They are not fairies. Nobody who believed in them called them that. Na daoine-sìth (na DOON-yuh SHEE), the people of the mounds. The Good Neighbours. The People of Peace. The Gentry. Themselves. Herself. The Other Crowd.

Every one of those is a way of speaking about them without speaking to them, and the reason is entirely practical. Naming opens a channel. You do not open a channel to something you would rather not have looking back.

That is the first thing to understand about Scottish fairy belief, and it is the thing that most modern treatment gets wrong before it starts. This was not whimsy. It was a set of rules for coexisting with dangerous neighbours who had a legitimate claim on the land you were farming.

What they were understood to be

Not small. Not winged. Not cute. Those are Victorian and later.

In the Scottish material the sìthichean (SHEE-i-chun) are roughly human-sized, live inside the hills and mounds, are organised into their own society with their own hierarchy, and are neither good nor evil but other. They have interests, and their interests are not yours.

Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, wrote the fullest early account in 1691. The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is written by a Gaelic-speaking clergyman treating the subject as a matter of natural philosophy, describing a parallel commonwealth with its own economy and social order. It is a genuinely strange and wonderful document, and Kirk's own local legend has him taken by them shortly afterwards.

The theological explanations offered in Christian Scotland were various: fallen angels who were not bad enough for hell, the dead, or a third order of creation between angels and people. None of these fits the older material well, which is the tell that the older material predates the framing.

The rules

This is the useful part, and the rules are remarkably consistent across the whole Gaelic-speaking world.

  • Do not name them. Circumlocution always. The Good Neighbours, Themselves.
  • Do not thank them. Thanks is an insult, or a debt, depending on the source. You acknowledge, you do not thank.
  • Do not accept their food. Eating in the sìth ends badly and is the single most persistent motif in the corpus.
  • Do not take their gifts without payment. Leave something. A coin, milk, bread.
  • Give them their portion. Milk poured out, the first of something spilled on the ground, a corner of the field left uncut. This is the most practically important rule and it runs through the whole tradition.
  • Do not build on their ground. Fairy knowes, sìthean (SHEE-an), lone hawthorns, certain paths. There are documented cases into the modern period of building work being redirected around a mound or a tree, and it still happens.
  • Do not cut a lone thorn. Hawthorn especially. A single hawthorn standing in a field is a marker, and the taboo has survived astonishingly well.
  • Iron. The reliable protection. Iron at the threshold, an iron pin in a garment, a horseshoe, a knife under the bed or the cradle.
  • Rowan and red thread. Above the door and the byre. As set out in its own article.
  • Salt. In the pocket, at the sill, in the churn.
  • Watch the liminal times. Dusk and dawn, the quarter days, and Bealltainn (BYOWL-tin) and Samhainn (SAV-in) above all, when the boundary was understood to be thin in both directions.

What they took

The tradition is very specific about what was at risk, and it is not romantic.

  • Babies and new mothers, before the child was named and before the mother was churched or sained. The most guarded moment in the entire folk calendar.
  • Milk and butter. The substance of the household economy. A cow going dry or butter refusing to come was the classic sign of interference, and there was a whole body of counter-practice for it.
  • Musicians and the beautiful. Taken for their skill, taken because they were wanted.
  • Time. The person who goes in for a night and comes out after a hundred years.

Notice what those have in common. They are the household's most valuable and most vulnerable assets: the newborn, the nursing mother, the milk supply, and the skilled. Fairy belief is a risk register for a subsistence economy.

Changelings, and why this matters

I want to be direct about this because it is the point where folklore stops being charming.

A changeling is the belief that a child, or sometimes an adult, has been taken and replaced by something of theirs left in its place. The signs given are recognisable to any modern reader: a child that fails to thrive, that will not feed, that cries constantly, that seems old in the face, that does not develop as expected.

That is a description of a sick or disabled infant.

The prescribed tests and remedies were, in a number of documented cases, lethal. Exposure, immersion, holding a child over or on a fire.

The most notorious case is Irish and late: Bridget Cleary, burned to death in Tipperary in 1895 by her own husband and relatives who had become convinced she was a changeling. She was twenty-six. There are Scottish cases too, less famous.

I include this because a site that presents fairy belief only as atmosphere is lying by omission. This belief system had a body count, and the people it killed were disabled children and inconvenient women. It sits in exactly the same place as the witch trials: a framework that gave communities a way to explain misfortune and a licence to act on it.

You can hold both things. The tradition is beautiful, deep, and worth preserving, and it was used to justify killing people. Most old things are like this.

Second sight and the sìth

Worth noting the overlap. The taibhsear (TAIV-shar), the person with the two sights, was frequently understood to be able to see the Good Neighbours as well as the coming dead. Kirk deals with second sight and fairy belief as one subject, because in his world they were.

Working with this, if you do

I am cautious here, and I will say why.

The modern practice of working with the Good Neighbours as allies, guides or a court to be petitioned has very little support in the Scottish material. In the tradition the relationship is not partnership. It is neighbourly caution: correct behaviour, offerings made, boundaries respected, and as little contact as possible.

If you want to bring this into practice honestly, the form the tradition supports is:

  • Leave the portion. Milk, cream, bread, whisky, the first of anything. Poured out on the ground, not left in a dish indoors. Do it consistently or do not start.
  • Leave the corner. A patch of the garden uncut, unweeded, not yours. This is the oldest form of the offering and the most substantial one, because it costs you something ongoing.
  • Respect the markers. Do not cut the lone thorn. Do not clear the mound. If there is a knowe near you, learn its name and leave it alone.
  • Keep iron at the door. Not as decoration.
  • Do not go looking. Everything in the tradition says that the people who sought them out fared worse than the people who did not.
  • Do not name them. Even now. Especially in writing.

Scotland's living version

This is not extinct. Redirected roadworks, uncut thorns in the middle of ploughed fields, and a general and quite widespread reluctance to interfere with certain places are all still observable, held by people who would not describe themselves as believing anything in particular.

That is what a living tradition looks like at this stage. Not belief. Practice, continued, without a theory attached.

I find that a more interesting form of survival than any revival, and I would treat it with the same respect.

Sources

  • Kirk, R. (1691, pub. 1815). The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. Full text at the Internet Sacred Text Archive. The essential early source.
  • Henderson, L. & Cowan, E. J. (2001). Scottish Fairy Belief: A History. Tuckwell Press. The standard scholarly account and the book to read.
  • Campbell, J. G. (1900). Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, and (1902) Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Via Internet Archive.
  • Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn. Annotated Campbell, and the best single volume on this material.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text.
  • Bourke, A. (1999). The Burning of Bridget Cleary. Pimlico. On the 1895 case and what changeling belief actually did.
  • Purkiss, D. (2000). Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories. Allen Lane.
  • Hutton, R. (2017). The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present. Yale University Press.
  • Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches — field recordings including a great deal of fairy material from tradition bearers.
  • The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft — a number of the accused described dealings with the sìth rather than with the Devil, until their interrogators reframed it.

Related: [Rowan Tree and Red Thread]; [An Dà Shealladh: Second Sight]; [Liminal Plants]; [Named and Unnamed: The Scottish Witch Trials]