Early medieval Britain, from the withdrawal of Roman authority at the beginning of the fourth century to the Norman Conquest in the eleventh, was a society of great diversity and complexity. From the fifth century, the descendants of Romano-Britons co-existed in many areas with Germanic settlers and it is likely that many descendants of Romano-Britons became ‘anglicised’ from the sixth century onwards.Footnote ¹ With the settlers and their cultural influence came the Old English language as well as Germanic paganism, while the Britons remained Christian. In British areas the Latin language was gradually abandoned, as the Welsh, Cumbric and Cornish languages (descendants of the British language) became established in the ‘Old North’, Wales, the Isle of Man and Britain’s southwestern peninsula, respectively. In addition, a Brittonic-speaking community was established in Armorica in north-western Gaul, which would become Brittany. Meanwhile the far north-western coast of Britain (as well as parts of Wales) was settled by migrants from Ireland who brought the Gaelic language.

The extent to which the languages of early medieval Britain can be matched to people groups remains an active subject of historical debate. All that can be said with certainty is that five main linguistic groups existed in the turbulent island: speakers of Brittonic languages, speakers of Old English, speakers of Gaelic, speakers of Pictish and learned speakers of Latin. By 600 the conversion of the English to Christianity was underway, which brought English culture within the sphere of Latin (the language of the church), although the English showed a preference for writing in the vernacular over Latin. By the middle of the seventh century Christianity, the Latin language and a common tradition of Christian learning had become shared features of the societies and kingdoms of Britain. While it is possible to emphasise the major differences between cultures in early medieval Britain they also had much in common, and a rigid delineation of Anglo-Saxons and Britons as cultural groups is unhelpful. This chapter will therefore examine what we know of beliefs about godlings and otherworlders circulating among both Britons and Anglo-Saxons in the early medieval world.

As one recent writer on the monstrous in Anglo-Saxon England has noted, the Anglo-Saxons had no concept of a supernatural world in the way modern people might understand it, as a different realm of being.Footnote ² The same, of course, can be said of the Britons. Folkloric beings might inhabit a different part of the physical world from humans (such as hills, mounds, caves or bodies of water), and time might even pass differently in their realm, but modern ideas of supernatural beings existing on another ‘plane of existence’ or ‘another dimension’ would probably have meant nothing to early medieval people. Supernatural beings were as real to them as the ordinary wild and domesticated animals they saw every day, or indeed strange creatures and peoples reported by travellers.

Different languages had different words for these beings, and it is clear that the Germanic settlers imported some beings, such as elves, who were conceptually different from the folkloric beings of the Britons – but there was also a great deal of commonality in perceptions of godlings. Furthermore, the use of the Latin language by the learned (mostly monks and clerics) anchored early medieval British societies to wider traditions of European learning and to the Roman past. When Anglo-Saxons or Britons writing in Latin chose words for supernatural beings they were not simply engaging in a thoughtless or haphazard process of interpretatio Latina, but were undertaking a complex process of cross-cultural evaluation of religious and quasi-religious concepts. This chapter will show that the interpretation of folkloric beings in early medieval Britain was governed by cultural change (which sometimes resulted in the introduction of entirely new beings, such as elves), the influence of learned commentary (which might include clerical demonisation) and continuity from the Roman and post-Roman eras.

The Influence of Learned Traditions

The old idea that folklore exists as a pure oral tradition, which was still often accepted by folklorists up to the later twentieth century, has now been abandoned in favour of a recognition that oral folklore exists in constant dialogue with other media – most notably, in the modern era, with print.Footnote ³ However, just as modern folklore interacts with print, so the folklore of the era before printing interacted with learned written commentary, and both influenced and was written by what learned individuals committed to writing. In the same way that folklorists have come to understand the importance of print to the survival of folklore in the modern era, so learned commentary interacted with folklore in the Middle Ages. Any attempt to consider the folkloric concepts current in a medieval Christian nation is futile without studying them against the background of biblical and Classical learning present in that society. While the list of monsters in Beowulf, for example, provides valuable information on Anglo-Saxon folklore, it would be misguided indeed to consider it apart from the interpretative framework within which the author of Beowulf situated the existence of monsters: namely, the biblical story of Cain:

The elaboration of biblical mythology in order to account for supernatural beings was by no means unique to the Christian Anglo-Saxons. In medieval Ireland, Cain was said to have fathered a siren named Ambia who had intercourse with a trout, giving birth to both Fomoir (the ancestor of the Fomorians) and Becnait (the ancestor of the leprechauns).Footnote ⁵ Rationalisations of monsters and folkloric beings in relation to the punishment of Cain (Genesis 4), the interbreeding of a race of giants with human women (Genesis 6), the curse placed by Noah on the race of Ham (Genesis 9) or the fall of some of the angels were just as important as pre-Christian mythologies in accounting for folkloric beings (if indeed those original mythologies were remembered at all in Christianised societies). As I argued in Chapter 3 above, the prevalence or intensity of belief in folkloric beings in a Christian society should not be taken as an indication of the depth of that society’s Christianisation, since the mistaken view that folklore is somehow incompatible (or only partially incompatible) with Christianity arises from misconceptions about the nature of medieval Christianity. The church often demonised folkloric beings, and it may have eliminated the pre-Christian myths that accounted for their existence; but popular Christianity seldom stamped out belief in godlings themselves, instead reinterpreting these beings for a Christian world.

Understanding the extent, the quality and the sources of biblical and Classical learning at a given point in time is a key step towards understanding how and why supernatural beings were interpreted at that time. Just as Christianisation was a continuous process in Britain between the fourth and seventh centuries, so Christian learning was (to a greater or lesser extent) a persistent feature of this period. The surviving writings of Gildas, Patrick, Pelagius and Faustus of Riez testify to the presence of Christian learning in Roman and post-Roman Britain, which continued to be a learned, literate and Latinate society (at least for some) after 410.Footnote ⁶

However, in contrast to Anglo-Saxon England, vanishingly few texts and manuscripts from post-Roman Britain and early medieval Wales survive (largely owing to a combination of Irish, Viking, English and internecine depredations against Welsh monasteries), and our evidence for literacy and post-Roman British Latinity is derived primarily from the inscribed stones set up (mainly as cenotaphs) in western and south-western Britain. Biblical quotations in the writings of the sixth-century author Gildas that correspond to no known version of the Latin Bible that preceded Jerome’s Vulgate suggest the possibility that post-Roman Britain had its own distinct Latin Bible.Footnote ⁷ While Welsh learning was probably influenced by Irish teachers, there are also hints that Latin learning in early medieval Wales was very archaic indeed, perhaps stretching back to the fifth century and providing a link with the Christian culture of late Roman Britain.Footnote ⁸

The Brittonic Linguistic and Onomastic Evidence

While the English language came to dominate southern and eastern Britain within what was apparently a remarkably short period of time in the fifth and sixth centuries, a Brittonic- and Latin-speaking population endured in western and northern Britain throughout the early Middle Ages. The Welsh, Cornish and Breton languages survived into the later Middle Ages and beyond, producing a rich literature that was one of the earliest vernacular literatures in Europe. Although the native spoken Latin of the Romano-Britons seems to have died out by the eighth century (meaning that Britain did not develop its own distinct Romance language), Anthony Harvey has shown that Latin ‘enjoyed a surprisingly deep and tenacious hold on early medieval Celtic Britain’ and profoundly affected the vocabulary of the Welsh language.Footnote ⁹ We might, therefore, expect the Brittonic languages to preserve religious and folkloric concepts carried over from Roman Britain, just as Welsh legends seem to have preserved half-remembered Roman history. These are notions that need to be treated with caution, however, being mindful of the centuries of interaction between Welsh, English and Latin.

The romantic idea of the Welsh language and medieval Welsh literature as arks preserving pristine knowledge of pre-Roman ‘Celtic’ culture and religion must be set aside, just as the idea that Irish medieval literature records Iron Age culture has largely been set aside by scholars of medieval Ireland. Contemporary scholarship on the Irish literature of the marvellous emphasises, instead, the extent to which learned authors drew syncretistically on traces of pre-Christian belief in order to fashion a literature for Ireland that gave it a place in universal Christian history and European religious culture.Footnote ¹⁰ Ben Guy has drawn attention to the difference between the common frame of reference provided by ‘culturally specific knowledge’ in Welsh traditional histories (such as the names of characters) and the literary works in which that knowledge was deployed. We ought not to imagine ‘a common pool of culturally specific historical and literary knowledge that was transmitted principally by an official class of trained poets, whose learning was mostly communicated orally’. This is the myth of the bardic tradition, transmitting ancient pre-Christian mythology in medieval Wales. While a common cultural frame of reference did exist, its sources were diverse (including written works and sources from outside Wales) and literature drew on the framework ‘freely and idiosyncratically’.Footnote ¹¹ For example, it would be wrong to assume (just because they apparently take the form of mnemonics suitable for oral transmission and contain no trace of the notoriously unreliable Geoffrey of Monmouth) that the Trioedd Ynys Prydein (‘Triads of the Island of Britain’), first attested in the thirteenth century, are of immemorial antiquity.Footnote ¹²

However, names of legendary Welsh figures ending in -on are likely to be of ancient origin. These include Mabon (cognate with Gaulish Maponos), Modron (cognate with Gaulish Matrona), Gofannon (cognate with Gaulish Gobannos) and Rhiannon (cognate with Gaulish Rigina).Footnote ¹³ Yet, as Guy notes for the names of Roman historical figures like Constantine, Magnus Maximus and Helena, the mere preservation of a name in a pseudo-genealogy need not indicate actual knowledge of the character who lay behind it or the stories associated with them.Footnote ¹⁴ The medieval Welsh stories known as The Mabinogion are works of fiction woven from the fabric of popular story rather than unproblematic witnesses to the nature of medieval Welsh folklore, and attempts to extract information about the nature of ancient cults from The Mabinogion are misguided. As Ken Dark has observed, apart from the general significance of springs, severed heads and the number three, it is perilous to attempt to relate any specific details of these medieval stories to archaeology.Footnote ¹⁵ In the same way that a character in modern fiction called Peter should not be taken as evidence for the cult of St Peter the apostle, so the behaviour of fictional characters who bear names derived from pagan gods may not be evidence for the characters of those deities.

There is no way to establish whether Modron descends from the Gaulish/British Matrona or the Classical Latin Matrona, but it is worth noting that no inscriptions survive from Roman Britain to the goddess Matrona or referring to the Deae Matres as Matronae (although a tablet from Vindolanda bears an apparent reference to the Roman festival of Matronalia on 1 MarchFootnote ¹⁶). It is possible that Modron is a cambricisation not of the name of a deity but of the Latin word matrona, ‘the lady’, as an elliptical or euphemistic way of referring to some unknown supernatural being. Furthermore, the fact that Modron appears as an individual character in Welsh literature and not as a triad suggests that, if there was ever a connection with the Deae Matres, it has been lost.

It is not possible to say with any certainty, therefore, that the folkloric beings of Welsh legend are the gods of Roman and pre-Roman Britain. Yet on the other hand, the idea that Welsh fairy beliefs are a medieval importation from England, ‘displacing earlier and historically obscure traditions’,Footnote ¹⁷ is decidedly unlikely. Indeed, as I shall argue in Chapter 5 below, quite the opposite is more likely to be the case: ‘British’ beliefs about godlings influenced England after the Norman Conquest. There is no reason to suppose that Welsh fairy beliefs are not part of the continuum of belief in an underground community of supernatural beings found across northern Europe, from Ireland to Scandinavia. While one word, ellyll, is perhaps a borrowing of English ‘elf’,Footnote ¹⁸ a striking feature of Welsh terms for folkloric beings is the absence of borrowing, from English, Irish or Latin, and a decided preference for euphemistic terms. While a word exists in Welsh cognate with Latin fata (ffawd), it was never personified by analogy with French fée and its Romance cognates, and thus never became a term for folkloric beings.

Instead, the best known and most widely used Welsh term for the nation’s folkloric beings is perhaps tylwyth teg, ‘the good folk’, first attested in the fourteenth century in a poem of Dafydd ap Gwilym,Footnote ¹⁹ and later in William Salesbury’s Welsh-English dictionary (1547).Footnote ²⁰ Other later terms such as plant (‘children’), plant annwn (‘children of the underworld’), gwragedd annwyl (‘dear women’) and anweledig (‘hidden ones’) are similarly euphemistic and elliptical. A few Welsh words for otherworldly beings are borrowings from other languages: coblyn, a borrowing of Middle French gobelin (probably via English ‘goblin’) was known to Salesbury in 1547,Footnote ²¹ while ellyll, a possible borrowing from Old English ælf, is attested in Welsh from the fourteenth century.Footnote ²² A word shared across the Brittonic languages is a borrowing of the Latin spiritus, yielding Welsh anysbryd/ysbryd, Breton spered and Cornish spyrys (the last being the origin of Anglo-Cornish ‘spriggan’). The universality of spiritus-derivatives across all the Brittonic languages suggests an early borrowing from Latin, perhaps influenced by Christian demonology; aside from references to the Holy Spirit, most occurrences of the word spiritus in the Latin Vulgate New Testament refer to a spiritus immundus (‘unclean spirit’) being cast out in exorcism.

Another term of some antiquity may be the old Welsh word for nightmare, gwyll (the modern Welsh word for a nightmare or incubus, hunllef, seems to be a borrowing from Old English with the suffix -ælfFootnote ²³). Salesbury recorded gwyll as ‘Nyght mare’ in 1547.Footnote ²⁴ Gwyll literally means ‘dusk’ or ‘darkness’ but has the meaning in modern Welsh of ‘manes, the spirits of the dead, shades, ghosts, sprites, hobgoblins; night-prowlers, night-thieves, vagabonds’Footnote ²⁵. However, another word gwyll (a variant spelling of gwyllt) has the meaning ‘wild’,Footnote ²⁶ lending an ambiguity to any use of gwyll as a word that conjures both darkness and wildness – in much the same way the Latin word incubus alludes both to the terrors of the night and to an aspect of the nature god Faunus.

One of the most interesting Welsh euphemisms for the fairies, from a historical point of view, is bendith y mamau, ‘the blessing of the mothers’, a phrase found especially in South Wales, because it might suggest a memory of the Deae Matres.Footnote ²⁷ The euphemism was first identified by the Protestant preacher John Penry in 1587:

The idea that the name of the bendith y mamau could derive from the pre-Christian cult of the Deae Matres is not new,Footnote ³⁰ and it is lent some support by Breton folklore where the fairies were sometimes spoken of as ‘our good mothers the fairies’ or ‘the good ladies’.Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, the indirectness of bendith y mamau, which does not call the fairies mothers but implies that they are personifications of speech uttered by the mothers, mirrors the origin of the French word fée as a re-personification of the fate-bearing speech of the Parcae. However, Penry himself interpreted the ‘mothers’ as the mothers of people who dared to speak of the fairies, who invoked a maternal blessing every time they mentioned them. Any association of this interesting euphemism with the Parcae or Deae Matres must therefore remain speculative.

One apparently ancient class of words used to refer to supernatural beings, in both the Brittonic languages and in English, derives from the Indo-European root *bheug-, with the meaning ‘to flee in fear, be frightened of’. This yields Welsh bwg, Old English puca, Middle English pouke and early modern English puck, as well as a range of dialect words for frightening beings from bug to boggart. Pouke would go on to become the standard word for a fairy in southern England in the later Middle Ages, prior to the introduction of French fée.Footnote ³² The origins and transmission of these cognates has been hotly debated, since puck-related words can be found widely spread throughout Germanic and Scandinavian languages, as well as in Finnish and the Baltic languages. Linguists have been divided over whether Celtic languages transmitted a loan to Germanic languages, or vice versa.Footnote ³³ Most recently, William Sayers has argued that Germanic speakers in Britain encountered Britons already using a word so familiar to them that the semantics of the two terms merged, rendering moot the question of which language was more influential on the other.Footnote ³⁴

Gwyddon, derived (as noted above) either from gwyˆdd (‘wood’) or gwˆydd (‘wild’), is a Welsh word that has been applied to many supernatural beings (giantess, female monster, hag, witch, sorceress, giant, monster, wizard, sorcerer, woodland deity, satyr, nymph), but it is without a Latin cognate.Footnote ³⁵ Iolo Morganwg’s suggestion that the word had something to do with druids writing on wood seems unlikely,Footnote ³⁶ and the word may have had the original sense of ‘a woodland dweller’ or ‘a dweller in the wild’. Pierre-Yves Lambert proposes Gaulish *uidu- (‘wood’) as cognate with Welsh gwyˆdd,Footnote ³⁷ but whether a Brittonic ancestor of gwyddon was applied by the Britons to godlings we cannot know. The earliest attested Welsh word that can be translated as ‘nymph’ was chwyfleian (lit. ‘wandering prophetess’), from the thirteenth century;Footnote ³⁸ the direct borrowing from Greek and Latin, nymff, is not attested until the sixteenth century.Footnote ³⁹

As we saw in Chapter 1 above, the Welsh word for the fairy realm, Annwn or Annwfn (lit. ‘the underworld’) is undoubtedly of great antiquity. However, the use of an ancient term for fairyland in medieval Welsh does not necessarily mean the Annwn of medieval Welsh literature is the mythological successor of a mythical otherworld realm of the ancient Britons. In the same way that the word ‘hell’ was adopted from Anglo-Saxon paganism to refer to the place of damnation in Christian belief, so it is highly likely that Annwn, the name of the underworld of the pagan ancient Britons, was borrowed by early Christian missionaries. Unlike ‘hell’, however, which has retained its exclusively infernal connotations, Annwn may have undergone a process of ‘undemonisation’ in the centuries between its adoption into British Christian culture and the emergence of Welsh mythological literature.

That the Annwn of folklore is not quite the same place as the hell of Christian belief (Welsh uffern, from Latin inferna) may owe something to the ambiguity of a term that simply means ‘the world below’. As we have seen, a belief that godlings lived beneath the earth is common across north-western Europe, but British belief also had distinctive features. Patrick Sims-Williams has shown that while the Irish síd is apparently equivalent to the Welsh Annwn, the two are rather different because Annwn is a single realm that can be reached through multiple points of access. By contrast, the Irish síde (mounds leading to underground dominions) are individual realms, and there is no single king of the otherworld in Irish tradition.Footnote ⁴⁰ Two references in medieval Welsh literature to Kaer Sidi (‘the castle of the Síd’) can probably be set aside as hibernicising borrowings rather than evidence of a close relationship between the Irish and Welsh otherworlds,Footnote ⁴¹ and they may have nothing to do with the síd at all.Footnote ⁴²

Annwn can thus refer to both a spiritual realm and to a dwelling of the godlings beneath the earth, accessed via hills and mounds, in much the same way as someone speaking English might use a phrase like ‘the great beyond’ to mean death, the afterlife, or even a remote geographical region. Annwn in its current usage, therefore, is likely to have more to do with a process of demonisation and undemonisation than with mythological survival from a remote period of antiquity. The suggestion that the name of Arawn, the king of Annwn, might derive from the Rhineland god Arubianus (identified in inscriptions with Jupiter) should be treated with caution.Footnote ⁴³ Arubianus is attested only in the Rhineland area, and while other Rhineland deities were certainly imported to Britain in the Roman period, there is no evidence of this god in Britain whatsoever. On the other hand, there is also barely any evidence for the popular Gaulish god Lugus in Britain, and Lugus emerges in the Welsh legendary tradition as Lleu.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet as noted in Chapter 2, the epigraphic evidence for the deities worshipped in late Roman Britain is inevitably incomplete, reflecting only the devotional interests of those able to afford to erect an altar or other inscription.

In Welsh tradition Arawn undergoes replacement by the hero Gwynn ap Nudd as king of Annwn (and later king of the fairies), who is the son of Nudd (later Lludd) Llaw Ereint, a figure whose name apparently derives from the god Nodens, venerated at Lydney. J. R. R. Tolkien suggested that the Lyd- element in the place name Lydney derived from the Welsh Lludd, the medieval descendant of the god Nodens once worshipped there.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, the Anglo-Saxon place-name forms Lidaneg and Ledanei suggest Lydney may be named after a man called Lida rather than the god, in spite of the fortuitous similarity between Lydney and Lludd.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yeates, however, has suggested that the place name Nustles (recorded as Nothehalles in 1565), which refers to the specific land on which the temple of Nodens is located, could be derived from the name of the god.Footnote ⁴⁷ By analogy with Bolivian miners who make offerings to the devil and a bountiful earth mother, Yeates speculated that the cult at Lydney was a dual cult of Nodens and Abundantia, perhaps surviving Christianisation in some respect.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is noteworthy that the thirteenth-century theologian William of Auvergne paired the fairy king Hellequin with ‘Lady Abundance’ (dame Habunde),Footnote ⁴⁹ suggesting that the pairing of an underworld deity with Abundantia may have been a feature of Roman popular religion that survived into the Middle Ages.

The names Nodens and Nudd/Lludd are also cognate with that of the Irish god Núadu, although it cannot be presumed from this that the figures are also mythologically cognate. All that can be said with certainty is that Nodens/Nudd/Núadu are linguistically connected, perhaps by a common ancestor.Footnote ⁵⁰ Núadu might have been planted in Ireland by settlers from late Roman Britain, and then re-introduced from Irish literature in the form of Nudd Llaw Ereint long after Nodens was forgotten in Britain; alternatively, both Nodens and Núadu developed in prehistoric times from a deity common to Britain and Ireland, and the later importation of the name of a deity formerly worshipped in Britain is no more than accidental. Either way, the case of Nodens/Nudd/Núadu shows how little faith can be placed in theonyms alone as a guide to mythology or belief. On the other hand, it is not impossible that the pairing of a king of fairyland or of the underworld with a female deity representing abundance did indeed survive into later ages.

Fauns, Woodwoses and the Origins of Male Fairies

The reappearance of fauns (or, under their English name, woodwoses) in early medieval Britain is one of the most striking examples of biblical and patristic influence on popular belief. The Vulgate Bible was the most widely read and copied text in medieval Britain, with the result that Jerome’s translation choices heavily influenced the ways in which medieval Christians perceived the world, including folkloric beings. The Latin translation of the Bible that preceded Jerome, the Vetus Latina, translated the Hebrew word se’īrīm (a kind of demon) as daemonia,Footnote ⁵¹ but Jerome selected the obscure Latin term pilosi for Isaiah 13:21 and Isaiah 34:14, later translated as ‘satyrs’ in the Authorised Version:

In his Commentary on Isaiah Jerome added ‘and the pilosi will dance there, or the incubi or satyrs or certain men of the woods (silvestres quosdam homines), which many call Fauni ficarii or understand to be a kind of demons’.Footnote ⁵² While the phrase ‘fig fauns’ has been interpreted as a euphemistic reference to the rampant fauns’ habit of penetrating the anus (ficus in Latin slang),Footnote ⁵³ T. P. Wiseman suggested the term may refer instead to fig trees that marked the beginning and end of the run of the young men known as luperci at the Roman festival of the Lupercalia, anciently associated with the god Faunus.Footnote ⁵⁴ Jerome used the term directly in his translation of Jeremiah 50:39: Propterea habitabunt dracones cum faunis ficariis, et habitabunt in ea struthiones (‘Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein’, according to the Authorised Version).

Although the pilosi appear first in the Vulgate, Wiseman argued that they can be traced in archaic Latin art to a much earlier period. On one mirror of the late fourth or early third century BCE, Incubo, Inuus and Ephialtes appear as distinct characters in a wedding chamber, with Incubo and Ephialtes portrayed as hairy all over: pilosi.Footnote ⁵⁵ By the fourth century CE, however, the characters of Faunus, Incubo and Ephialtes (and even Pan) were conflated, and Jerome’s translation and commentary suggest that the term pilosi could be applied indiscriminately to fauns, satyrs, incubi, panitae and other godlings of the untamed wild, the silvestres homines. In Jerome’s Life of St Paul, an incubus encountered by St Anthony confesses that he is one of those worshipped by pagans as fauns, satyrs and incubi.Footnote ⁵⁶

An authority equal to Jerome in the Latin west, Augustine, reported that ‘Silvani and fauns, who are commonly called incubi, often misbehaved towards women and succeeded in accomplishing their lustful desires to sleep with them’.Footnote ⁵⁷ While Augustine’s identification of incubi with fauns was nothing new, and the sexual behaviour of the fauns was well known, the idea that the name incubus had a specifically sexual meaning (as opposed to a being associated with the phenomenon of sleep paralysis) seems to have been an original attempt at demonisation by Augustine, and it was to prove highly successful.Footnote ⁵⁸

Jerome and Augustine’s demonology passed into the highly influential encyclopaedic work of Isidore of Seville – an author whose work we know was present in post-Roman Britain, even if no manuscripts survive. An inscribed stone at Llanllyr House in Ceredigion bears the obscure word tesquitus (meaning ‘waste-plot’, ‘hermitage’ or ‘monastery’), derived from the word tesqua which is known in Britain only from Isidore’s Etymologies, composed in the early seventh century.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Etymologies was the encyclopaedic work par excellence of early medieval Christian Europe, providing a helpful digest of Classical learning, and the inscription from Llanllyr is good evidence that Isidore was known in at least one early medieval Welsh monastery. Paraphrasing Jerome’s Commentary on Isaiah, Isidore provided a description of the ‘fig fauns’:

Elsewhere, Isidore explained the nature of the fauns in relation to their supposed etymology, an explanation largely derived from Varro’s De lingua Latina (‘On the Latin language’):

The pilosi, according to Isidore, ‘are called Panitae in Greek, and “incubuses” (incubus) in Latin, or Inui, from copulating (inire) indiscriminately with animals’.Footnote ⁶² Isidore thus attempted to associate two main characteristics with fauns: the bestial behaviour of the silvestres homines and the traditional prophetic or vatic function of Faunus. However, the bestial and the prophetic need not be perceived as antithetical. The figures of Myrddin Wyllt and Lailoken in Welsh and Scottish legend, who are driven mad by the horror of battle and flee to the woods, are cases in point. Myrddin and Lailoken go mad and live as wild men, but these silvestres homines also acquire magical powers.Footnote ⁶³ The Welsh word gwyddon, which can refer to both a woodland deity and a wizard, hints at a world of British belief in which the line between the divine and the bestial was a porous one. In one version of the story of St Samson and the theomacha (discussed in Chapter 1), who may well embody how early Welsh people imagined a gwyddon, the theomacha is horned (cornuta) – perhaps a simple scribal mistranscription of canuta (‘grey-haired’), or alternatively a more telling indication of beliefs about therianthropic forest-dwelling godlings.Footnote ⁶⁴

Anglo-Saxon scholars had the same access to Isidore’s Etymologies as learned Britons,Footnote ⁶⁵ but they also seem to have had access to other Classical sources – some of them now lost, such as the Roman poet Lucan’s Orpheus, quoted by Aldhelm and paraphrased in the Liber monstrorum de diversis generibus (‘The book of monsters of various kinds’), probably composed in the kingdom of Wessex in the late seventh or early eighth century. The Liber monstrorum’s information on fauns comes from Lucan:

One possible source for the surviving manuscript of Lucan’s Orpheus used by Aldhelm and the author of the Liber monstrorum was the library of Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset, an abbey with both post-Roman traditions and strong links to Ireland which was the source of the manuscript tradition of Isidore’s Etymologies in England.Footnote ⁶⁷

Where Aristotle observed that anyone without the need for human society ‘must be either a beast or a god’,Footnote ⁶⁸ British tradition may have elided the bestial and the divine. Whether this can be interpreted as a legacy of ancient veneration of therianthropic beings or ‘shamanic’ practices in which people ‘became’ animals is impossible to know, but it is just as likely that the idea was inspired by the Bible. The madness of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:31–37 sees the king ‘driven from men, and [he] did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’. The purpose of the king’s transformation into a wild man is illumination, however, and on his return to sanity Nebuchadnezzar comes to knowledge of God, and Nebuchadnezzar’s royal splendour is greater than before. The ‘man of the woods’ was therefore an ambivalent figure, cursed with madness but also rewarded with wisdom. An example of a positive portrayal of a faun in Christian iconography can be found on the tympanum of St Paul-de-Varax in Burgundy, where St Anthony encounters a faun accompanied by the inscription ‘the abbot was seeking Paul and the faun taught’ (abbas querebat Paulum faunusque docebat). This image was interpreted by Kirk Ambrose as evidence of Christian admiration for the almost-human.Footnote ⁶⁹

The depth of influence of patristic commentary on the roots of Irish folklore has been emphasised by Jacopo Bisagni and Angana Moitra. Bisagni argues that the ultimate origin of the Irish word lupracán (‘leprechaun’) was the Roman Luperci, the young men who dressed in animal skins in February and ran in the Lupercalia. Patristic tradition from Augustine onwards associated the Luperci with actual transformation from men into wolves, by passing through water, which was further developed in early Irish texts of computus (commentaries on the church calendar) into the idea that the Luperci represented an actual race of monsters. Owing to the importance of water to the transformation of the Luperci, the lupracáin became water-sprites and, later, the leprechauns of modern Irish folklore.Footnote ⁷⁰ Similarly, Angana Moitra has argued that the figure of Midir in Irish legend derived in part from Dis/Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, via Classical influence on Irish learning.Footnote ⁷¹ If Bisagni’s and Moitra’s analyses of Irish legend are correct, then the case for investigating Classical-patristic origins for folkloric beings in both Britain and Ireland before reaching any conclusions about pre-Christian or prehistoric origins is a strong one.

While Old English sometimes received loanwords from Latin, there was also a strong tendency to coin new Old English terms glossing the perceived meaning of the Latin term. Ælfric of Eynsham’s tenth-century glossary gives unfæle men (‘evil men’), wudewasan (‘woodwoses’) and unfæle wihtu (‘evil people’) as glosses of satiri, vel fauni, vel sehni (sic. for sileni), vel fauni ficarii.Footnote ⁷² While unfæle men/wihtu can be set aside as euphemisms, the Old English word wuduwasa directly translates homo silvestris, and in later portrayals of woodwoses in medieval art they are both pilosi (hairy from head to toe) and apparently behave like incubi (portrayed as pursuing women). When John Wycliffe came to translate Isaiah 13:21 in the 1380s he gave wodewoosis for pilosi,Footnote ⁷³ and the incident of the ‘wild man of Orford’, recounted by Ralph of Coggeshall (and discussed in Chapter 5 below) is evidence that woodwoses were a potential experiential reality for medieval English people as well as a mythological, heraldic or decorative conceit.Footnote ⁷⁴

Furthermore, Anglo-Saxon commentators glossed the Old English word mære with incuba, satyrus and pilosus, a puzzling juxtaposition of feminine terms with the distinctly masculine satyrus and pilosus. Alaric Hall has argued that Isidore and Jerome’s elision of incubi, satyrs and pilosi provides an explanation for the gloss, since a mære was a female spirit of nightmare essentially equivalent to an incuba or succuba, female demons linked to the Classical lamiae or empousai, who feed on men while enticing them with sex.Footnote ⁷⁵ The glossing of mære with satyrus and pilosus is evidence of the extent of the strength of the identification of incubi, satyrs, fauns and pilosi, which could even cross gender boundaries.Footnote ⁷⁶ Caroline Batten goes somewhat further, however, to argue that a pre-existing Anglo-Saxon concept of a sexually predatory supernatural female being was so strong that incubus always became incuba in Old English glosses, and the Latin words satyrus and pilosus acquired feminine meanings.Footnote ⁷⁷ For Batten, the mære is essentially unstable as to gender, ‘the female form of a masculine sexual assailant’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Bede asserted that sexually predatory supernatural beings appeared in both male and female form in his commentary on St Luke’s Gospel: ‘Whether appearing to men in female form, or to women in male dress (which demons the Gauls call Dusii), by an unspeakable miracle incorporeal spirits contrive to seek and desire to sleep with a human body’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Bede went on to recount the deliverance of a nun molested by an incubus, whose touch resulted in ulcers on her body; a belief in health problems resulting from demonic touch seems to have been a peculiarly English preoccupation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet Bede’s use of the term Dusii is unilluminating, representing only deference to the authority of Augustine. We have no indication of what Old English name Bede might have used for an incuba/incubus, but mære and wuduwasa are possibilities. A single eleventh-century Old English charm survives that appears to be intended against (or for) people who sleep with a devil.Footnote ⁸¹ If the woodwose was indeed the male insular inheritor of the characteristics of the pilosi, who stand in the Vulgate for the whole panoply of male Classical rustic therianthropic godlings (fauns, satyrs, incubi, Sileni, Silvani, Panitae and so on) then it is conceivable that the idea of the woodwose hovers behind some Anglo-Saxon accounts of incubi.

While much of the learned knowledge of fauns and pilosi in medieval Britain seems to have been transmitted via Jerome and Isidore (and, in Aldhelm’s case, via Lucan), there was also a parallel tradition of commentary on satyrs (and, by implication, fauns) as naturalia – phenomena of the natural world, rather than godlings or supernatural beings. According to the second-century Physiologus, whose text formed the basis of most medieval bestiaries,Footnote ⁸² satyrs were non-supernatural monsters living in Ethiopia. Since the Physiologus omitted to mention that satyrs had hooves, satyrs in bestiaries had horns and tails (and sometimes only tails), but were often without hooves (Plate 12).Footnote ⁸³ This may go some way towards explaining why the woodwose of medieval art differs so markedly from the fauns and satyrs of the Classical world. The medieval woodwose is generally without either hooves or horns and is usually a man completely covered in hair, bearing a club. However, depictions of woodwoses with hooves can be seen on the church fonts at Waldringfield and Nacton in Suffolk, serving as a reminder of the ultimate origin of woodwoses as fauns (Plate 13).Footnote ⁸⁴

Plate 12 Medieval satyrs

Plate 13 A woodwose on the font, Waldringfield

Elves

Since ‘elf’ emerged as the standard Middle English word for a fairy (until the adoption of French fée in the late Middle Ages), the idea that the Anglo-Saxon ylfen were the ancestors of later fairies is understandably attractive. However, the evidence regarding the function and place of elves in Anglo-Saxon society remains somewhat obscure, in spite of exhaustive analysis by Alaric Hall. Anglo-Saxon elves were human-like, otherworldly, but not monstrous, and presented a risk to humans through their practice of a kind of magic known as ælfsiden. Elves also embodied a specific beauty – ælfscyne – which, in spite of the fact that elves were usually conceptualised as male, was of a seductive feminine kind.Footnote ⁸⁵ Indeed, the word ælf itself may refer to physical appearance, since its Proto-Germanic antecedent could well be cognate with Latin albus (‘white’), perhaps with the original meaning of ‘white/shining ones’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Medieval elves lived under the earth or in wild places, formed an alternative society with a king or queen, dwelt in a specific otherworldly realm and were sometimes diminutive in stature or monstrous in appearance. We are lacking the evidence that Anglo-Saxon elves had these characteristics – although absence of evidence is not, of course, evidence of absence.Footnote ⁸⁷ I shall argue in Chapter 5 below that the medieval elves (who were eventually renamed fairies) were composite beings who acquired the characteristics of a broad range of British and Anglo-Saxon early medieval supernatural beings, but it remains the case that Anglo-Saxon elf-lore was probably more extensive than the surviving evidence suggests, especially if it was comparable to the more richly evidenced Norse elf-lore. However, separating the original elf-lore of the Anglo-Saxons from elements that may have been introduced by Norse settlers in the ninth century is difficult, and by the end of the Anglo-Saxon era it is likely that elf-lore in some regions was already a composite of Anglo-Saxon and Norse belief. A trace of this can be found in the persistence of ‘elf’ as the name for a fairy into the late Middle Ages in northern and eastern England.Footnote ⁸⁸

Like the aos sí of Ireland and Scotland, the word ælf often defied translation and glossing in Anglo-Saxon England – an indication, in and of itself, that the concept of ælf did not correspond in any straightforward way to readily available Classical or biblical analogues. Elves were never identified with fauns, presumably because they lacked any of the fauns’ connotations of monstrous therianthropy, although elves were sometimes identified as demons. As we have seen, elves joined other monstrous beings in Beowulf as the offspring of the sin of Cain, while the Mercian Royal Prayerbook (c. 800) featured an exorcism of satanae diabulus ælfae (‘devil of Satan, of an ælf’).Footnote ⁸⁹ However, unlike some of its Germanic cognates in other cultures, the Old English word ælf never became a functional synonym for a demon (even if elves were sometimes seen as demonic), and elves thus never underwent an entirely successful ‘pejoration’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Hall has emphasised the evolution and transformation of belief in elves over time, arguing that the concept of female elves probably came late, in the eleventh century. Unlike the untranslatable male elves, female elves were glossed in Latin with nympha and various related Latin words.Footnote ⁹¹ However, in spite of the later ascendancy of the word ‘elf’ in Middle English, elves were just one among many classes of folkloric beings in early medieval England, and their greatest achievement may well have been to pass on their name as a generic term for a human-like supernatural being. The extent to which the elves of the later Middle Ages resembled the elves of Anglo-Saxon belief remains an open question, and the process by which ‘elf’ became the generic term for fairies in much of medieval England until the late fourteenth century, rather than some other term, remains obscure. While Norse cultural influence in the Danelaw is one possible explanation, it must count as one of the most significant unanswered questions in the development of Britain’s godlings.

Female Godlings in Early Medieval Britain

As we have seen in Chapter 1, there is evidence that belief in frightening and warlike female godlings was current among Britons from as early as the seventh century, perhaps signified by the Welsh word gwyddon and associated with the number nine (three times three).Footnote ⁹² And as we have seen in Chapter 2, the cults of the Parcae and Deae Matres were present in Roman Britain. The Parcae are the subject of another part of the section in Isidore’s Etymologies dealing with godlings, where Isidore again partially paraphrases Varro:Footnote ⁹³

Isidore’s reluctance to engage with the understanding of fatum in his own time is suggestive; was Isidore reluctant to discuss folkloric understandings of the Fates that would eventually evolve into fairy lore? Perhaps in an effort to dissuade people from trying to placate the Parcae, Isidore argues that their name (based on his etymology derived from parcere) is a euphemistic one, because in reality the Fates spare no-one.Footnote ⁹⁵ Here, perhaps, is a hint of a new understanding of the Parcae and Deae Matres as exclusively threatening beings rather than deities of fortune.

British beliefs about frightening supernatural female beings may have survived from the Roman period (as we have seen, at least one altar was set up to lamiae), but they can also be explained in terms of imported Germanic beliefs, the influence of authors such as Isidore, and even the influence of Frankish penitentials which, uncritically copied, brought Frankish ideas of popular religion into Britain in the Christian era. Old English authors were certainly aware of the Parcae, albeit apparently from Classical literary sources. Aldhelm’s Latin riddles displayed the extent of his Classical learning, including a riddle on the spindle that referenced the Parcae:

The Old English word for fate was wyrd, yet the personification of wyrd as the three ‘weird sisters’ is only attested in the later Middle Ages in lowland Scotland, and may have been influenced by the Norse tradition of the Norns.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, the Anglo-Saxons had an established literary tradition of conceptualising non-personified fates in triplicity: the ‘three fates’ of illness, old age and military conflict which could determine an individual’s destiny.Footnote ⁹⁸ Furthermore, Herbert Merritt argued that the Old English word used to gloss the Latin Parcae, burgrunan, may have originated as an attempt to express Isidore’s etymology of the Parcae from parcere. The burg- element, on this view, derives from Old English beorgan, ‘to spare’.Footnote ⁹⁹ If this is correct, then it is evidence that the Parcae did, indeed, continue to have significance in early medieval Britain – even if that significance probably derived from their role in Isidore’s Etymologies. It is conceivable that the Parcae underwent ‘re-personification’ in Anglo-Saxon England, aided by the existence of similar supernatural women such as hægtessan in Germanic culture, and that the burgrunan were godlings fashioned at need in Christian England in order to provide an Anglo-Saxon equivalent to the Parcae.

A hint that something like this may have occurred can be found in a story from Winchester recounted by the French monk Lantfred in the tenth or eleventh century. According to Lantfred, early in July 971 (a few days before the translation of St Swithun from his grave to the Old Minster on 15 July) an unnamed man approached the River Itchen at noon close to the walls of Winchester in order to check on his mules. The man fell asleep and, when he awoke and began on his way he noticed two women on the riverbank:

The ‘undressed Ethiopians’ demanded to speak to the man but he ran away. The women closely pursued him, while threatening:

The man prayed in desperation to God as they drew close to the city, but just as he thought he was getting away from the two ‘raven-like females’, a third made her appearance:

The third woman chastised her dark-skinned sisters for chasing noisily after the man, and instead lay in wait for him on the crest of the hill: ‘Remaining stationary on the crest of the aforesaid hill, she folded over the sleeve of her tunic three times into a plait; lifting it up with a mighty commotion and striving to strike him with the total effort of her strength’. God protected the man from her strike, but the man’s side was nevertheless struck by the wind from the woman’s sleeve. The three women threw themselves into the Itchen, but the man was paralysed by the blast from the supernatural garment.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Michael Lapidge has identified the three women of Lantfred’s account as hægtessan, the term by which Furiae are often glossed in Anglo-Saxon texts.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Furthermore, one Old English spell against ‘sudden stitch’ (which may be the ailment that afflicts the man in his side) promises to turn back the attacks of hægtessan.Footnote ¹⁰² On the other hand, Lantfred does not explicitly identify the women as Furies (they are said to be like Furies), and Francesco Marzella has noted that Old English sources often linked unfamiliar supernatural beings with familiar characters from Classical mythology in order to better explain them to learned readers.Footnote ¹⁰³ The role played by a knotted garment in the story is highly suggestive of a link with the Parcae (or, in Old English terms, the burgrunan), especially since the supernatural women appear to represent and personify inexorable fate; there is, after all, no reason for them to pursue and attack the unfortunate man apart from their role as the enforcers of the fates of men. Furthermore, while two of the women are portrayed as hideous, the third does not seem to be ugly. It is possible that the burgrunan and hægtessan have become conflated in this story, as a result of the demonisation of both sets of beings; although the beautiful appearance of the third supernatural woman suggests that the process of demonisation was by no means complete.

The association between the Parcae and witchcraft – specifically acts involving tying and binding – was discussed in Chapter 2 above. In Old English the association between hægtessan and witchcraft is borne out not only by the meaning of the modern English descendant of the word, ‘hag’; as we have seen, hægtessan were also associated with sudden stitch, the sort of unexplained illness and misfortune often blamed on witches in pre-modern societies. Furthermore, in the Leiden Glossary the Old English hægtisse seems to have become confused with *Hecatissa, an otherwise unattested Latin neologism that seems to mean ‘associated with Hecate’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This is strongly suggestive of a false etymology for hægtisse current among learned Anglo-Saxon scholars which linked the term to the name of the Greek goddess of witchcraft. The cultural association between hægtessan and witchcraft further strengthens the idea that the hægtessan/Furies were conflated with the burgrunan/Parcae, since it was the Parcae who were linked above all to the tying and untying of destinies.

The curious term Modraniht (‘night of the mothers’) used by Bede for the night of 25 December in pagan England has been advanced as possible evidence for the survival of the cult of the Deae Matres in early England, which was still remembered by Bede in the eighth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ However, Bede himself believed that the name stemmed from rituals performed by human mothers on that night. Bede may well have been wrong, but if he was it remains unclear whether the divine mothers honoured on 25 December by the pagan Anglo-Saxons were goddesses adopted from Roman Britain (who were themselves probable Germanic imports in the Roman era), or Germanic goddesses brought to England in the Anglo-Saxon era. There is not much other evidence for Anglo-Saxon veneration of divine mothers, but there is also not much evidence for Anglo-Saxon pre-Christian religion tout court.

Ronald Hutton has compared Lantfred’s story of the Furies/Parcae with Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s account of the foundation of Evesham Abbey in his late tenth-century Life of St Egwin, which likewise features three mysterious supernatural women – but this time Christianised rather than demonised.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The events described by Byrhtferth supposedly took place in 701, when a swineherd named Eof (the source of the name Eofeshamme) in the service of St Egwin, bishop of Worcester, lost a piglet and went looking for it in dense woodland:

The swineherd went to Egwin, fell at the bishop’s feet and told Egwin of his vision. The bishop, impressed by the swineherd’s humility and apparent truthfulness, went himself to witness the same thing (Byrhtferth has Egwin speak in the first person):

Alaric Hall has shown that the use of the Old English word ælfscyne reveals that elves were associated with exceptional female beauty in Anglo-Saxon England,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and the implication of Egwin’s admission that he ‘considered quietly that it could have been the holy perpetual Mary the Mother of God whom I saw’ is that it was not immediately obvious to the bishop that he was experiencing a vision of the Virgin Mary. It is possible, therefore, that Egwin considered and dismissed the possibility that the women were folkloric beings – especially since they appeared in a wild place and in a group of three, like the Furies/Parcae in Lantfred’s narrative of the miracles of St Swithun; Byrhtferth’s narrative never makes clear who the other two women are, although later versions identify them as angels. On the other hand, Byrhtferth stresses the beauty of the book held by the most beautiful of the women, along with a cross, and has her perform a specifically Christian gesture by signing Egwin with the cross. A book was a specifically Christian object in early medieval England, and not one likely to have been associated with elves. On the other hand, in Roman art the Parcae are sometimes depicted with scrolls, such as on a third-century sarcophagus depicting the myth of Prometheus in Rome’s Capitoline Museum, where Atropos/Morta sits reading a scroll.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Yeates interpreted Eof’s encounter as a meeting with the Dobunnic mother goddesses, and argued that it preserves evidence that the local genii of people groups had to be individually reimagined in Christian terms and incorporated into a Christian story as part of the process of Christianisation.Footnote ¹¹¹ This rather fanciful interpretation rests on a number of problematic assumptions – not least the idea that the Hwicce of the eighth century were still worshipping Romano-British mother goddesses. All things considered, it is unlikely that the vision of Eof and Egwin was an encounter with non-Christian folkloric beings reinterpreted in a Christian form, not least because Byrhtferth was recording it nearly two centuries after the event. Hall notes that there is no evidence for a feminine form of the word ælf (ælfen) until the early eleventh century,Footnote ¹¹² and it is possible that no concept of female elves existed in England until the late Anglo-Saxon period (just as female elves do not make an appearance in medieval Norse literature). Neither in the eighth nor in the tenth century was someone likely to have perceived elves as Eof perceived the three women in the wood on the future site of Evesham Abbey, and Anglo-Saxon England had no tradition of encountering elves in threes.

The triplicity of the divine women is suggestive of a different order of being, perhaps the Parcae or Deae Matres who seem to have become the burgrunan of Anglo-Saxon England. Yeates has noted that Evesham lies historically in the Forest of Arden, a name that may be cognate with the Ardennes in France, where the goddess Arduinna was worshipped as a form of the goddess Diana and associated with a boar. Yeates therefore suggests that the vision of Eof may be linked to a dim memory of a mother goddess connected with pigs,Footnote ¹¹³ but this also seems a rather thin basis on which to make a connection with pre-Christian cults. There is no direct evidence of which goddess was worshipped in the Forest of Arden, and no evidence that she was worshipped in triple form.

On the other hand, visionary experiences of the Virgin Mary were not common in the western church in the eighth or tenth centuries; Byrhtferth may simply have been reaching for appropriate imagery and alighting almost inadvertently on pre-Christian ideas of nymphs and dryads in the absence of an agreed cultural iconography of Marian visions. Christian hagiographers inherited from the ancient world the narrative motif of an animal on the loose leading a founder to the site of a future structure or settlement; the wildness of woodland accentuated the transition from wilderness to monastic settlement and cultivation. As Sarah Semple has noted, the ‘liminal ruinous qualities [of wild places] and associations with perhaps exile, despair, and terror rendered them ideal locales at which to stage a narrative of spiritual battle and triumph’.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Perhaps for the same reasons, wild animals were sometimes involved in foundation stories of this kind. The ninth-century Westphalian saint Meinulf, for example, built a church on the spot where his swineherd (again searching for a lost pig) saw deer strangely circling around a mysterious light.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Similarly, the Scottish king David I famously built Holyrood Abbey on the spot where he had a vision of the cross between the antlers of a hart in 1127.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It may be that Evesham’s dedication to the Virgin Mary inspired Byrhtferth to have Eof and Egwin see Mary in the woods, but woodland visions in and of themselves were a hagiographical commonplace.

While Eof and Egwin’s vision may be best understood as the literary device of a hagiographer, questions remain: why does the Virgin Mary appear with two companions, and who are these women? Angels did not appear in female form in the Middle Ages, even if they were sometimes represented with characteristics of feminine beauty,Footnote ¹¹⁷ and the other two figures seen by Eof and Egwin are unambiguously female. Unless Byrhtferth considered it somehow unfitting for the Virgin to appear without attendants – which seems unlikely, given the absence of a tradition of female angels – the triplicity of the vision does seem to hark back, consciously or unconsciously, to pre-Christian triads of supernatural women.

Such a mixing of Christian and non-Christian elements can be found in a late twelfth-century life of Hereward the Wake, the English rebel against Norman rule. Recounting events that took place in 1070, the Gesta Herewardi tells how Hereward and his men became lost in the forest of Bromswold after plundering the abbey of Peterborough – an apparent punishment from St Peter, who had appeared to Hereward in a dream as an angry old man brandishing a key. Hereward’s men escaped from the forest only when they followed a gigantic white wolf, and strange lights ‘like those which are commonly called nymph-lights’ (velut illae quae vulgus appellant candela nympharum) appeared on the soldiers’ lances to light their way.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The wolf guided the men to the outskirts of Stamford before disappearing. The mention of nymphae in the story – even if only indirectly – suggests one possible interpretation of the white wolf as a fairy beast; certainly it is far from clear from the text that the wolf was sent by a relenting St Peter. Instead, the wolf may be intended to evoke English national identity by reminding the reader of the animal that rescued St Edmund’s head from the clutches of the pagan Danes in the ninth century.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Pygmy Otherworlders

In Isidore’s Etymologies the existence of diminutive peoples in India called pygmies is discussed immediately after the fauni ficarii,Footnote ¹²⁰ and learned individuals in early medieval Britain would have been well aware of foreign races of diminutive peoples from authors such as Pliny the Elder. The coraniaid (‘dwarfs’) who invade Britain in the medieval Welsh tale Lludd and Llefelys come from Asia, and seem to derive from the naturalia tradition of commentary on pygmies. However, the boundary between supernatural otherworlders and the monstrous denizens of unimaginably remote lands was a porous one in early medieval Britain and Ireland. Rachel Bromwich has suggested that the coraniaid may be equivalent to the Irish Tuatha Dé Danaan, the ancient invaders of the island who become the ancestors of the sídhe.Footnote ¹²¹ Since the Tuatha Dé are not of diminutive stature this seems unlikely, but an early medieval Irish gloss mentioned lupracáin (leprechauns) in a discussion of Indian pygmies.Footnote ¹²² The lupracáin, in contrast to the Tuatha Dé, were represented as diminutive beings; the term was even used to gloss Latin nanus (‘dwarf’).Footnote ¹²³

The diminutive size persistently (but not consistently) attributed to the fairies of medieval belief was often attributed by early folklorists to their demotion from a former status as deities, but this is by no means the only possible explanation of diminutive stature. The smallness of the fairies – and indeed their wild fluctuations in size – may simply render them other, uncanny and monstrous. Alternatively, the smallness of the fairies was inspired by the little hills and underground chambers they were supposed to inhabit; or the smallness of fairies was inspired by reports of pygmies in medieval writings on naturalia. One, all or none of these explanations may be true, but what is clear is that there is no one satisfactory or obvious explanation for the small size of medieval and early modern fairies.

In the Welsh tale, the diminutive coraniaid are in possession of magically acute hearing. Given that a fourteenth-century Welsh text glossed satyrs as correit, it is possible that the coraniaid’s Asian origin could have been inspired by geographical works that reported satyrs among the monsters at the edges of the world – and even that the coraniaid’s acute hearing was inspired by the satyrs’ large goat-like ears. However, Lludd and Llefelys contains no physical description of what the coraniaid actually look like, so it is impossible to link them with fauns and satyrs. Scholars have long been puzzled as to why the invaders of Lludd and Llefelys are the coraniaid and not the Romans. However, we know that surviving Roman archaeology was interpreted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folklore as the work of dwarfs and fairies as well as giants, and it is possible that such traditions stretched into the more distant past. In Herefordshire and Worcestershire Roman coins found in the soil at sites like Kenchester were sometimes identified as ‘fairy money’ or ‘pennies from heaven’, and were believed to magically disappear.Footnote ¹²⁴

In 1879 William Hiley Bathurst noted that the temple complex at Lydney Park first excavated by his father in 1805 ‘was long known popularly by the name of Dwarfs’ Hill, from the notion that the buildings were the work of fairies, always supposed to be a diminutive people’.Footnote ¹²⁵ This name for the site could have been inspired by Lydney’s hypocaust, since a hypocaust (with its miniature arches as stoke-holes) might give the impression of a dwelling constructed by tiny people (Plate 14). Furthermore, some votive offerings at Roman shrines and temples were miniature models, such as the miniature spears recovered from shrines at Neighbridge, Lydney and Uley in Gloucestershire and Woodeaton in Oxfordshire,Footnote ¹²⁶ and it is possible to imagine such objects (like prehistoric arrowheads and spearheads) being misidentified as evidence of the former existence of diminutive peoples. If the coraniaid do represent a dim folkloric memory of the Romans, the folkloric interpretation of Roman archaeological remains such as hypocausts and miniature votive offerings might explain why the Romans are imagined as pygmies in this medieval Welsh tale. If the coraniaid are the Romans, however, they have little to do with fairy lore.

Plate 14 The stoke-hole of a Roman hypocaust, Richborough

The pygmy king described by Walter Map (1130–c. 1210) in the story of King Herla in Map’s De nugis curialium (‘On trifles of courtiers’) is clearly and unambiguously a faun, suggesting that there was conflation between pygmies and fauns/satyrs in some traditions:

On the other hand, the pygmies encountered by the young Eliodorus on a riverbank in Gerald of Wales’ Journey through Wales are described as homunculi or pygmaei but are not otherwise identified as monstrous,Footnote ¹²⁸ suggesting that more than one tradition existed of imagining pygmies. For Gerald, pygmies were simply people of diminutive stature.

In addition to these Latin sources, evidence for the reception of the learned tradition of commentary on monstrous naturalia in Welsh language and culture can be found in a fourteenth-century Welsh translation of the Elucidarium of Honorius of Autun, in the Book of the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi (1346). The text includes a section from a supposed letter of Prester John describing the strange creatures living in his kingdom, including fauni and satiri,Footnote ¹²⁹ rendered into Middle Welsh as choriuti and correit.Footnote ¹³⁰ While choriuti may be an attempt to render Kouretes or Korybantes (the dancing attendants of Cybele who were conflated with the satyrs by Strabo),Footnote ¹³¹ correit corresponds with modern Welsh cor, which derives from Proto-Celtic *korso- or even from Latin curtus (‘short’, but with an additional sense of ‘mutilated’ or ‘deformed’).Footnote ¹³² Although it is no longer applied to a class of supernatural being in Welsh, in Breton korriganez (Cornish korrigan) is one of the two main terms used for fairies (along with boudig, which is simply a diminutive of boud (‘being’), meaning ‘little being’).Footnote ¹³³ All of this suggests that the learned tradition of commentary on satyrs, fauns and pygmies interacted with popular folklore in Brittonic-speaking regions, not only in the creation of stories like those of Eliodorus and Herla but also in the naming of folkloric beings.

The Britons were not alone in their belief in diminutive supernatural beings. Belief in dwarfs seems to have been characteristic of Germanic belief, although here (as elsewhere) Norse culture supplies the richest evidence. In Norse mythology, the dwarfs were ‘associated with the dead, with battle, with wisdom, with craftsmanship, with the supernatural, and even to some extent with the elves’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Among the few mentions of dwarfs in Old English sources are references in charms that treat dwarfs as a source of threat and disease. Scholars remain divided on the meaning of the enigmatic charm wið dweorh (‘against a dwarf’), but the discovery of a possible holed lead amulet near Fakenham, Norfolk, in 2015 bearing the runic inscription ‘the dwarf is dead’ (which can be dated tentatively to the mid-eighth century) may be a survival of countermagical measures against these entities (Plate 15).Footnote ¹³⁵ While Anglo-Saxon belief in dwarfs has generally been compared with Norse analogues, a potential link with the British tradition of coraniaid and the later Welsh identification of satyrs with dwarf-like beings should not be ruled out. On the other hand, Anglo-Saxon dwarfs tend to appear in a medical context (in contrast to the pygmy peoples of Welsh tradition), and interpretation is complicated by the fact that dweorh was an Old English term for a spider, making it conceivable that some of these charms were directed against spiders.Footnote ¹³⁶

Plate 15 Anglo-Saxon-era lead amulet bearing the runic legend ‘the dwarf is dead’, found near Fakenham

Work of Giants

Medieval knowledge of Roman Britain was limited, and interwoven with legend. Yet the physical remains of the Roman province were available to medieval observers as they are to us. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s assertion that King Bladud, the legendary founder of Bath, dedicated the sacred spring to Minerva may derive from inscriptions recording the goddess’s name in the city’s Roman ruins; how else, except by a lucky guess, could Geoffrey have discerned the identity of Bath’s patron deity?Footnote ¹³⁷ The idea that any folkloric tradition linking Bath with Minerva survived in oral tradition to the twelfth century is fantastically unlikely. However, the likelihood that Geoffrey was already relying on Roman epigraphy as evidence for Bath’s history is a reminder that antiquarian information of a rudimentary nature already existed in medieval Britain.

The most persistent early medieval idea about the origins of Britain’s Roman remains, however, was that they were the work of giants. The Old English word gigant (from gigas) was even borrowed from Latin, along with orc (from orcus), a word for a monster. Old English already had a number of non-Latin words for gigantic supernatural beings such as eóten, ent and þyrs.Footnote ¹³⁸ Gigant was, in all likelihood, a borrowing from the Vulgate where Genesis 6 describes the race of giants that lived before the Flood, and denoted these beings specifically because they differed from an eóten, ent or þyrs. Orcus, on the other hand, was originally the name of a god, sometimes conceptualised as a distinct god and sometimes as a Roman equivalent to Pluto or Hades. According to Varro, Orcus was simply another manifestation of Jupiter ‘in his lowest capacity, which is joined to the earth’ (infimus, qui est coniunctus terrae), and one and the same as Dis Pater: a kind of chthonic Jupiter, in other words. However, Varro may have confused an archaic name for Jupiter, Diespiter, with Dis Pater.Footnote ¹³⁹ Orcus was also a synonym for the realm of hell, both before and after Christianisation, and this seems a more likely origin for the Anglo-Saxon figure.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The word orc did not pass into medieval or modern English, although its Italian and French cognates orco and ogre were borrowed back into English in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The original word orc then re-entered modern English via the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien.

While the Anglo-Saxons clearly had their own traditions of chthonic monsters, their need to borrow words from Latin suggests that existing vocabulary was insufficient to describe their folklore of gigantic beings. There is a good deal of evidence that such folklore was linked with Roman remains. When the Anglo-Saxon author of The Ruin described the crumbling remains of the sacred spring and baths of Sulis as enta geweorc (‘the work of giants’), he or she was using a standard literary phrase that recurs throughout Old English literature, but which may speak to an older folkloric trope.Footnote ¹⁴² The author of The Ruin understood that the monumental remains of the Roman city of Bath had been built by human beings, but later folklore suggests that this was not the perception of all ordinary people. In twentieth-century Sussex, local folklore spoke of ‘one of the Romans’ buried in a golden coffin beneath the Long Man of Wilmington, with the implication that the Long Man was somehow a representation of a Roman giant.Footnote ¹⁴³

Semple has argued that whereas dragons were associated with barrows in Anglo-Saxon England and fens with the monstrous þyrs, enta (giants) were repeatedly associated with ceastra (urban settlements) and with worked stones and other objects.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In the sixteenth century William Camden recorded that at Silchester (the site of the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum) ‘are commonly dug up British tiles, and great plenty of Roman Coins, which they call Onion-pennies, from one Onion whom they foolishly fancy to have been a Giant, and an inhabitant of this city’. A portion of the ruins then still standing at Silchester was known as ‘Onion’s Hole’, although curiously Camden found that ‘Onion’s Hole’ was more suitable for a dwarf than a giant: ‘For by the rubbish and ruins the earth is grown so high, that I could scarce thrust my self through a passage which they call Onion’s hole, tho’ I stoop’d very low’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ While Thomas Hearne, visiting Silchester in 1714, thought that ‘Onion’ represented a misreading of legends on coins of the emperor Constantine,Footnote ¹⁴⁶ John Alfred Kempe traced the name to an alternative name for Silchester in the Ravenna Cosmography, Ard-onion, which he interpreted as Ardal Einion, ‘the region of Einion’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

‘Onion’ was in fact the obscure English hero Unwen, who (as ‘Onewyn’) appears as one of the ‘strong champions’ (athlete fortissimi) mentioned in the fourteenth-century Fasciculus morum (a preachers’ handbook) as an inhabitant of elvenlond.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Unwen first appears in the Old English poem Widsith, where he is said to be the son of Eastgota (Ostrogotha), the eponymous ancestor of the Ostrogoths. A document known as the Gesta Unwini (‘The Deeds of Unwen’) is now lost.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ However, by the eighteenth century Onion may have been imagined as a fairy of some kind, since according to Hearne he was said to have thrown a rock called the ‘Imp Stone’ from Silchester to Silchester Common.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Onion/Unwen was a Germanic figure in origin, and it is unclear how he became associated with the Roman ruins at Silchester, but the stories encountered by Camden and Hearne at least suggest that some attempt was made to give identities to the ‘giants’ credited with Roman monuments.

Once again, it is possible that the connection between heroes and fairyland derives from Isidore, who traced the etymology of the Greek word ‘hero’ to a belief that heroes live in the air and are ‘men of the air’ (aerius).Footnote ¹⁵¹ The idea of heroes as ‘men of the air’ recalls the idea, frequently expressed by medieval theologians, that fairies are spirits of the air.Footnote ¹⁵² Another named giant hero was Ghyst, identified by William Worcestre in the fifteenth century with Ghyston Cliff, a natural rock formation containing caves that presumably inspired stories of giants. Worcestre identified Ghyst as the founder of a nearby hillfort, which was built by ‘Saracens or Jews’:

Worcestre’s reference to ‘the common people’ suggests he may have been somewhat sceptical of the giant Ghyst who, like the ‘Saracens and Jews’, was little more than a cipher to represent an imagined other in order to account for otherwise inexplicable human-made features in the landscape. The persistent tendency to associate Roman remains with giants in folklore extended even to ‘Robin of Risingham’, a representation of a hunter god at Risingham, Northumberland, which came to be associated with Robin Hood. Robin, in this case, was imagined as a giant whose brother lived at Woodburn.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In reality, it is possible the figure represents the god Cocidius in his guide as a hunter.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Conclusion

By the eleventh century it is possible to discern five main strands in British belief in folkloric beings, across the various linguistic and cultural communities:

1. 1 Belief in ‘men of the woods’ (woodwoses or fauns) gifted with prophetic powers

2. 2 Belief in elves (although it remains unclear exactly what elves were)

3. 3 Belief in supernatural women, often in a triad, governing the fates of human beings

4. 4 Belief in diminutive otherworlders, sometimes living beneath the earth in a subterranean kingdom

5. 5 Belief in heroes who have somehow become supernatural beings

To these five features of early medieval British folk belief can be added the evident continuance of some sort of veneration and communication with the tutelary spirits of water sources, discussed in Chapters 1 and 3 above. With the exception of belief in elves, which is somewhat meagrely attested in literary sources, all of these beliefs correspond to learned discussions emerging from commentary on the Bible, the church fathers and naturalia (marvels of the natural world). This is not to say that folklore did not exist apart from learned commentary, or that it was entirely created by it; but the influence of authors such as Isidore of Seville and Jerome on perceptions of godlings is evident, and in some cases beliefs that had died out (such as in the Parcae) may have been re-introduced through the influence of learned clerics.

Reconstructing early medieval Welsh beliefs about folkloric beings is hampered by the prevalence of euphemistic and vague terms for godlings in the Welsh language, while a complex and problematic process of glossing the names of Roman godlings into Old English occurred in the Christianised Anglo-Saxon community. However, the evidence suggests that no class of beings readily identifiable with the elves and fairies of later medieval belief existed in Britain before the Norman Conquest. The elves and fairies of later medieval belief were, then, in all likelihood a synthesis of the natures and functions of various classes of godlings of early medieval Britain. It is to that ‘fairy synthesis’, which created fairies as we know them, that we shall now turn.