Addlers and Menters

The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke - Richard Dadd

Like the tale of the 'Elf Dancers of Cae Caled' which I posted up a few weeks ago, some folk tales sound so detailed and oddly convincing, you feel they must be true – whatever ‘truth’ may mean.  And then again, you start to wonder.  Here are two fairy stories from Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828) which have set me thinking carefully about the way they may have been collected.

This is the first tale, with Keightley’s original asterisk and footnote:

Addlers and Menters

An old lady in Yorkshire related as follows:– My eldest daughter Betsey was about four years old; I remember it was on a fine summer’s afternoon, or rather evening, I was seated in this chair which I now occupy.  The child had been in the garden, she came into that entry or passage from the kitchen (on the right side of the entry was the old parlour-door, on the left the door of the common sitting-room; the mother of the child was in a line with both doors); the child, instead of turning towards the sitting room made a pause at the parlour-door, which was open.  She stood several minutes quite still; at last I saw her draw her hand quickly towards her body; she set up a loud shriek and ran, or rather flew, to me crying out “Oh! Mammy, green man will hab me! green man will hab me!” 

It was a long time before I could pacify her; I then asked her why she was so frightened.  “O Mammy,” said she, “all t’parlour is full of addlers and menters.” Elves and fairies (spectres?) I suppose she meant. She said they were dancing, and a little man in a green coat with a gold-laced cocked hat on his head, offered to take her hand as if he would have her as his partner in the dance. 

The mother, upon hearing this, went and looked into the old parlour, but the fairy vision had melted into thin air.

“Such,” adds the narrator, “is the account I heard of this vision of fairies. The person is still alive who witnessed or supposed she saw it, and though a well-informed person, still positively asserts the relations to be strictly true.” *

*And true no doubt it is: ie: the impression made on her imagination was as strong as if the objects had been actually before her. The narrator is the same person who told the preceding boggart story.

It’s frustrating that Keightley did not often name his contributors. In ‘Addlers and Menters’ we initially assume the narrator to be the old lady mentioned in the first sentence.  However, a different voice creeps in to comment upon the layout of the house – this is the person she is telling the story to, who in the absence of any clue to the contrary, we suppose to be Keightley himself.  Only in the last paragraph do we realise that the person to whom this story was told is not Keightley after all, but an unnamed contributor.  We are therefore getting the story at third hand: and it’s not at all clear from Keightley’s own footnote whether the ‘person still alive who witnessed it’ is the old lady, or her daughter, little Betsey, now grown up.

The detail of the first two paragraphs – the well visualised domestic interior, the little girl coming in from the garden, the pause by the open parlour door, the child’s sharply observed gesture of ‘drawing her hand quickly towards her body’, and her terrified shriek – all suggest a genuine experience of some sort, if only a frightening waking dream or hallucination, which has later been ‘finished off’ with a conventional literary ending.  Addlers and menters?  Whether dialect words or childish gabble, they somehow carry conviction. But the civilized little man with green coat and gold-laced cocked hat who invites the child to dance – does not.  He is hardly convincing as the source of such childish terror.

I find it fascinating to compare the style of this tale with the Boggart story which Keightley’s footnote declares to have been narrated by the same person – whether the old lady herself, the daughter, or Keightley’s unnamed contributor.  Here is the boggart story:

The Boggart

In the house of an honest farmer in Yorkshire, named George Gilbertson, a Boggart had taken up his abode. He here caused a great deal of annoyance, especially by tormenting the children in various ways.  Sometimes their bread and butter would be snatched away, or their porringers of bread and milk be capsized by an invisible hand; for the Boggart never let himself be seen; at other times, the curtains of their beds would be shaken backwards and forwards, or a heavy weight would press on and nearly suffocate them.  The parents had often, on hearing their cries, to rush to their aid. There was a kind of closet, formed by a wooden partition, on the kitchen stairs, and a large knot having been driven out of the deal boards of which it was made, there remained a hole. Into this one day the farmer’s youngest boy stuck the shoe-horn with which he was amusing himself, when immediately it was thrown out again, and struck the boy on the head.  The agent was of course the Boggart, and it soon became their sport (which they called laking with Boggart) to put the shoe-horn into the hole and have it shot back at them.

The Boggart at length proved such a torment that the farmer and his wife resolved to quit the house and let him have it all to himself.  This was put into execution, and the farmer and his family were following the last loads of furniture, when a neighbour named John Marshall came up – “Well, Georgey,” said he, “and soa you’re leaving t’ould hoose at last?” – “Heigh, Johnny my lad, I’m forced tull it. For that damned Boggart torments us soa, we can neither rest neet nor day for’t, and soa you see, we’re forced to flitt.”  He scarce had uttered the words when a voice from a deep upright churn cried out, “Aye, aye, Georgey, we’re flitting ye see.” – “Od damn thee,” cried the poor farmer, “if I’d known thou’d been there, I wouldn’t ha’ stirred a peg. Nay nay, it’s no use, Mally,” turning to his wife, “we may as weel turn back again to t’ould hoose as be tormented in another that’s not so convenient.”

So here’s another story which seems split in two. Or even three.  Most people will recognise the second paragraph as a well known popular folktale, complete in itself, Aarne-Thompson Type ML.7020. Motif: F.482.3.1.1 [Farmer is so bothered by brownie that he decides he must move, etc]. Here, it seems to have been tacked on to the first part, which itself appears to have been cobbled together from two other narratives, one about a poltergeist or unquiet spirit which terrorises some young children; the other involving some boys who, far from being afraid of their boggart, actually play a game with him: ‘laking with Boggart’ – in which he fires objects like the shoe-horn out of the hole into which they push them.  ‘Laking with boggart’, which means ‘playing with the boggart’ is convincing Yorkshire usage (they still say ‘laiking about’ in Yorkshire, and drop the definite article.)  Most of the domestic detail, the closet on the kitchen stairs, and the knot-hole, and the boys with the shoe-horn, comes from this part of the story.

Apart from the dialogue, the story is told in a rather flat ‘literary’ style – ‘In the abode of an honest farmer’, ‘this was put into execution’, etc, but the second paragraph is not entirely convincing in its attempt at a colloquial dialect. For one thing, the farmers address one another with the formal ‘you’. Instead of John Marshall’s ‘Soa you’re leaving at last’, I’d expect the informal ‘Soa th’art leaving at last’.  Even if John Marshall is actually addressing George and his family – plural – George’s response is ‘and soa you see, we’re forced to flitt’- instead of the more likely ‘and soa tha sees, we’re forced to flitt’. Apart from the phrase ‘laking with boggart’, none of this story conveys the impression of someone scribbling down what he has actually heard.  Whereas the little girl’s words in ‘Addlers and Menters’ sound as if they’ve been written down verbatim, the dialogue in the second paragraph of The Boggart’ seems much more like what someone thinks is the way a Yorkshire farmer talks.

So what’s been going on?  In my opinion, someone has decided to turn a series of anecdotes – odd in themselves, but short and inconclusive – into stories, ‘improving’ them by linking them together into a narrative.  And who was that someone?  It could be Keightley himself, of course, but personally I suspect his unnamed contributor, the person who listened to the old Yorkshire lady.  It’s perfectly possible the old lady told him all the ingredients of these stories, as separate tales – I’m sure she supplied the names of George Gilbertson and John Marshall, and the anecdote of the shoe-horn.  But I don’t believe they were originally linked.  And I think that the addlers and menters, the poltergeist, and the shoe-horn game are much more convincing – and far more unsettling – when left on their own.


Picture credit: Richard Dadd: The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (Tate Britain) Wikimedia Commons