The Scottish fairy tale 'Rashie Coat' illustrated by Joan Hassall

 

For more than a decade from the mid 1970s the artist Joan Hassall was a neighbour of my family in the Yorkshire Dales village of Malham. I was twenty in 1976 when she inherited Priory Cottage in the village, and she lived there until her death in 1988 at the age of 82. Joan was a skilled wood engraver who illustrated many, many books (you can read more about her life here). I was a bit too young to be a friend, but I knew her as a much-loved village figure, with her thick pebble glasses, beautiful smile and layers of flower-patterned skirts. She played a number of musical instruments and for some time was organist at the parish church of St Michael the Archangel. She attended our wedding there in 1987 – not to play the organ on that occasion, just to be there – and we can never forget how she came up to us after the ceremony, and with the sweetest smile said simply: 'Be happy!' It was a genuine blessing if ever there was one, and a command we've done our best to obey.

I have two or three books illustrated by Joan, and for me as a lover of fairy tales this one is special. She was commissioned to design and produce a series of chapbooks for the Saltire Society which was set up in 1936 to ‘promote and celebrate the uniqueness of Scottish culture and heritage’. The books are tiny – approximately 13 x 9cm – but the work is exquisite. This is number 12, published 1951. It is the old Scottish fairy tale of ‘Rashie Coat’ and I guess, though I cannot be sure, that the elegant signature on the flyleaf is Joan’s own writing. She was a fine artist and a lovely person. I hope you'll enjoy her work. 

Picture credit

Portrait of Joan Hassall see wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Joan_Hassall.jpg

Descriptive Formulae in Scottish and Irish Wonder Tales

 

I've been reading a lot of Irish and Scots fairy tales or wonder tales lately and have been struck, as often before, by the sheer beauty of expression in many of them. I cannot read the original Gaelic of course, but various Victorian translators seem to have done a marvellous job of indicating the poetry. For example, here are some extracts from ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’ in J.F. Campbell’s orally collected ‘Popular Tales of the West Highlands’. It was narrated in Gaelic circa 1820 on Islay by ‘an old man of the name of Angus McQueen to James Wilson, a blind fiddler on Islay' – who recited it to Hector MacLean, the schoolmaster on Islay, who wrote it down in Gaelic and sent it to Campbell in 1859. The tale tells how the young king decides to play a game (gambling) against the local Gruagach (‘the hairy one’), the stake being ‘the cropped rough-skinned maid that is behind the door’. He wins, and marries the maid, the Gruagach’s own daughter who in fact is very beautiful. Next day he visits the Gruagach again and his wife advises him to play for ‘the dun shaggy filly with the stick saddle’. Again he wins, and the dun filly is his. Of course the third time he plays, the Gruagach wins and sets out the penalty.

‘The stake of my play is,’ said he, ‘that I lay it as crosses and as spells on thee, and as the defect of the year, that the cropped rough-skinned creature, more uncouth and unworthy than thyself, should take thy head, and thy neck and thy life’s look off, if thou dost not get for me the Glaive of Light of the king of the oak windows.’

This is unfortunate. His own wife must kill him if he cannot bring back the Glaive (sword) of Light! No wonder, then –

The king went home, heavily, poorly, gloomily. The young queen came meeting him and she said, ‘Mohrooai! my pity! there is nothing with thee tonight.’ Her face and her splendour gave some pleasure to the king when he looked on her brow, but when he sat on a chair to draw her towards him, his heart was so heavy that the chair broke under him.

I love ‘heavily, poorly, gloomily’ – and the chair breaking under him because of the heaviness of his heart. Only in a fairy tale could you get away with that. But the queen tells him to cheer up. After all, he has ‘the best wife in Erin and the second-best horse in Erin’ and if he follows her advice and the filly’s advice, all will turn out well!

She set in order the dun shaggy filly, on which was the stick saddle, and though he saw it as wood, it was full of sparklings of gold and silver. He got on it; the queen kissed him and she wished him the victory of the battlefields. ‘Take thou the advice of thine own she-comrade the filly, and she will tell thee what thou shouldst do.’ He set out on his journey, and it was not dreary to be on the dun steed.

            She would catch the swift March wind that would be before her, and the swift March wind would not catch her. They came at the mouth of dusk and lateness, to the court and castle of the king of the oak windows.

‘The mouth of dusk’... all that last paragraph is pure poetry, yet made up of formulae that with variations turn up again and again in these fairy tales. (You’ll find ‘the wind of March’ in an Irish tale, below.) These repeated formulae or set pieces are an important part of oral storytelling, going back at least as far as Homer. ‘Dawn with her rosy fingers’, ‘thoughtful Telemachos’, ‘gray-eyed Athena’ – as Richmond Lattimore comments in the introduction to his verse translation of the Odyssey:

In both epics, women are deep-girdled, iron is gray, ships are hollow, words are winged and go through the barrier of the teeth, the sea is wine-coloured, barren and salt, bronze is sharp and pitiless. [...] The poet repeats brief formulae and even sizeable sequences. Adaptation may be necessary. Amphimonos goes down, Odyssey xxii: ‘He fell, thunderously, and took the earth full on his forehead.’ We cannot quite have the standard Iliad line: ‘He fell, thunderously, and his armour clattered upon him’: Amphimonos has no armour.

Memorable for their cadences and evocative power, such ready-made phrases take the strain of description, painting familiar but vivid pictures for those listening. (And to to return for a moment to ‘The Young King of Easaidh Ruadh’: the swift filly tells the young king how to steal the sword of light. She helps him escape and advises him how to slash off the head of the king of the oak windows – catching the head neatly in her mouth as they gallop side by side. On the young king’s return his wife tells him that since the king of the oak windows was the Gruagach’s brother, he had better kill him too, or be killed himself. This he successfully does, but that’s not the end of the story; next thing his wife is stolen by a giant and the king sets out to find her with the help of ‘the slim dog of the greenwood’...)

            In another very long tale, ‘The Battle of the Birds’, told by ‘John Mackenzie, fisherman, near Inverarie’ the king’s son of Tethertown arrives late to view the annual battle of the birds. The raven has won, but is being attacked by a snake which the king’s son swiftly dispatches with a blow of his sword. To reward him, the raven takes him up on his back and flies ‘over seven Bens and seven Glens and seven Mountain Moors’ to the house of the raven’s sister where he receives ‘meat of each meat, drink of each drink, warm water to his feet and a soft bed for his limbs’. A similar journey is repeated on the next day; on the third, the king’s son is given the gift of a bundle to carry to the place he would wish to dwell. (Inside the bundle is a castle: much more follows.) However, the ‘seven bens and seven glens and seven mountain moors’ over which the raven flies is a stock phrase echoed by the Irish tale ‘The King Who Had Twelve Sons’ (in ‘West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances’ collected and translated by William Larminie, 1893). In this tale a boy rides a pony over ‘seven miles on hill on fire and seven miles of steel thistles and seven miles of sea’, while a shorter variant of those steel thistles appears in ‘The Wal at the Warld’s End’, a story from Fife printed in Robert Chambers’ ‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland’. A lassie’s stepmother sends her to fill a bottle of water from the well at the world’s end: she gets there on the back of a pony who gallops over a ‘muir of hecklepins’ – that is, a moor of sharp steel pins of the type used for combing flax or wool.

             Another ‘West Irish Folk-Tale’ is ‘The Story of Bioultach’, narrated to Larminie in the 1880s by Terence Davies of Renvyle, Co. Galway. It contains what Larminie terms ‘a sea run’: the description of a voyage. Bioultach (the name means Yellow-Hair) is searching for his lost brother Maunus. After slaying a giant who has spirited away the three suitors of a king’s daughter – Maunus being the last – Bioultach sets out for the mysterious ‘bake-house in the east’ where Maunus is imprisoned. Since Bioultach has saved the king’s daughter, the king fits him out with a ship and two champions, and eight hundred men.

When Bioultach went on board the ship they raised their great sails, speckled, spotted, red-white, to the top of the mast, and he left not a rope unsevered, nor a helm without [here, Larminie says, ‘there were several words in the Gaelic I am unable to translate’] in the place where there were seals, whales, creeping things, little beasts of the sea with red mouth, rising on the sole and palm of the oar, making fairy music and melody for themselves, till the sea arose in strong waves, hushed with wondrous voices, with greatness and beauty was the ship sailing, till to haven she came and harbour on the coast of the Land of Brightness.

Similarly worded ‘sea-runs’ occur in other tales from the same collection. In ‘King Mananaun’, narrated by Patrick McGrale of Achill Island, a king’s daughter called Pampogue is fought over by two princes, Londu and Kaytuch. The one she loves, Kaytuch, is killed by Londu, but she refuses to marry the victorious prince. Instead she takes Kaytuch and ‘put him in a box, and the herbs of the hill about him’, and –

She went then and fitted out a ship great and gallant, till she raised the great sails, speckled, spotted, as long, as high as the top of the mast; and she left not a rope without breaking, an oar without tearing, with the crawling, creeping creatures, the little beasts, the great beasts of the deep sea coming up on the handle and blade of the oar, till she let two-thirds (of the sail) go, and one third held in, till the eels were whistling, the froth down and the sand above; till she overtook the red wind of March that was before her, and the red wind of March that was after did not overtake her; and she was sailing nine months before she came to land.

As she approached this island she witnesses two men carrying a dead man: he is alive in the morning but dead again by evening, ‘and so it was like that for three days’. Then one of the men rows out in a currach to ask rudely if she wants a husband. (‘She told him to be off, or she would sink him’.) The second approaches in the same rude manner, but the third is courteous and explains that they are three sons of a king, ‘and when he died there came Fawgawns and Blue-men on us,’ so they are now stranded on this island and their enemies attack them each day and kill one of them, whom they then bring back to life with ‘healing water’. Pampogue replies,

‘With me is a champion, the best that ever struck blow with sword; and I promise you his help for a day if you bring him to life.’

            The man went in and brought the healing water and rubbed the wound; and Kaytuch arose alive again; and he rubbed his eyes with his hands and said, ‘Great was the sleep that was on me’; and she laughed and told him everything from the time the young king cut his head off. ‘I took you on board ship, and we were sailing for nine months before we came here; and I promised your help for a day to this man if he would bring you to life; but you will not go far for a month until you grow strong.

            So he and she spent the night together – a third in talking, a third in storytelling, and a third in soft rest and deep slumber, till the whiteness of the day came upon the morrow. 

‘Till the whiteness of the day came upon the morrow.’ And I love the matter-of-fact way Kaytuch comes back to life as after a long sleep, and Pampogue’s laugh as she welcomes him.

            The third of the stories is ‘The Champion of the Red Belt’, told by Patrick Minahan of Malinmore, Glencolumkille, Co. Donegal; it is the tale of two young children who are put out to the sea in a barrel, along with two swords. One boy wears a black belt, the other a red belt; they are washed up on the shores of Greece and adopted by the king, who assumes (correctly) they are of royal blood. The boys believe they are the sons of this king but, eventually learning that they are not, they set out to discover their true parentage. Promising to come back and marry the girl he has supposed to be his sister, the Champion of the Red Belt and his brother come to the shores of the sea. 

He threw his hat out. He made a ship of the hat, a mast of his stick, a flag of his shirt. He hoisted the sails speckled, spotted, to the top of the straight mast. He turned the prow to sea, the stern to shore, and he left not a rope without breaking, nor a cable without rending, till he was listening to the blowing of the seals and the roaring of the great beasts, to the screams of the seagulls; till the little red-mouthed fishes were rising on the sole and palm of the oars; till they steered the vessel in under court and castle of the King of the Underwaveland. 

‘Not a rope without breaking, nor a cable without rending’: all three of these ‘sea-run’ passages employ a language of extravagant violence and damage to convey the topsy-turvy urgency of these journeys – ‘the froth down and the sand above’, and all three celebrate the diversity and plenty of the sea, filled with the life and activities of seals, whales, gulls, ‘great beasts’, and the little ‘red-mouthed’ fishes that rise and jump among the oar-strokes. Although these ships are supposedly large, even magical ones, with tall sails and masts, it is a fisherman’s currach close to the surface of the sea that is really being evoked each time, and the fisherman’s everyday familiarity with the sea’s creatures...

 ‘The sole and palm of the oars’ - what better phrase could there be for the way the oar-blades dip and twist as you row?

Picture credit: 

Riders of the Sidhe - by John Duncan, 1866 - 1945

Strong Fairy Tale Heroines #26: KATE CRACKERNUTS

Kate Crackernuts is the same story type as the Norwegian Tatterhood (#15 in this series) in which two sisters or stepsisters stick together through thick and thin, and the plain or ugly sister rescues the pretty one from a witch’s spell and manages things so that in the end they both marry princes (whether the prince wants to or not). Kate Crackernuts in this tale rescues her prince as well. 

The story was first collected by Duncan J Robertson (1860-1941) – poet, naturalist, County Clerk of Orkney for over 50 years and some time owner of Eynhallow, a small and now deserted island in Eynhallow Sound between Rousay and Mainland Orkney. (The island is said to have been first inhabited by the Finfolk or mer-people, who were driven out bythe first human settler, the Goodman of Thorodale.)  

Anyway, Robertson published Kate Crackernuts in Longmans Magazine, vol xiii (1888/9). I wasn't able to consult this version, since the only online edition is unavailable to anyone outside the United States. But Andrew Lang republished the story in Folklore, Sept. 1890 (vol 1, no. iii) and it’s probably safe to assume he made few if any changes, since the narrative is quite fragmented. It keeps dropping in and out of a Scots, not Orcadian dialect – which suggests to me that it may not in fact have been collected on Orkney – and various chunks of the story are told in a rather stilted summary. For example: ‘In consequence, the answer at the henwife’s house was the same as on the preceding day’, or ‘A magnificent hall is entered, brightly lighted up, and many beautiful ladies surround the prince,’ etc. To make it flow and be enjoyable to read or listen to, it absolutely has to be expanded and partly rewritten. This I have done – and Joseph Jacobs did so too when he included it in his famous (somewhat misnamed) English Fairy Tales of 1890. He complained that the tale was ‘very corrupt, both of the girls being called Kate’, and renamed one of them Anne, doubtless to prevent child readers getting muddled. I don’t personally think this was necessary, and I believe the two Kates are likely to be authentic and not a mistake at all. 

Katharine Briggs seems to have agreed, for she kept the two Kates in her lovely 1963 novel Kate Crackernuts in which she gives the fairy tale a local habitation and a date in 17^th century Scotland at Auchenskeoch, Dumfries and Galloway, near the Solway Firth. And in her lightly rewritten version of the fairy tale in the 1976 Dictionary of Fairies, she calls the girls ‘the King’s Kate and the Queen’s Kate’, but follows Joseph Jacobs in making the all-night fairy dancing the cause of the prince’s illness. The Robertson/Lang version says nothing about this at all, but it makes good narrative sense. 

Food is important in the story. Just a mouthful of bread or a handful of peas can protect the king’s Kate from her minnie’s (stepmother’s) wiles and the henwife’s spells. Bread was often blessed by having a cross cut into it, and perhaps the peas are given to her with a blessing, too? Then of course there are the nuts – probably hazel nuts – which Kate not only eats herself but uses as a medium of exchange for the fairy wand and bird. In Celtic legend the hazel is the tree of knowledge or divination, which may be why hazel rods are still used by water diviners. Hazel trees with crimson nuts were believed to grow around the pools at the source of Irish rivers. The nuts which fell into the water fed the Salmon of Knowledge, and anyone who ate the flesh of the salmon would in their turn become wise. 

One sleepy afternoon two years ago I visited the deep, peaty pool at the source of the Shannon. The steep banks were sprinkled with flowers: gnats and mayflies rose and sank in the air, and although the trees leaning over it and dropping the occasional lazy leaf were willows, I could well imagine the Salmon of Knowledge swimming unseen in the brown water. 

I wonder if Kate’s handful of hazel nuts brought her the wisdom and luck to succeed? 

Once upon a time there was a king and a queen, as in many lands have been. The king had a daughter, Kate, and the queen had one too, but the king’s Kate was bonnier than the queen’s Kate, and the queen was jealous of her and cast about for a way to spoil her beauty. So she took counsel of the henwife, and the henwife told her to ‘send the lassie to me in the morn, fasting.’ 

So on the next morn, the queen sent the king’s Kate down to the henwife for eggs, but the lassie was hungry and snatched up a piece of bread before she went out. When she came to the henwife’s, she asked for the eggs as she’d been told to, and the henwife told her to ‘lift the lid of the pot there, and see.’ Well the lassie lifted the lid and up rose the steam, but nothing happened for all that. ‘Gae hame to your minnie, and tell her to keep her larder door better steekit,’ said the henwife. Then the queen knew that the lassie had had something to eat. Next morning she watched her, and sent her out fasting, but as the lassie went to the henwife’s she saw some country folk picking peas by the roadside, and spoke to them, and they gave her a handful of the peas which she ate by the way. So once again when she lifted the lid of the pot and the steam rose, no harm came to her, and the henwife said, ‘Tell your minnie the pot winna boil if there’s nae fire under it.’ 

On the third day, the queen takes the king’s Kate by the hand and herself leads her to the henwife. And now when the lassie lifts the lid of the pot and the steam rises, why, off jumps the princess’s ain bonnie head, and on jumps a sheep’s head! 

Now the queen was quite satisfied and went home, but the queen’s ain daughter was angry. She took a fine linen cloth and wrapped it around her sister’s head, and took her by the hand and out they gaed to seek their fortune. 

They gaed, and they gaed far, and further than I can tell, till they came to a king’s castle. Kate rapped on the door and asked for ‘a night’s lodging for my’sel and my sick sister.’ 

‘Aye, you shall have that,’ they said, ‘will ye but only sit up this night wi’ the king’s sick son and watch o’er him, and if a’s right wi’ him in the morning, ye shall have a peck o' siller as well.’

Aye, Kate was well willing to sit by him, and all went fine till midnight. Then the prince rose like one in a dream, and dressed himself, and with Kate stealing after him he went down to the stables, saddled his horse, called his hound and jumped into the saddle – and Kate jumped up behind. Away they rode through the greenwood and the hazel thickets, Kate picking nuts as they passed and filling her apron with them. They rode on and on till they came to a green hill. The prince drew rein and cried, ‘Open, open, green hill an’ let in the young prince with his horse and his hound,’ and Kate added, ‘and his lady him behind.’ 

 At once the green hill opened and in they passed to a great hall marvellously lit and full of dancers. Kate slipped off the horse and hid behind the door while a crowd of beautiful fairy women pulled the prince into the reel and made him dance and dance until he was faint with weariness, and at cock-crow he took his horse and rode home with Kate behind. Then he lay down in his bed and Kate sat by the fire and cracked her nuts and ate them. When the folk came in the morning, Kate told them the prince had slept well, so they said if she would  another night with him, they would give her a peck of gold. 

On the second night the prince rose as before and took his horse, and Kate rode with him to the fairy hill. Sitting behind the door as the prince danced, she saw a fairy bairn playing with a silver wand, and she overheard one of the dancers say, ‘Three straikes o’ that wand would make Kate’s sick sister as bonnie as ever she was.’ So Kate rolled nuts to the fairy boy, and she kept rolling them till the bairn dropped the wand to run after them, and Kate snatched it up and hid in in her gown and carried it with her when she rode back to the castle behind the prince. Then she tapped her sister three times with the wand, and off flew the sheep’s head and there she stood with her ain head on, bonnier than ever before, and when the brother to the sick prince saw her, he couldna take his eyes off her. And Kate sat down by the fire and cracked nuts and ate them.

So they asked Kate to sit with the prince for a third night, and she said she would only do it if she could marry him. And when he rose at midnight she followed him a third time into the fairy hill, and this time she saw the bairnie playing with a little dead bird, and heard one of the dancers saying, ‘Three bites of that birdie would make the sick prince as well as ever he was.’ Then Kate rolled nuts to the bairnie, and rolled and rolled them till he set down the birdie and ran after the nuts and Kate picked up the birdie and put it in her apron.

At cockcrow they set off home again, but this time instead of cracking nuts, Kate plucked the bird and roasted it at the fire, and at the smell of the roasting the prince said, ‘I wish I had a bite o’ that birdie,’ so Kate gave him a bit of the birdie, and he rose on his elbow. By and by he cried out again, ‘Oh, if I had another bite o’ that birdie!’, so Kate gave him another bit and he sat up on his bed. Then he said again, ‘Oh! If I had a third bite o’ that birdie!’ So Kate gave him a third bit, and he rose, dressed  himself and sat down by the fire, quite well – and when the folk came in the morning, they found Kate and the young prince cracking nuts together. 

So the sick son married the well sister, and the well son married the sick sister, and they all 

Lived happy and they died happy,

And never drank out of a dry cappy.

Picture credits:

'Off jumped her own pretty head': illustration by Morris Meredith Williams from The Scottish Fairy Book, 1910

'Kate Crackernuts': cover illustration by Pauline Baynes

'Kate Crackernuts': back cover illustration by Pauline Baynes

Strong Fairy Tale Heroines #10: WHUPPITY STOORIE

 Illustration by Kate Leiper: www.kateleiper.co.uk/Instagram:kate_leiper_artist

This Scottish tale is included in Robert Chambers’ ‘Popular Rhymes of Scotland’ (1841 edition) and comes from the manuscript of Chambers’ friend Charles K. Sharpe. It’s presented as if narrated by one ‘Nurse Jennie’ of Annandale whose Lowland Scots tongue is so vivid and racy (whether she actually existed or not!) that it would be a shame to anglicize it. So I have simply added a variety of explanatory notes, some within the text and some footnotes. I'm sure we Sassenachs can manage! 


The heroine of the story is ‘the goodwife o’ Kittelrumpit’. The narrator suggests this place may be situated “somewhere amang the Debatable Ground”. In fact I think it’s a joke, a made-up name with a comic and mildly rude meaning;‘Tickle-arse’ would be my best bet, though I’m no Scots scholar, so if anyone knows better, do let me know. The Debatable Ground does exist: it is the much fought-over area between Scotland and England which, in the 16th century, was the haunt of the Border Reivers.

The tale is one of the many variants of the Rumpelstiltskin story, but a lot funnier and livelier. The goodwife and the green fairy woman are splendidly-matched antagonists – two energetic, determined women with sharp tongues in their heads: but the goodwife wins hands down when she turns the tables on her foe. The lovely illustration is by Scottish artist Kate Leiper and you can see more of her beautiful work by clicking the link below the picture: also here: http://kateleiper.co.uk/

The story begins when the goodwife’s husband goes off to the fair one day and never comes back: he was “a vaguing sort of body” anyway and not to be depended upon. Left to fend for herself – “A’body said they were sorry for her but naebody helpit her, whilk’s a common case, sirs,” – she has nothing left but her cottage – a “sookin’ lad bairn” (that's a baby boy still at the breast) – and her pride and joy, a “soo” (sow) which is about to give birth to piglets. If all goes well, the goodwife’s stock will be much increased. But one day she goes to the pigsty to fill the sow’s trough, and shock! horror! what should she find but the sow “lying on her back, grunting and groaning and ready to gie up the ghost”? 

Read on! 

I trow this was a new stoon [blow] to the goodwife’s heart; she sat doon on the knocking-stane[1] wi’ her bairn on her knee and grat [cried] harder than she ever did for the loss of her ain goodman.

                Noo, the cot-hoose of Kittlerumpit was built on a brae[2] with a muckle fir-wood behind it, o’ whilk ye’ll hear mair afore lang. So the goodwife, while she was dichtin her een [wiping her eyes] chances to look doon the brae, and what does she see but an auld woman, almost like a lady, coming slowly up the way. She was buskit in green, all but a white short apron, and a black velvet hood, and a steeple-crowned beaver hat on her head. She had a lang walking stick, as lang as herself, in her hand – the sort of staff that auld men and women helpit themselves with lang syne; I see nae sic staffs noo, sirs.

                Aweel, when the goodwife saw the green gentlewoman near her, she rose and made a curtsie; and “Madam,” quo’ she, weeping, “I’m the maist misfortunate woman alive.”

                “I dinna wish to hear pipers’ news and fiddlers’ tales,” quo’ the green woman. “I ken ye’ve lost your goodman – we had waur losses at the Shirra Muir[3]; and I ken that your soo’s sick. Noo, what will ye gie me to cure her?”

                “Onything your leddyship’s madam likes,” quo’ the witless goodwife, never guessing who she had to deal with. 

                “Let’s wet thumbs on that bargain[4],” quo’ the green woman, so thumbs were wet, I warrant ye, and into the pigsty madam marches. 

                She glowers at the soo for a lang time, and then begins to mutter to herself what the goodwife couldna well understand; it soundit like “Pitter patter, Haly watter.” Then she took oot of her pouch a wee bottle wi’ something like oil in it, and rubs the soo with it around the snout, behind the lugs and on the tip o’ the tail. “Get up, beast,” quo’ the green woman, and nae sooner said than done – up bangs the soo wi’ a grunt and awa’ to her trough for her breakfast. 

                The goodwife o’ Kittelrumpit was a joyful goodwife noo, and wad hae kissed the very hem o’ the green madam’s gown-tail, but she wadna let her. “I’m no fond o’ demonstrations,” said she, “noo that I hae righted your sick beast, let’s finish our bargain. Ye’ll no find me an unreasonable, greedy body – I like aye to do a good turn for a small reward – all I ask, and will have, is that lad bairn in your bosom.”

                The goodwife o’ Kittelrumpit let oot a skirl like a stickit gryse [stuck piglet]. The green woman was a fairy, nae doubt of it, so she prays and weeps and kneels and begs and flytes, but it wouldna do.  “Ye may spare your din,” quo’ the fairy, “skirling as if I was a deaf as a doornail; but this I’ll tell ye – by the law we live on, I canna take your bairn till the third day after this; and no then, if ye can tell me my right name.” And off gaes madam around the pigsty end,  and the goodwife falls down in a swoon behind the knocking-stane.

                Aweel, the goodwife couldna sleep that night for weeping and a’ the next day the same, cuddling her bairn till she near squeezed its breath out; but the second day she thinks o’ taking a walk in the wood, and wi’ the bairn in her arms she sets out and gaes far in amang the trees where there was an old quarry hole grown o’er wi’ gorse, and a bonny spring well in the middle of it. Before she came very nigh, she hears the birring of a lint-wheel [a wheel for spinning flax], and a voice lilting a sang; sae the wife creeps quietly amang the bushes, and keeks [peeps] ower the brow of the quarry, and what does she see but the green fairy kemping at her wheel and singing:

“Little kens our good dame at hame

That Whuppitie Stoorie is my name!” 

                “Ah ha!” thinks the wife. “I’ve gotten the mason’s word at last: the de’il gie them joy that tell’t it!”  And she gaed hame far lichter than she came out, as you may guess, laughing like a madcap wi’ the thought of begunkin [befooling] the auld green fairy.

                Aweel, ye must ken that this goodwife was a jocular woman and aye merry when her heart wasna sair overladen, sae she thinks to have some sport wi’ the fairy: and at the appointit time she puts the bairn behind the knocking-stane and sits down on it hersel’. Syne she pulls her nightcap ajee [awry] ower her left lug [ear], crooks her mouth on t’ither side, as if she were weeping – and a filthy face she made, ye may be sure. She hadna lang to wait, for up the brae mounts the green fairy, neither lame nor lazy, and lang afore she got near the knocking-stane, she skirls out, 

                “Goodwife o’ Kittelrumpit, ye ken weel what I come for – stand and deliver!” 

                The wife pretends to greet sairer [weep more sorely] than before, and wrings her nieves [fists], and falls on her knees, wi’: “Och, sweet madam mistress, spare my only bairn and take the weary soo!”

                “The de’il take the soo, for my share,” quo’ the fairy. “I come na here for swine’s flesh. Dinna be contramawcious, hizzie [hussy, wench], but gie me the gett [child; begotten] instantly!”

                “Ochone, dear leddy mine,” quo’ the goodwife, “forbear my poor bairn and take mysel’!”

                “The de’il’s in the daft jade,” quo the fairy, looking like the far-end o’ a fiddle[5] [sour], “She’s clean dementit! Wha in all the earthly warld, wi’ half an ee in their heads, would ever want wi’ the likes of thee?”

                I trow this set up the wife o’ Kittelrumpit’s birse [put up her hackles]; for though she had two bleared een and a lang red neb [nose] forbye, she thought hersel’ as bonny as the best o’ them. Sae she bangs aff her knees, sets her nightcap[6] straight, folds her two hands in front of her, makes a curstie down to the ground, and, “In troth, fair madam,” quo’ she, “I might hae had the wit to ken that the likes o’ me is nae fair to tie the warst shoe strings o’ the high and mighty princess, Whuppity Stoorie!”

                Gin a fluff o’ gunpowder had come out o’ the ground, it couldna hae made the fairy loup [leap] higher than she did; then down she came again, thump on her shoe-heels, and whirling around, she ran down the brae, screeching for rage like an owlet chased wi’ the witches.

                The goodwife o’ Kittelrumpit laughed till she was like to ryve [split]; then she takes up her bairn and goes into her hoose, singing all the way; 

A goo and a gitty, my bonny wee tyke,

Ye’s noo hae your four-oories;

Sin’ we’ve gi’en Nick a bane to pyke

Wi’ his wheels and his Whuppity Stoories.”[7]

               

---

[1] ‘the knocking-stane’: a stone with a hollowed out basin in which grain could be ground by pounding it with a wooden mallet.

[2] ‘brae’: a steepish hillside; the brow of a hill.

[3] ‘waur losses at the Shirra Muir’: Chambers notes: “This was a common saying formerly, when people were regretting trifles.” The Battle of Sherrifmuir near Stirling in 1715 ended the Jacobite Rebellion and the Earl of Mar’s attempt to place James Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’, on the throne

[4] Licking thumbs and pressing them together (an exchange of bodily fluids) was a country way of sealing a bargain. 

[5] “looking like the far-end o’ a fiddle’: ‘A person of sour countenance is said to ‘hae a face like the far en’ of a French fiddle’: G. Fraser ‘Lowland Lore’, p156, 1880

[6] Nightcap: in the original Scots, ‘mutch-croon’.

[7] ‘A goo and a gitty’: nonsense words to coo to to a baby. ‘Tyke’: literally a dog: naughty little lad. ‘Four-oories’ – I have no idea; Scots speakers please help!  ‘Nick’: Old Nick, the devil, to whom the goodwife assumes the fairy belongs. ‘a bane to pyke’: a bone to pick.