The “Little Dark People” - by Katherine Langrish

In ‘A Book of Folk-Lore’ (1913) the Devon folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould recounts three instances in which he and members of his family ‘saw’ pixies or dwarfs. I’ll let you read them: 

 

In the year 1838, when I was a small boy of four years old, we were driving to Montpellier [France] on a hot summer’s day, over the long straight road that traverses a pebble and rubble strewn plain on which grows nothing save a few aromatic herbs.

 

I was sitting on the box with my father, when to my great surprise I saw legions of dwarfs about two feet high running along beside the horses – some sat laughing on the pole, some were scrambling up the harness to get on the backs of the horses. I remarked to my father what I saw, when he abruptly stopped the carriage and put me inside beside my mother, where, the conveyance being closed, I was out of the sun. The effect was that little by little the host of imps diminished in number till they disappeared altogether. 

 

When my wife was a girl of fifteen, she was walking down a lane in Yorkshire between green hedges, when she saw seated in one of the privet hedges a little green man, who looked at her with his beady black eyes. He was about a foot or eighteen inches high.  She was so frightened that she ran home. She cannot recall exactly in what month this took place, but knows it was a summer’s day.

 

One day a son of mine, a lad of about twelve, was sent into the garden to pick pea-pods for the cook to shell for dinner.  Presently he rushed into the house as white as chalk to say that while he was engaged upon the task imposed upon him he saw standing between the rows of peas a little man wearing a red cap, a green jacket, and brown knee-breeches, whose face was old and wan and who had a gray beard and eyes as black and hard as sloes.  He stared so intently at the boy that the latter took to his heels.  I know exactly when this occurred, as I entered it in my diary, and I know when I saw the imps by looking in my father’s diary, and though he did not enter the circumstance, I recall the vision today as distinctly as when I was a child. 

 

In spite of the vivid and detailed nature of these visions Baring-Gould didn’t believe he or his family had seen anything ‘real’. He continues stoutly:

 

Now, in all three cases, these apparitions were due to the effect of a hot sun on the head. But such an explanation is not sufficient. Why did all three see small beings of a very similar character?  With ... temporary hallucination the pictures presented to the eye are never originally conceived, they are reproductions of representations either seen previously or conceived from descriptions given by others. In my case and that of my wife, we saw imps, because our nurses had told us of them… In the case of my son, he had read Grimms’ Tales and seen the illustrations to them. 

 

Rational indeed – though still a little puzzling that sun-stroke or heat-stroke should in each case have brought on visions of dwarfs or pixies. Perhaps it ran in the family. However that may be, Baring-Gould acknowledges that this explanation only pushes the problem further into the past – ‘Where did our nurses, whence did Grimm [sic] obtain their tales of kobolds, gnomes, dwarfs, pixies, brownies etc? … To go to the root of the matter, in what did the prevailing belief in the existence of these small people originate?’  And he answers thus: 

 

I suspect that there did exist a small people, not so small as these imps are represented, but comparatively small beside the Aryans who lived in all those countries in which the tradition of their existence lingers on. 

The grim events of the 20^th century have taught us to beware of that word ‘Aryan’, liberally scattered in the introduction to many a 19^th century collection. Sir George Dasent, introducing ‘Popular Tales from the Norse’ (his translation of Asbjornsen and Moe’s 'Norske Folkeeventyr’) includes a section on ‘the Aryan race’ which according to contemporary anthropological wisdom had spread across Europe ‘in days of immemorial antiquity’.  In 1905, citing the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley as his authority, Charles Squire in ‘Celtic Myths and Legends’ writes confidently of ‘certain proof of two distinct human stocks in the British Isles at the time of the Roman conquest’. He describes them: the early people who built Britain’s long barrows were ‘Iberian’ or ‘Mediterranean’ in origin: ‘a short, swarthy, dark-haired’ aboriginal race; but ‘the second of these two races was the exact opposite of the first. It was the tall, fair, light-haired, blue- or gray-eyed people called, popularly, the “Celts”, who belonged in speech to the “Aryan” family … It was in a higher stage of culture than the “Iberians”.’ In the illustration below from a history of the world published in 1897, we see how the heroic Celts were imagined, along with an account of the 'Aryan migration'. And they were supposed to have displaced a different race of indigenous people, driving them almost literally underground.

 

'The Celtic Vanguard' from 'Ridpath's History of the World', 1897

This notion of ‘two races, two cultures’ has been discredited. Archaologists and geneticists now agree that Europe has been a melting-pot of racial groups from at least the early Neolithic. European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were neither replaced nor suddenly shunted out; instead, over several thousand years, they assimilated both the culture and the genes of a gradually diffusing population of Neolithic farmers. It wasn’t until the Bronze Age (says Professor Barry Cunliffe in ‘Europe Between the Oceans, 9000 BC – AD1000’) that sea-faring and trading populations on the on the coasts of Europe, Britain and Ireland, developed the Celtic tongue as ‘an Atlantic façade lingua franca’. Isn't that wonderful? The Celts didn’t ‘come from’ anywhere: they were in place already. The Celtic languages evolved because coastal peoples travelled and traded and intermarried and talked to one another. Britain wasn't isolated, it was always an integral part of Europe. 

 

So the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould was wrong. There was never a distinctly different race of ‘little dark people’ living on the edges of a conquering population of tall, fair, confident ‘Aryans’. Nothing to give rise to a belief in a ‘hidden folk’ of pixies, dwarfs or elves. 

 

You can see why he liked the idea. It seemed to answer a lot of questions, besides lending to folk-lore a kind of scientific gloss: anthropological ‘truths’ preserved in tales. Many a writer has been honestly misled by it. In Rosemary Sutcliff’s tremendous novel ‘Sword at Sunset’, the Romano-British and nominally Christian hero Artos, fighting off the Saxon invasions in the 3^rd century AD, takes as his allies ‘the little Dark People of the Hills’, who live half-underground in turf-covered bothies, use poisoned arrows and worship the Earth Mother. Their clan leader, the Old Woman, calls Artos ‘Sun Lord’ and tells him:

 

‘We are small and weak, and our numbers grow fewer with the years, but we are scattered very wide, wherever there are hills or lonely places. We can send news and messages racing from one end of a land to the other between moon-rise and moonset; we can creep and hide and spy and bring back word; we are the hunters who can tell you when the game has passed by, by a bent grass-blade or one hair clinging to a bramble-spray. We are the viper that stings in the dark –’

 

 

 

 

And in the same author's if-anything-even-more-magnificent ‘The Mark of the Horse Lord’, the half-Roman half-British ex-gladiator Phaedrus, masquerading as Midir, Lord of the Dalriads (actually a 4th century AD Scots-Irish Gaelic kingdom), lays down his iron weapons to call upon an Old Man of the Dark People who lives like a badger in ‘a tumble of stones and turf laced together with brambles’ with ‘a dark opening in its side’:

 

[Phaedrus] had heard before of places such as this, where one left something that needed mending, together with a gift, and came back later to find the gift gone and the broken thing mended; it was one of those things no one talked of very much, the places where the life of the Sun People touched the life of the Old Ones, the People of the Hills. Like the bowls of milk that the women put out sometimes at night, in exchange for some small job to be done – like the knot of rowan hung over a doorway for protection against the ancient Earth Magic – like the stealing of a Sun Child from time to time.’  

 

This Old Man is ‘slight-boned … with grey hair brushed back from his narrow brow, and eyes that seemed at first glance like jet beads…’  Sutcliff was writing in the mid-1960s when the ‘two races’ hypothesis was still widely credited: she writes with great imaginative sympathy. I grew up with these stories and it was easy to be swept along by the idea: these Little Dark People, the Painted People, these remnants of the past clinging to the verge of cultures which had displaced them, were the historical origin of the fairies. I felt sorry for them. Even in Sutcliff’s sympathetic treatment, these imagined, marginalised archaic people are nearly powerless.  Their magic – feared though it is – doesn’t really work on the more civilized Sun People. They are spies, not warriors: they creep through the heather with poisoned arrows, killing by stealth.  In fact they’re natives, with all the baggage that implies in colonial and post-colonial Britain. They may help the heroes, but they can’t be the heroes.  Their time is past.

 

 

Writing in 1913 Baring-Gould doesn’t even allow them the skills to erect dolmens:

 

They were not, I take it, the Dolmen builders – these are supposed to have been giants because of the gigantic character of their structures. They were a people who did not build at all. They lived in caves, or if in the open, in huts made by bending branches over and covering them with sods of turf. Consequently in folk-lore they are always represented as either emerging from caverns or from under mounds. 

This is to lend to folk-lore an authority far beyond its deserts.

 

Most of the nineteenth century collectors of the fairy tales and folk-lore which we all love so much were driven by nationalist impulses and racial pride. Each sought, as the Grimms did, the pure voice of their own ‘folk’. As the century progressed what they in fact uncovered was the inextricably interrelated nature of European folk- and fairy- lore. Despite the near-impossibility of claiming a particular version of any story as ‘original’, some went on to claim an ultimate ‘Aryan’ heritage for such tales, going so far as to assert that the Aryan master-race originated in Scandinavia – since, clearly, the Nordic peoples were the tallest, blondest and bluest-eyed of the lot. Most of these gentlemen intended only to generate pride in what they saw as their heritage. They did not recognise it as racism - the term had not yet been coined - but racism it was. As folklorists, as lovers of fairy tales, we need to be responsible for the ways we interpret the stories we tell. 

While I was researching Mi’kmaq and Algonkin folk-lore for my book 'Troll Blood', I came across a salutary reminder of how untrustworthy some 19^th century commentators can be when discussing origins: in a compilation called ‘The Algonquin Legends of New England’ (1884) I found the anthropologist Charles G. Leland with a bee in his bonnet about what he claimed had to be a Norse influence on Mi’kmaq stories. Having decided that the Mi’kmaq tales were in effect too ‘noble’ to have been the product of Native American minds, he made the wildly unsupported assertion that the Norsemen must have told stories from the Eddas to the indigenous peoples of what is now Newfoundland and New Brunswick: that the Mi’kmaq culture-hero Kluskap (‘Glooscap’, in his account) ‘is the Norse god intensified … by far the grandest and most Aryan-like character ever evolved from a savage mind’. I almost dropped the book and was forced to regard it ever after as compromised and unreliable. If there was any contact at all between Norsemen and the Native American population in the 10^th to 13^th centuries (the likely duration of occasional forays from treeless Greenland for much-needed North American timber), the Greenlanders’ Saga suggests that it was violent and short. But that’s not the point. The point is the mindset which says ‘this is too good to have been created by [insert racial group]’. 

 

The dwarf Eitri making the hammer Mjölnir.

Returning to the origin of pixies, elves and dwarfs – if they’re not a folk-memory of some once co-existing shy and inferior race, what are they?  As Baring-Gould says, the notion must have come from somewhere.  Well, Britain, Ireland and Northern Europe are dotted with burial mounds and barrows. The Irish story of the love of Midir for Étain states plainly that Midir is a king of the ‘elf-mounds’, the underworld, and the tale is full of instances of death and rebirth. As I argue more closely in an essay called ‘The Lost Kings of Fairyland’ in my recent book, fairies have long been associated with the dead. In a fascinating essay ‘The Craftsman in the Mound’ (Folk-Lore 88, 1977) Lotte Motz discusses the figure of the dwarf as a smith and craftman dwelling in hills, mounds and mountains, who may be heard hammering away in underground smithies. Pointing to the many instances of ‘legends of dead rulers who reside, sometimes in a magic sleep and often with their retinue, within a mountain’, she continues:

 

A relation to the dead appears to belong also to the dwarfs of the Icelandic documents; so the dwarf Alviss [‘All-Knowing] is asked by Thor if he had been staying with the dead, and a poem in a saga tells of a doughty sword which had been fashioned by ‘dead dwarfs’. I would… assert that the mountain dwelling of the smith holds, rather than temporary wealth, eternal treasures in its aspect as the mountain of the dead. 

 

As if to emphasise his deathly character, like a ghost fleeing to its grave at cock-crow, the dwarf Alviss (the story is from the Poetic Edda) cannot endure daylight but turns to stone at sunrise. 

 

 

‘The day has caught thee, dwarf!’ cries triumphant Thor, who like Gandalf in ‘The Hobbit’ has kept him talking…  

 

It's always been thought dangerous to see fairies. Like the Furies in Greek mythology, if you talked about them at all, you used flattering circumlocutions – the Good People, the Seely Court, the People of Peace. They came from the hollow hills, the land of death, and it was wise to be frightened of them.  Maybe the visions, the ‘legions of dwarfs’, the little green men or pixies which Baring-Gould and his wife and child separately saw signified something more sinister than folk-memories.

 

After all, sunstroke can kill you.

 

 

Picture credits: 

Pixies - John D Batten - Wikimedia Commons

Nisse eating barley porridge - Wikimedia Commons

The dwarves Brokkr and Eitri making the hammer Mjölnir - Arthur Rackham - Wikimedia Commons

Alvissmal - Alviss answers Thor - Wikimedia Commons 

The Celtic Vanguard - Wikimedia Commons  
Dolmen, Jersey, 1859 - Wikimedia Commons
 

Through a Glass Darkly: Mirrors, Myths and Magic by Catherine Hokin

I am a bit obsessed with mirrors at the moment. That's not an unusual state for many women as we oscillate between avoiding or checking our appearance depending on how hopeful/fearful we are feeling on any given day especially if, like me, your approach to dressing may be on the 'eclectic' side. An American acquaintance recently commented that she 'was interested in' the way I flaunted the look in the mirror, remove one item adjunct by adding three more. I digress (which may also be my clothing issue): my mirror obsession is currently centred on their mythical properties.

 

 Roman lead mirror, faces missing

Superstition is one of the many threads that connect us to our ancestors and many have ancient roots. Walking under a leaning ladder, for example, may have connections to the Ancient Egyptians and their belief that the triangle was a sacred shape. You might not be a salt thrower and you may place new shoes on the table without a care but I bet few of us break a mirror without a shiver. The belief that seven years bad luck would result comes from Ancient Rome and is linked to the 7 years the Romans believed it took for a soul to renew itself. If you do have a disaster, simply popping the pieces in the bin is not enough to reverse the misfortune: you can bury the pieces, immerse them in south-flowing water for several hours or grind them to a fine powder so the pieces no longer reflect an image. Or do all three while flinging salt and turning in a circle three times. Best to be safe in these strange times.

The idea of reflection, seeing an image that may otherwise be hidden or differs from what the watcher expects, has always fascinated, whether the source be water, metal or glass. We look for our identity in them, for good or ill: Socrates advised young men to look at their faces and, if the reflection was a handsome one, to focus their life on keeping their souls pure. Some ancient cultures believed the reflection was the true self, 'the shadow soul', hence the myth that vampires and evil spirits have no reflection. In some cultures, the images go beyond the individual: in ancient Chinese mythology, there is the story of the Mirror Kingdom in which creatures who will one day rise up to battle humans are caught in a magic sleep; the flickers we sometimes see in the corners of our eyes as we look into a mirror are the creatures' first stirrings. Other superstitions spanning cultures include not looking into them at candlelight when spirits of the dead might appear and covering mirrors when someone in the house dies so that the soul does not become trapped. The deep-seated hold these superstitions have on the popular imagination is reflected in stories as far apart as Narcissus, Snow White and Candyman. We look but we do not always believe or trust what we see.

 Ancient Egypt c. 1479 BC

That mirrors have grown up surrounded by myths is understandable: not only could they show us new aspects of ourselves and our world, in their earliest incarnations they were rare and expensive. Mirrors made from polished stone (obsidian) have been found in use in Turkey from 6000 BCE and also in South and Central America from 2000 BCE. Polished bronze discs with handles of ivory, wood or metal are seen in Egypt as early as 2900 BCE and in China from around 2000 BCE. By 465 BCE, some Greek mirrors were large enough to reflect a whole figure but most remained small enough to be portable and were highly ornamented, often with figures of the gods. All were recorded as being highly valuable: "For a single one of these mirrors of chiseled silver or gold, inlaid with gems, women are capable of spending an amount equal to the dowry the State once offered to poor generals’ daughters!” (Seneca). However, the reflected image purchased at such cost was not an accurate one: stone and bronze were both dark, metal scratched and tarnished easily and the very few glass mirrors that have been found were curved and therefore distorting - a problem which continued well into the sixteenth century and goes some way to explain the distrust around the reflected image.

 Pictish mirror symbol

Superstition and magic, mirrors have long been associated with both. The idea of reflecting things that were previously hidden or unseen is a short step from looking at mirrors as a method of divination: seeing not just what is there but what might be. One of the most common symbols carved onto Pictish stones in Scotland is a mirror, usually accompanied by a comb. There are a number of theories around the symbol's meaning, including a link to a matriarchal culture but another possibility is an association with astrology and using a mirror to read the heavens. Turning a mirror to the stars to divine messages about the future is seen in ancient Persia, by Shamans in Asia and is even attributed to Pythagoras who, according to legend, tipped a mirror at the moon to read the future. This practice, known as catoptromancy or scrying, is described in a number of ancient Greek texts and sometimes involves mirrors being lowered into water on a thread to provide a double reflection. It appears to have had a number of uses including predicting the future, medical diagnoses and communicating with people not physically present. Practitioners would burn herbs, chant 'prayers' and wait for answers and messages to reveal themselves in surfaces sometimes viewed as a portal between worlds. The practice is recorded well into the middle ages.

 15th century woman and mirror

During the mid to late medieval period, mirrors had rather mixed fortunes. Their role in divination made them a target for the Church and divination itself, associated as it was with demons and evil spirits, was banned. In The Book of the Knight of the Tower, an advice manual written in 1372 by Geoffrey de la Tour Landry for his daughters who are about to attend court, the dangers of sitting in front of the mirror rather than attending church are clearly spelled out:“Will this lady never be done combing herself! Staring at herself in the mirror? And as it pleased God to make an example of her, even as she stared into the mirror she perceived the enemy, who bared his behind, so ugly and horrible that the woman lost her reason, as if possessed by the devil.” However, mirrors also start to appear as a means of guarding against evil and excess: in Dit du Miroir by Jean de Cande, a man asks for a double mirror so he can look at himself inside and out. As mirrors became more common, it seems people were trying to find better ways to accommodate their presence.

The process by which mirrors were made gradually became more sophisticated: the process for making flat glass began in Germany and was perfected in sixteenth century Venice and new coating methods were discovered which improved reflectivity. At the same time, Johannes Kepler was working on a better understanding of the way light is received and focused by the eye. Distorted reflections and magic associations gradually became a thing of the past. Well logically they did but I'm not convinced humans are really that logical when you scratch the surface. For every child who listens to Snow White and then tries the magic mirror refrain out in their bedroom or reads Harry Potter and wants to buy scrying implements in Diagon Alley, there's a teenager giggling with their mates into a candle-lit glass on Halloween and an adult fixing a new mirror on the wall with very great care. Don't believe me? Go drop a mirror, I dare you...

Scotland's Pictish Stones and The Lost Story of Guinevere by Catherine Hokin

I have been time-travelling this month in the name of research. Now that book two (fourteenth-century) has been delivered to my agent, I have been delving into the twelfth century for book three and, rather more challengingly, the sixth century in search of the Picts. This will either make sense when the idea finally gets out of my head and onto the frighteningly blank screen or it will have been  a wonderful diversion, either way the literal journey is proving fascinating.

  

 Scotland's Kingdoms 600 AD

The Picts were a confederation of tribes who lived primarily in northern and eastern Scotland during the late Iron Age and early medieval periods, their kingdom being destroyed around 840  AD.

As with so much of the discussion around this period, there is no agreed definition
of the name Pict. It may refer to 'painted people' (they loved a tattoo even more than a modern-day hipster Glaswegian) or derive from the Roman blanket term for the, diverse, tribes of northern Scotland or it may be a mis-hearing of the Old Norse name which was Pecht/Pettir. Whatever the origin, they live on in tales of a savage warlike people, covered in woad and in some Scottish place names such as aber (a river mouth) in Aberdeen, pert (a copse or woodland) in Perth and the use of pit (a share of land) in Pitlochry. They also live on in the wonderful, intricately carved standing stones which have been found throughout Scotland - stones which tell of a far-more sophisticated people than perhaps popular imagination gives these early tribes credit for.

 The Pictish Beast

Several hundred stones have now been found and these often combine Christian crosses with uniquely Pictish symbols, depicting a world on the cusp between the old religions and the new.

The stones are largely sandstone and many have been carved over or simply weathered by time but archaelogists have been able to identify three symbol types: recurrent and consistent abstract or geometric designs; real and mythical creatures including the Pictish beast which is like a dolphin/legless elephant hybrid and the manticore which has a human head, a lion's body and wings; real-life objects in pairs, such as a comb and mirror or an anvil and hammer.

 Some Pictish stone symbols

Like the origins of their name, 'reading' the stone symbols leads to a multiplicity of interpretations and there is considerable discussion over whether the symbols are 'heraldic' or linked to the distinct language we know the Picts spoke. It has been suggested that some of the symbols (eg. the crescent and v-rod) could hark back to the Roman cult of Mithras or could be associated with sun-worship. It is also possible that they are tribal badges and the animal depictions are land markers or have associations with Celtic mythology, the serpent, for example, being linked to kingship and status.  The comb and mirror have been suggested as indicators of female power or wealth, particularly if they are associated, as they commonly are, with the mermaid symbol. Whatever their meaning, they are complex and beautiful and suggestive of a culture far more multi-layered than woad-wearing and creating mayhem.

I am lucky enough to live in Scotland so, last weekend, we went on a stone-hunting journey to the little village of Meigle where the Scottish Pictish Stones Museum is located. The collection there is large but we were on the trail of one particular stone: Guinevere's burial marker. Yes, Guinevere, of King Arthur fame, Keira Knightley's pout and far too many romantic-myths.

 Vannora's Mound

It was the series of books by the late Norma Lorre Goodrich that spurred the visit: she locates Arthur very much in Scotland and Guinevere as a warrior queen/priestess rather than the adulterous 'heroine' of the Arthur myths, a trend that began in the later medieval period with the chivalric poets. In her reading, Guinevere was the daughter of a Stirling-based King and may have ended her days close to Meigle at Mordred's Castle on nearby Barry Hill. In the mid 1990s Goodrich went to Meigle and there was not only the stone but also a burial mound in the churchyard known as Queen Vannora's (Guinevere's) mound. The stone itself is stunning: on the plinth it stands over 10 feet tall and its red sandstone is intricately carved on both sides - my picture really doesn't do it justice!

 The Guinevere Stone

There is a wonderful description of it in the Goodrich book which positions Guinevere as the angel on the top with Arthur next to him - like everything, Goodrich's reading of the myths and the stone is a theory not a fact but it's a really interesting one. And this is where the rant came in - my husband had already stepped back, expecting it, he's used to me. The plaque below the stone continues the hackneyed tale of an adulterous queen pulled to death by four horses - you have to search for the Goodrich (and any other theories) in the dusty information folders at the back. Not only that (husband has gone for a coffee and a lie down by now) but the guide informed us that the stone was saved by the a local (male) vicar who brought it inside out of the weather to preserve it after centuries of exposure to the elements. Except Goodrich was very clear (and I've checked this in the local press cuttings since, I like my rants to have meaning) that the stone was saved by the local women of the village who used their own savings to pay for the first museum which was known locally as a women's museum. They did this to honour the memory of a woman of legend from their area. No mention of this, anywhere. The guide also chose not to re-tell the colourful local legend that girls should not step on the burial mound as it would make them barren, like Guinevere herself, on the grounds that it was 'tasteless history'. Also known as the best bits.

 Norma Lorre Goodrich

Now let's be honest here, I have no desire to be the mad woman in the museum: I asked questions politely and did the ranting primarily to myself and my lying down husband before writing a strongly worded email to Historic Scotland which they ignored. If you get a chance to visit Meigle do: all the stones in the museum are beautiful and it is humbling to see them. However, it strikes me as very sad that a story that spans centuries, that carries a legend from women to women and whose symbols can still call so eloquently has become as lost as the Picts it stemmed from in less than 50 years. I think I'm going to go back and rant a little louder.