9 Chapter Nine: The Cailleach/Witches/Fairy Doctors
Changelings
“The fear of such kidnapping still finds echoes in the lost children and loathsome adults who haunt the deep wood of European fairy tales” (Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization 39).
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The “charitable and cooperative action of fostering a fairy child alongside one’s own is rather less frequent than the fairies’ stealing of a human infant and its replacement with a dull, wizened, uncommunicative child which neither grows nor thrives. The many traditional tales of changelings make distressing reading, whether they feature mothers who do their best to love the difficult child who seems to have replaced their bonny, smiling youngster (sometimes gaining a coin a day in their apron pocket as encouragement and reward), or mothers who subject the changeling child to mistreatment, even torment, in order to get it to admit its changeling status. For if the imposter can be brought to confess its fairy identity, then it must go back to fairyland and the human baby for which it was exchanged will return. Two of my favourite changeling stories involve little cruelty and a good measure of humour. In a widespread tale, this version from Ireland, the parents suspect that their child has been exchanged for a changeling and seek advice from a local wise woman. She suggests an odd course of action, and although the parents are skeptical they decide to give it a try. The mother empties out some eggshells, brings hops, water and mash, and begins to brew beer in them over the fire. Instead of lying immobile or screeching in its cradle, the changeling sits up and takes an interest in the proceedings, finally bursting out with, ‘I’m fifteen hundred years old, and I never saw a brewery of eggshells before!’ The mother had been advised that, if the changeling thus revealed himself, she should attack him with a red-hot poker; but before she could do so, she realised that her very own child was back in the cradle and that the imposter had vanished. Heaven knows what kind of cruelties were visited on children with disabilities in the belief that the lost perfect child could somehow be brought back. In these stories – and even in some court cases – babies are thrown on the fire, or in the stream, or left outside for their fairy parents to reclaim, and we can well imagine how many infants must have died as a result of this
well-meant ill-treatment. Changeling tales reach down into parents’ profoundest fears for their sons (for the changeling is almost without exception male): what seems a healthy baby at birth may turn out to have developmental disorders and will neither grow nor thrive. The sense that such a child may be better off dead than enduring a limited existence, confined to its cradle, never walking or talking, underlies the tales of ill-treatment: the hope that somehow the harm can be undone and the child be made better.” Larrington, Carolyne. The Land of the Green Man, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Kindle Edition.
Fairy-Women and Fairy-Doctors
“The overwhelming message of the fairy-legends is that the unexpected may be guarded against by careful observance of society’s rules. These stories are important components of child-rearing practice, establishing the boundaries of normal, acceptable behaviour, and spelling out the ways in which an individual who breaches them may forfeit his or her position. . . . Some remedies, prescribed by knowledgeable people known as ‘fairy-men,’ ‘fairy-women,’ or ‘fairy-doctors,’ simply show how to avoid compounding the problem. They use rest, measured and calibrated by ritual practice. Others involve herbal medicine” (The Trial of Bridget Cleary 30).
Tralee 1826: “Ann Roche, an old woman of very advanced age, was indicted for the murder of Michael Leahy, a young child, by drowning him in the Flesk. . . under the delusion of the grossest superstition. The child, though four years old, could neither stand, walk, nor speak—it was thought to be fairy-struck. . . . Upon cross-examination, the witness said it was not done to kill the child but to cure it—to put the fairy out of it. Verdict—not guilty” (37-8).
Ballyvadlea, 1895: “There was nothing exotic or unusual in the suggestion that Bridget Cleary, ill in bed with bronchitis. . . was a fairy changeling. Among the documented cases of changeling burning in Ireland in the 19th century, Bridget Cleary’s is the only one that involves an adult victim” (43). Some said fairies had taken her into their stronghold and she would emerge, riding on a white horse. Her badly burned body was found in a shallow grave. Her husband, father, aunt and four cousins were arrested and charged.
The Cailleach
“We have a good description of [the cailleach] from the tale “Togail Bruidne Da Derga,” preserved in Lebor na hUidre, the oldest extant manuscript entirely in Irish, dating from the 12th century, though the tale is clearly pre-Christian. . . . Conaire Mór, the high kind of Ireland, was forced to break his geis (‘taboo’) by the arrival of an old woman to the door of a warrior fort at night and demanding to be let in.
As long as a weaver’s beam was each of her two shins, and they were as dark as the back of a stag-beetle. A greyish, wooly mantle she wore. Her lower hair used to reach as far as her knee. Her lips were on one side of her head. She came and put one of her shoulders against the door-post of the house, casting the evil eye on the kind and the youths who surrounded him in the hostel.
When Conaire asks her name she launches into a litany to show how multidimensional she is. Among the names she lists are
Samon, Sinand, Seisclend, Sodb, Caill . . . Níth, Némain, Nóennen, Badb, Blosc, Bloár, Huae, óe Aife la Sruth.
Badb (Modern Irish badbh) means ‘hooded crow,’ something she is often portrayed as. In another myth, ‘Togail Bruidne Dá Choca,’ she again appears as a crow, being described as a ‘red woman’ washing blood from a chariot at a crossing point of a river. . . . As Cormac and his men unyoke their chariots they notice
A red woman on the edge of the ford, washing her chariot and its cushions and its harness. When she lowered her hand, the bed of the river became red with gore and with blood. But when she raised her hand over the river’s edge, not a drop therein but she lifted it high; so that they went dryfoot over the bed of the river.
When someone asked her what she was doing she stood on one foot again (adopting the pose of magical incantation, as she did in ‘Togail Bruidne Da Derga’), and with one eye closed she uttered the grim prophecy that she was washing the harness of a dead kind—that of Cormac himself.
It is strangely pleasing that this woman, who was demonized by the patriarchy, is still part of the language I speak today. That she now exists in physical form in an increasing number of communities throughout the country once a year, and that she can be visited for the rest of the time at a shore-line rock in West Cork [the Hag of Beara] on the contually shifting margin between land and ocean, is something to be treasured and savoured.”
Witches
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Callan, Maeve Brigid. “The Charges Against Alice Kyteler.” The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish : Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland. Cornell University Press, 2015. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.txstate.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat00022a&AN=txi.b3767526&site=eds-live&scope=site. Permalink: https://bit.ly/3LZxGso Williams, Bernadette. “The Sorcery Trial of Alice Kyteler.” History Ireland, Winter, 1994, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 20-24. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27724208.
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