Modern Fairies and loathly ladies series one, Episode three, Helpful fairies.
Hello, this is Faye Hield and this is Caroline Larrington in the first episode in this series.
We introduced our project, Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies in this project.
We researched traditional tales about fairies in the British Isles and then investigate how some contemporary musicians,
writers and artists remediate or are inspired by those tales to make new works of art that speak to our modern lives.
In today's episode, we're going to talk about stories where humans and fairies assist one another using their quite different
kinds of skills to improve life for struggling humans or fairies who find themselves in temporary trouble.
These tales often point to the moral that generosity and open heartedness is rewarded.
Here are two tales from Scotland which show fairies and humans interacting in a friendly way with one another.
Here's Brian McMahon again. These are two stories from the West Highlands.
Borrowing oatmeal. One day as a mother was sitting rocking her baby to sleep, she was surprised.
On looking up to see a lady of elegant and courtly demeanour.
So unlike any one she had ever seen in that part of the country, standing in the middle of the room, she had not heard anyone enter.
Therefore, you may judge it was with no little surprise. Not on mingled with curiosity that she rose to welcome her strange visitor.
She handed her a chair, but she very politely declined to be seated.
She was very magnificently attired. Her dress was the richest green embroidered round with spangles of gold.
And on her head was a small coronet of pearls. The woman was still more surprised at her strange request.
She asked in a rich musical voice if she would oblige her with a basin of oatmeal.
A basin fall to overflowing was immediately handed to her for the woman's husband, being both a farmer and Nella had plenty of meal at command.
The lady promised to return it and named the day she would do so.
One of the children put out her hand to get hold of the grand lady's spangles, but told her mother afterwards that she felt nothing.
The mother was afraid the child would lose the use of her hands. But no such calamity ensued.
It would have been very ungrateful in her fairy majesty if she had struck the child powerless for touching her dress.
If indeed such powers were hers. But to return to our story.
The very day mentioned the mail was returned not by the same lady, but by a curious little figure with a yelping voice.
She was likewise dressed in green after handing the meal. She helped out Prall meal.
It's the top pickle of the season. Corn. It was excellent.
And what was very strange. All the family were advised to partake of it when sickness came shortly afterwards, the whole family survived.
But there was one servant lad who spurned the fairies meal and he died shortly after
the miller and his wife firmly believed it was because he refused to eat the meal.
They also firmly believed that their first visitor was no less a personage than the queen of the fairies,
who having this Mr. Court, had not one maid of honour in waiting to obey her commands.
A few nights after this strange visit as the Miller was going to bed,
a gentle tap was heard at the door and on, it's being opened by him with a light in his hand.
There stood a little figure dressed in green, who, in a shrill voice but very polite manner,
requested him to let on the water and set the meal in order that she was going to grind some corn.
The miller did not dare to refuse. So did as she desired him.
She told him to go to bed again and he would find all he had left it.
He found everything in the morning, as she said he would. So much for the honesty of faries.
Done view leaks on fire. Fairies were very friendly to some people whom they favoured, but equally mischievous, where they took a dislike.
A hill in the farm of Don View, Luke in Craig Inish was one of their favourite haunts.
And on a certain occasion, they offered to assistant honest tenant's wife in the neighbourhood for whom they had
a kindness to manufacture a quantity of wool she had for clothing for her family.
She was very glad to have their services and being always an active race.
They set to work directly, repeating a song teasing, carding, mixing, distaff weaving loom waterfall walking on the fire.
The thrifty housewife herself is the best at sitting up late.
In the heat of their operations and envious neighbour came to the door crying, Don, Vueling is on fire.
Dan, Vueling is on fire. Vueling is on fire, was reacted by all the little company done.
Vueling is on fire. My Hamer's and my anvil, my hammers and my anvil.
My little children and my grown men. My little children and my grown men.
And they all scampered off, but not till they had nearly finished the housewife's weaving.
So in the boring oatmeal's story, then the open hearted generosity of the household, it really paid off?
Definitely, yes. The fairy leaves them with something not just equal to what they borrowed,
but with an added special gift that they the fairies can see something coming in the future and helps the family overcome that.
Yeah, it comes as a kind of surprise, doesn't it, to the family that they didn't know that the fairy would repay them with the kind of extra interest,
as it were, but they just reach out to someone in trouble and sheds the kind of quite meagre resources that they have?
Yes, there's the poor chap who decides not to eat it, though.
Doesn't earn. He perishes and dies. So I'm not quite sure where that fits with fairy eating fairy food.
Isn't there a bit of a taboo about eating food? Yes. And I think that kind of pulls against that in some way.
If you eat fairy food when your below ground Disney Fairy World,
you are prone to then develop a kind of addiction to it and you want to keep going back and getting more and more.
And it can end up with your pining and dying, particularly if people, Christians, the priests,
the mothers, stop people from going into fairy land to get a fix, then it all becomes rather dangerous.
But I think perhaps in these Scottish tales, the fairies are bringing a magic fairy substance out of fairy land into the human world.
I think probably the poor chap who doesn't eat it is being quite cautious and being quite God-Fearing in the way.
Yeah.
So there's a difference between being given a gift and being rewarded for something you did or just consuming and partying as part of the fairy dance.
Yes, I think it's the attractions of the other world that drag you away from real human existence that is such a danger there.
Mm hmm. Interesting. And it's also interesting in the second story, I think, how we get the sense of the kind of endless work that women have to do,
particularly in clothes manufacture,
starting right from taking the wool off the sheep and going all the way through the spinning and the weaving and so on.
Yes. And that the fairies just come and it seems quite altruistically just help get through that work.
They're not looking to get anything out of it, particularly themselves. They just like her.
Mm hmm. And there's other stories, aren't there were people where fairies come to mill people's grain for them or it's not just in clothing.
There's all sorts of trades that fairies will come and do. Yes.
Or sometimes there are stories about elves which have the same kind of structure where you
have the the helpful elves who help the cobbler and they do his work for him overnight.
And then those stories, if you try and reward the other well being. It takes offence and cares of doing it out of love, not for kind of gain.
Then this story ends. It's rather saddening in a way to see that the envious neighbour just blows everything up.
Yeah. Not very kind. Not going to do anyone any good, is it?
No. I mean, it's also I guess it's quite striking that the the fairies, as they run the way they're shouting, oh,
my Smith's tools, which is quite interesting given the the normal idea of fairies not getting on well with iron,
but also my my man, my children, my family to the kind of fairy families in the hill,
just like human families, and they share the same concerns with their villages on fire.
They need to go and save themselves. So yes, they will do altruistic and good things for us, but not at the price to themselves.
Yeah. So that kind of perhaps than we might have thought. So while sometimes these fairies are coming and doing work for us and putting
their skills into practise and using their magic for the benefit of humans,
as in giving you magic oatmeal or getting your work done for you. They also pass on their skills and enhance the human ability as well.
In some cases they. Yeah, there's another interesting. Again,
the Scottish Changeling story where Smith's son is snatched away by the fairies and eventually the
father comes and rescues him from the fairy mound and discovers that all the fathers and Xman Smith,
the son, is even better because he's lent strange fairy metalworking trades.
And so after his time in The Fairy Man, he's able to make a good living from the trade,
which he wouldn't have had if he hadn't had that experience with the fairies. And in that tale,
doesn't the son not speak for a year after coming out of fairy worlds of suggesting
maybe he was having quite a nice time there or else he's kind of traumatised?
Can't the fairies that want him to speak of what happened to him, the possibility that is interesting.
And there's other skills as well, musician skills. So there's lots of Trower tunes that I've heard around the place.
So these are supposed to be tunes that been learnt from the fairies.
So passing on their tunes, but also their musical abilities and to make magical, mystical and enchanted music.
Yeah, and that's an example that differs from some of the other kind of fairy stories where going into fairy land,
the meeting the fairies has quite a detrimental. Not on your life, but because they're skilled musicians already.
When they go into the mound where they meet the trials, the Orkney and Shetland version of fairies,
they give good entertainment to the other world creatures while they're there.
And that's a reward. They learn these wonderful, magical tunes, which they take away with them back to the outside world.
Here's Lucy Farrell and Ewan McPherson playing The King of the Fairies.
That was the King of the Fairies by Lucy Farrell and Ewan McPherson.
Now that is an old tune said to summon the king to any social gathering.
So if you play it round three times, he will appear. And depending on whether the parties to his liking or not, he might stay and join in.
But if it's really not his taste, he can cause endless mischief and a great deal of problems.
So helpful fairies is not just about fairies passing on skills to us and giving us wonderful music and wonderful food to eat.
But they also need our help sometimes. And there's a few stories of humans being taken into the fairy world to be helpful.
Yes, this is a story from Wales about a serving girl called Elion and her relationship with the teller.
Take the Welsh version of the fairies and his Brime mum to read it to us.
Alien and the tellies take. An old man and his wife lived at the golf dorwin in some period a long while ago.
They went to Caernarfon to hear a servant maid at the All Hallows Fair.
The custom then for young men and women who stood out for places to station themselves at the top of the present maze by a little green eminence,
which was where the present post office stands.
The old man and his wife went to that spot and saw their glass with yellow hair standing a little apart from all the others.
The old woman went to her and asked her if she wanted a place. She replied that she did.
And so she hired herself at once and came to her place at the time fixed.
In those times, it was customary during the long winter nights that spinning should be done after supper.
Now the maid servant would go to the meadow to spin by the light of the moon and tell if Taig used to come to her to sing and dance.
But sometime in the spring, when the days had grown longer, Alien escaped with the telephone taig so that she was seen no more.
The field where she was last seen as to this day called aliens field and the meadow is known as the Maids Meadow.
The old woman of Garthe, Dorwin, was in the habit of helping women in childbed and she was in great request far and wide.
Sometime after Alien's escape, there came a gentleman on horseback to the door one night when the moon was full.
While there was a slight rain, just a little mist to fetch the old woman to his wife.
So she rode off behind the stranger on his horse and came to Rossie Court.
Now, there was at that time in the centre of the cross,
somewhat of a rising ground that looked like an old fortification with many big stones on the top and a large cairn of stones on the northern side.
It is to be seen there to this day, and it goes by the name of Brinn EPB in.
But I have never visited the spot. When they reached the spot, they entered a large cave and they went into a room where the wife lay in her bed.
It was the finest place the old woman had seen in her life.
When she had successfully brought the wife to bed, she went near the fire to address the baby and when that was done,
the husband came to the old woman with a bottle of ointment that she might anoint the baby's eyes,
but he had treated her not to touch her own eyes with it. Somehow,
after putting the bottle by one of the old woman's eyes happened to each and
she rubbed it with the same finger that she had used to rub the baby's eyes.
Then she saw with that eye how the wife lay on a bundle of rushes and withered ferns and a large cave with big stones all around her.
And with a little fire in one corner. And she saw also the lady was only alien.
Her former servant girl, whilst with the other eye, she beheld the finest place she had ever seen.
Not long afterwards, the old midwife went to Caernarfon to market when she saw the husband and said to him, How is Alien?
She's pretty well, said he, to the old woman. But with what I do, you see me.
With this one. Was the reply. And he took a bullrush and put her eye out at once.
So Alien turns out to be not such a great servant girl for her mistress.
If she's away with the fairies, happy full moon dancing green. And I think you can understand in some ways why that kind of life with the fairies,
even though it turns out to Christianised to be quite an illusion, is more attractive than just being a puss upon servant in the in the Welsh form.
Yeah. Well, if you just get the one day off a month then I suppose you'd want to go and dance with the devil.
But there's also notable, I think, that this midwife comes home with new information and with a reward.
And that seems to because her Christian faith allows her to see clearly.
So what looks like a rich hall with a tapestry beds and and fine hangings and carpets is actually nothing
but an old cave with a straw on the floor and the girls lying on pallets of straw with Christianised.
You can see that the fairy world is an illusion. Why do you think the fairies needed human help to deliver babies?
It's interesting, isn't it? We can see in the next episode that humans give birth reasonably easily.
But Fairy seem to have difficulty with it. They always seem to need human help and fairy children don't thrive necessarily.
So there are reasons to swap your fairy child with a human child, as we'll hear shortly.
Another issue that fairies have is with Ion, isn't it?
So when without needing to manage tools or make industrial artefacts, they sometimes come for human intervention as well.
Yeah, there's another lovely Welsh story where a ploughman is ploughing up and down the field and then he sees that the end of the field,
a tiny little shovel with the long handle, which is the kind that you would use to put bread loaves into the ovens.
And with a long handle so you don't get burnt. And the nail that secured the metal bit has come loose.
And he realises that the fairies need his help.
So at the end of the ploughed turn, he nails the people, as it's called, back together, and then he is rewarded with some delicious fairy loaves.
Again, Pooh loves that come out of fairy land and which are both tasty and healing.
So there's a lovely symbiotic relationship going on here that the fairies don't just give us everything
they need us as well and were to two bodies that have to thrive off each other in order to really thrive.
Yeah, we lived side by side with the fairies and sometimes we can see them, sometimes we can't.
But cooperation, respect, promise, keeping. These are the things that stop the fairies being dark and malicious in the way that they can be.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, join us in the next one in the series. Well, we'll talk about fairies and children and the fear of the changeling.
And if you happen to be able to come to the stage, Gates said, there'll be a residency with open rehearsals and actual performances.
The artist's new work in progress on April 26, 27 and 28, 2009.
Goodbye. Goodbye. May seven.
Paul.