Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies podcast series one.
Fairies, Children and Changelings. 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 research traditional tales about fairies in the British Isles and then investigate how some contemporary musicians,
writers and artists re mediate or are inspired by those tales to make new works of art that speak to our modern lives.
Today, in the fourth episode of the series, we're going to talk about some of the most personal and distressing tales about fairies.
These can involve the snatching away of human children and leaving a changeling an unresponsive,
difficult, wizened child that doesn't seem to grow or thrive in its place.
In another story, we'll hear about how some mysterious children appear near a village in Suffolk and they claim to come from another world entirely.
And then they have to try to adjust or not to life in mediaeval East Anglia.
But first, we're going to pick up on some of the stories we were talking about in the last podcast, and this is a story called Midwife to the Fairies.
Here's a version that comes from Suffolk. Midwife to the fairies.
In the town of Stowmarket in Suffolk, there lived a skilled midwife.
One day she found a little man standing on her doorstep asking for her help with his wife, who was in labour.
She went off with him and made sure that the baby was born safely. Sometime later, she was at the market in Stowmarket and to her surprise,
she caught sight of the fairy man helping himself to quantities of beef in the butcher's shop as ferries are normally invisible to humans.
The butcher, of course, was quite unaware of what was going on. The midwife greeted her acquaintance cheerfully and asked him how the baby was.
Mother and child were doing well, she was told. And the little man asked her with which eye she could see him.
She pointed to the eye for while in fairyland she had rubbed some ointment intended for the child's eyes upon her own eye,
and the fairy man blew on it. After that, she never saw him or any other members of the family tribe.
Again. So in that story, that's a very typical example,
isn't the kind of service that the ferries need from humans that their babies can't apparently be born by themselves without human intervention?
But, you know, although the midwife did her thing, a rather cruel in some ways.
There has to be some kind of limitation on on the exchange there.
So they need something from her. But she cannot just leave with all their knowledge and the ability to see fairy world and what's going on.
You know, there's quite touching that she sort of gives herself away by behaving just like
a human midwife would when she sees the father of a baby that she's delivered,
that she says, oh, hello. And she also after the baby. And that's what reveals the fact that she's got that fairy ornament in her eye.
You can see why the fairies need their invisibility. Well, yes.
I can't imagine the fairies would get away with just wandering around through the market if we all knew they were there.
Stealing bits of meat has perhaps for the baby. I mean, who knows? But that does show the fairy difference.
I think that fairies don't necessarily sympathise with with the midwife just because she has warm, loving feelings towards the child.
They just go, nope, he broke the rules. And we're going to punish you.
But there is a different levels of viciousness on that punishment.
So in some cases, the the fairy realises that this human can see the fairy world and can blow on the eyes to get rid of this magical power of vision.
And in other cases, it's just a result. It's not the way that she spoke to the fairy, pokes out the eye.
And that's, I think, a bit grim. Now, here's another story, the tale of the green children.
And this is an extraordinary story that's recorded in two separate chronicles that come from the late 12th century in mediaeval England.
And both tales tell about some strange children, bright green in colour, who appears suddenly one day near the village of Wolf Pitt.
Yes, Brian McMahon again. Green children.
Here's a version of this tale from William of Newburgh.
In East Anglia, there is a village which is said to lie four or five miles from the famous monastery of the Blessed King and Mount Edmond,
close to the village. Some very ancient ditches are visible in English.
They are called wolf pits or wolf ditches, and they lend their name to the village close by.
At harvest time, when the harvesters were busy in the fields gathering the crops.
Two children, a boy and a girl, emerged from these ditches.
Their entire bodies were greed and they were wearing clothes of unusual colour and unknown material.
As they wandered bemused over the countryside, they were seised by the Reapers and led the village.
Many people flocked to observe this most unusual sight, and for several days they were kept without food.
So they were now almost fainting with hunger. Yet they paid no attention to any food offered to them.
It then chanced that beans were brought in from the fields. They want grabbed these and looked for the beans in the stalks.
But when they found nothing in the hollow of the stalks, they wept bitterly.
Then one of the bystanders pulled the beans from the pots and offered them
to the children who had once gleefully took and ate them for several months.
They were nourished by this food until they learnt to eat bread.
In the end, they gradually lost their own colour when the qualities of our foodstuffs had their effect.
They became like us and also learnt the use of our speech.
Persons of prudence decided that they should receive the sacrament of holy baptism.
And this was also administered. But the boy, who seemed to be younger, lived only a short time after baptism and then died prematurely.
Whereas the girl continued unaffected, differing, not even in the slightest way from the women of our kind.
She certainly took her husband later at Llyn, according to the story, and was said to be living a few years ago.
Once they had the use of our language, they were asked who they were and where they came from.
They are said to have replied. We are people from St. Martin's land.
He is accorded special reverence in the country of our birth.
When they were next asked where that land was and how they had come from that war pit, they said we do not know either of these things.
All we remember is that one day we were pasturing our fathers flocks in the fields when we heard a mighty din,
such as we often hear at St. Edmunds when they say the bells are ringing out.
When we turned our attention to the sound which caused to surprise, it was as though we were out of our minds,
for we suddenly found ourselves amongst you in the fields where you were harvesting.
When they were asked whether people believed in Christ there or whether the sun rose, they said that it was a Christian country and had churches.
But the sun does not rise amongst the natives of our land.
They said, and it obtains very little light from the sun's rays, but is satisfied with the measure of its brightness.
Which in your country precedes its rising or follows its setting?
Moreover, a shining land is visible not far from our own, but a very broad river divides the two.
They are said to have made these and many other replies too long to narrate to interested enquirers.
Another late 12th century chronicler, Ralph of Coggs Hall, has a slightly different version.
Another wonderful thing happened in Suffolk at St. Mary's of the Wolf Pits,
a boy and his sister were found by the inhabitants of that place near the mouth of a pit which is there.
Who had the form of all their limbs like to those of other men.
But they differed in the colour of their skin from all the people of our habitable world,
for the whole surface of their skin was tinged of a green colour.
No one could understand their speech when they were brought as curiosities to the house of a certain night, Sir Richard, to comb that wicks.
They wept bitterly. Bread and other vittles were set before them, but they would touch none of them.
Though they were tormented by great hunger.
As the girl afterwards acknowledged at length when some beans just cut with their stalks were brought into the house,
they made signs with Greater Vendetti that they should be given to them when they were brought.
They opened the stalks instead of the pods, thinking that the beans were in the hollow of them, but not finding them there.
They began to weep anew when those who were present saw this.
They opened the pods and showed them the naked beans. They fed on these with delight.
And for a long time tasted no other food. The boy, however, was always languid and depressed, and he died within a short time.
The girl enjoyed continual good health and became accustomed to various kinds of food, lost completely that green colour and gradually recovered.
The sanguine habit of her entire body.
She was afterwards regenerated by the boon of holy baptism and lived for many years in the service of that night,
as I have frequently heard from him and his family, and was rather loose and wanton in her conduct,
being frequently asked about the people of her country. She asserted that the inhabitants and all they had in that country were of a green colour
and that they saw no sun but enjoyed a degree of light like what is after sunset.
Being asked how she came into this country with the aforesaid boy,
she replied that as they were following their flocks, they came to a certain cavern on entering,
which they heard a delightful sound of bells ravished by whose sweetness they went for a long
time wandering on through the cabin until they came to its mouth when they came out of it.
They were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun and the unusual temperature of the air, and they thus lay for a long time.
Being terrified by the noise of those who came on them, they wish to fly, but they could not find the entrance of the cabin before they were caught.
I find this one fascinating because it's logged in a contemporary official record, lots of the others try iTunes.
It's kind of a romantic aural narrative of where these stories came from.
But this one seems so important to people that these children were recorded and in two different contexts.
Yes, that's interesting. There is obviously a story people knew and that it went through their lives as well.
And the daughter, the little girl, she she grew up and got married as well and became part of society.
And the boy just couldn't hack it. And I always feel terribly sorry for the distress of those children.
And they've emerged out of their their strange twilight world following the sound of church bells.
Again, this kind of tension that we often get between church bells symbolising Christianity and
the the side other world of the fairies and just being stuck and they can't go home again.
Now, the slightly cynical, not believing in fairies, part of me thinks of these as not fairy children.
And what it must be like to be believed to be fairy children if if they had come indeed from somewhere else and they still can't get home.
And that's still in this very alien environment. And yet they didn't have the language immediately to explain.
So they eventually learn to talk and then they explain it.
But perhaps quite a long time off, though, where it was they came from.
And perhaps it was just a village down the road. But they were they spoke a different kind of dialect.
Yeah, well, the bit that I find particularly open now is that the daughter does go off and get married,
but there's no record or whether she has children. So if indeed these were children of the fairies.
Is there a bloodline still going on down through there? If you are a descendant of grandchildren, please write, right?
Yes, let us know. In the meantime, however, here's a wonderful poem that Jane Yolen, an American poet, wrote about the green children.
Here it is, sung by one of our artists on the project, Murray Waterson, who's slightly altered the words.
Des Wyvern Lie and.
Stones, the arms and legs scream, not the dark green 5V nor the green of apples.
That and some arms, not the deep green of the sea, but solve the Liebreich in.
When they. And they SWO could bring language which trees and flowers.
The boy died of a waisting lived aid, saying she got angry.
Why? To rage. To Kris Dunn.
I'm married. Why not lie to me?
Why not? Why? Travis Wax is.
No. Why? To see us from the shadows.
She was the White House. Shines.
That is all that is. That is.
That was Murray Waterson with Ben Nichols and Barney Moss Brown singing their version of Janice Allen's poem, The Green Children.
Another kind of child based story is the swopping of human and fairy babies.
At around 18 months to two years old, this seems to happen or where a previously healthy human baby starts to wither away and become less itself.
The Stories of the Changelings. Here's a typical changelings story, which has got some quite nice comic elements in it.
It's some Scotland and it's called Johnny in the Cradle. And it tells us what happens when you're changing.
Baby is left to its own devices. Here's Brian McMahon again.
Johnny at the Cradle.
A man and his wife were not long married and they had a week, Kitty, called Johnny, but he was always crying and never satisfied.
There was a neighbour near a tailor and he came to Market Day and Johnny was I greeting or crying and never growing.
And the wife wanted to get a day at the market, so the tailor said he'd stay and watch what Johnny?
So he was sitting sewing by the fire and a voice said.
Is my mother and my father away? He couldn't think it was the baby speaking, so he went and looked out of the window, but there was nothing.
And he heard it again. Is my mother and my father away?
And there it was sitting up with its we hands gripping the side of the cradle.
There's a bottle of whisky in the press. It says, here's a drink.
Sure enough, there was one and they had a drink together. Then we Johnny wanted a blow on the pipes, but there was not a set in the house.
So he told the tailor to go and fetch a round of straw from the buyer.
And he played the loveliest tune on the pipes through the straw. They had a good talk together.
And the way things said is my mother and my father coming home. And when they came.
That was near the end. Yeah. And the cradle. By this time, the Taylor knew it was a fairy.
They had there. So he followed the farmer into the buyer and told him all that had happened.
Farmer just couldn't bring himself to believe it. So between them, they hit on a contrivance.
They let on that a lot of things had not been sold at the market. And there was to be a second day of it.
And the Taylor promised to come over again to sit by the band.
They made a great stir about packing up and then they went through to the barn and listened to the peephole in the wall.
Is my mother and my father gone, said the wee thing. And the mother could just hardly believe her ears.
But when they heard the piping through the corn straw, they can say it was a fairy right enough.
And the farmer went into the room and he set the griddle on the fire and heated it red hot.
And he fetched in a half bag full of horse manure and set it on the griddle.
And the wee thing looked at him with wild eyes when he went to grip it and put it on the griddle.
It flew straight up the chimney and as it went, it cried out.
I wish I had been a longer with my mother. I had a cancer better.
So, yeah, lots of funny bits in there.
But I can't help but feel the distress of the parents that are left with this child that they don't recognise as their own.
And it's in some ways in that story, it's it's a bit less horrifying that they just thought heating the shovel but wants the baby.
The fairy babies revealed itself, which is off up the chimney, and it doesn't get hurt or tortured in the way that we suspect.
Lots and lots of fairy children or human children who just had developmental deficits of various kinds might have been horribly maltreated.
So in these stories, it seems that the something has to happen in order to reveal the changeling for what it is.
So either in some cases the very baby plays the pipes and it calls its family to them and they have to go back to their
family or they expose themselves by speaking like 80 year old man rather than the toddler baby that is supposed to be.
They need catching out in some way. That's right. Because they're so old, even though they're fairy babies that they know a lot in the in the story,
a brewery of egg shells, which is quite a widespread one.
The old wise woman that the village advises the mother to catch the fairy baby out by
putting some water and some molton some hops in an egg shell and holding it over the fire.
And this catches the fairies attention and it says, what are you doing?
And the mother will say, I'm brewing beer in an egg shell.
And then the fairy says, Well, I've lived for fifteen hundred years and I never seen that before.
Whoops. And that breaks the spell, of course. Yeah.
Which is some comfort to that.
There are other records of women mistreating their babies in an effort to try and get this kind of confession out of them.
And that's altogether darker. It's really horrible when we think of babies being left out,
be exposed to the cold and the wet in the hope that the fairies will just come and swap the human baby back because they can't bear
to see their own babies so mistreated or whether it's to torment them with the hot iron in order to get a confession out of them.
There must have been quite a number of children who suffer them, very likely died.
A children's tradition that we're probably all a bit more familiar with is the idea of a fairy godmother.
Yeah, fairy godmother seemed to turn up from French rather later in to English tradition than these older and darker stories of the fairies.
And of course, the fairy godmother is summoned to the christening of the child and showers.
Blessings upon it. Good luck, beauty, wisdom, courage and so on.
But then, of course, they can be the rather darker fairy godmother as well,
the one who is left out at the christening and comes along and pronounces some kind of curse.
But the idea that there is this connexion on a human child from birth with the fairy world,
that there is a self-proclaimed themselves as as part of the human family, as a godmother in that case is a more recent tradition.
But it's certainly interesting. The good fairy godmother always works Hathaway somehow to counteract the effects of the bad one.
And that makes these stories, I think, more optimistic.
Kids suggests that the kinds of of dark things that might cloud the child's first years don't have to stay with them forever.
That with with help them with courage and perseverance, they can grow out of it and learn to thrive.
Fairies are interested in human children in different ways, their own children seem not to thrive easily.
And they like to steal human infants. Giving birth is difficult.
And human midwives are often summoned to help.
It's not clear whether this is because fairy mothers tend to be stolen human women or whether humans are just better at delivery.
Fairy mothers may miss their own children when it's been exchanged.
Or they may send them to a human to be nursed for a while in return for fairy gifts.
Most widespread, however, are the changeling stories. The healthy human baby is exchanged for puny wailing infant who never grows or develops.
The changeling must be made to betray itself by speaking or exclaiming, then threatened with violence.
The fairy will then flee away up the chimney and the lost child will be restored.
Sometimes there's a time lag between the changeling vanishing and the recovery of the human.
Other feats may have to be performed to win it back. If you've enjoyed this podcast, join us in the next one in this series.
Well, we'll talk about the strange figure of the lonely lady. And if you happen to be able to come to the stage at Gateshead,
there'll be a residency with open rehearsals and actual performances of the artist's new work in progress.
That'll be on April 26, 27 and 28.
Nineteen. Follow us on Twitter at Model Underscore faries, find the page on Facebook or take a look at how websites and modern fairies dot code.