyes of the bocan were causing him greater fear than anything else he
ever heard or saw.’ This is very like the incident in the medieval Icelandic Grettir’s Saga, where Grettir slays the corpse-ghost Glam and
is never able to shed the terror of seeing Glam’s eyes roll horribly in the moonlight... Donald Ban saw other fairy sights too: for out hunting one day
‘in the year of the great snow, at nightfall he saw a man mounted on the back
of a deer ascending a great rock. He heard the man saying, “Home, Donald Ban,”
and fortunately he took the advice, for that very night there fell eleven feet
of snow in the very spot where he had intended to stay.
Country people – small-holders, crofters, farmers – took
the world of spirits and fairies seriously because they had to: they lived
liminal lives themselves, dependent on weather, on crops doing well, on animals
thriving. Anything that might tip the balance, anything that might help or hinder their
own survival, was worth paying attention to. So they kept a belief in their
‘good neighbours’ the fairies, whom it really wasn’t worth offending, and they
kept telling the old tales and finding new ones. That is why the
story of the fairy rade of Nithsdale with which I opened this post is so
compelling. The fairies those young lassies witnessed may have been ‘tiny
little folk in green scarves’, bedecked with stars, and shining with a light ‘prettier than moonshine’ –
but they were really scary.
And
that’s why the two girls cowered
down, afraid of being seen.
 |
Baccanal: Richard Dadd
|
