Edinburgh Research Explorer From fairy queens to ogresses Citation for published version: Dunnigan, S 2016, 'From fairy queens to ogresses: Female enchanters in early Scottish literature', The Bottle Imp, vol. 20. <http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/SWE/TBI/TBIIssue20/Dunnigan.html> Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: The Bottle Imp General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. 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Sep. 2021 ISSN 1754-1514 poetry, and explored most fully in Lizanne Henderson and Edward Cowan’s definitive study of Scottish fairy lore.3 In one, known as the ballad of ‘Kind Kittok’, a widower The narrates the story of his former ‘guddame’ whose afterlife is spent in ‘ane ailhouse near hevin’, brewing and baking.4 This is a post- Bottle humous profession enabled by her sojourn near ‘ane elrich well’.5 There she meets ‘ane ask rydand on ane snail / Scho cryd ourtane Imp fallow hail hail / And raid ane inch behind the tail / Quhill it wes neir Ene’.6 This bizarre image, as if a cross between paintings by Issue 20, December 2016 Hieronymus Bosch and the Scottish Victorian From Fairy Queens to Ogresses: Female fairy artist, Joseph Noel Paton, is wholly Enchanters in Early Scottish Literature characteristic of Bannatyne’s ‘eldritch’ vein – Sarah Dunnigan carnivalesque and comic. It is a poem which celebrates profanity and excess by locating nce upon a time, according to an anon- both in the idea of female transgression; but ymous sixteenth-century Scots poem, has a democracy of spirit, too, since this is an Othere was an ogress who lived on the alehouse off the path to heaven, organised by North Berwickshire coast, and she man- the fairy otherworld as a cheerful refuge for aged to scare even the king of fairies before sinners. Another strange lyric, usually known marrying the devil himself.1 This comically as ‘Lichtoun’s dreame’,7 is a first- person grotesque poetic fairy tale, found unattributed demonic fairy vision which involves a trip in the Bannatyne manuscript (a collec- to the moon, a meadow where ‘thre quhyte tion of medieval and early modern Lowland quhailis’8 reside, and an encounter with a Scottish poetry), opens up a seam of striking little fairy gentleman wearing a coat of ‘ant- associations between the feminine and the skins’. Though there are no transgressive otherworld. women in its other world, it is a tale licensed There are perhaps more familiar links in or ‘demanded’ or solicited by a female Scotland’s literature and lore. Historically, audience as we learn in the poem’s last women are well-known as storytellers and line: ‘As wyffis commandis this dreme I will guardians of tradition, like the ‘nursemaids’ conclude’.9 who bequeathed a treasury of stories to In other Bannatyne ‘eldritch’ lyrics, the nineteenth-century collectors (such as Robert feminine is more grotesquely linked to the Chambers) and dark fabulists (famously, realm of the senses. In one comically dia- Robert Louis Stevenson). There are the ‘fairy bolic little fairy tale, the clarsach-playing King women’ of tradition who work industriously Berdok lucklessly courts ‘Mayiola’ for seven at their spinning wheels on fairy hills;2 and years (a typical fairy duration). A ‘bony bird the vulnerable young female protagonists of [who] had bot ane E’10, she is the daughter of ballad and folktale (excluding the courageous the fairy king no less and so a war between Janet of ‘Tam Lin’), abducted to fairy realms the kingdoms breaks out over ‘possession’ of if left alone in the magical ‘grene wud’ world. Mayiola until Berdok escapes by being mag- Yet the diversity of the otherworld in Scottish icked into a ‘bracken bush’ that frightens the tradition and literature means that women otherworldly squadrons; we never learn what are active inhabitants and participants in its befell poor Mayiola. manifold enchantments. There are fairies, sel- The gyre-carling is a more formidable kies, mermaids, witches, fairy queens, ‘hags’, (anti)heroine, and far more strongly linked to godmothers, stepmothers, too numerous to the forces of anarchic desire, shape-shifting do justice to here; but, as we shall see first, (into ‘ane sow’), and becoming the devil’s they have surprising female kindred in the bride. Celebrated for her monstrously gargan- lesser-known imaginative materials of the late tuan appetite – we learn that she ‘levit vpoun medieval and early modern periods. Christiane menis flesche and rewt heidis The Bannatyne ogress springs out of a vnleipit’11 – her profane carnality recalls vivid handful of lyrics in the manuscript, often medieval emblems of monstrous female sin- known as ‘eldritch’ (unearthly, uncanny) ners. She endures a grotesque and demonic www.thebottleimp.org.uk The Bottle Imp is the ezine of the Scottish Writing Exhibition www.scottishwriting.org.uk and is published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies www.asls.org.uk 1 courtship (as if a hellish parody of high-style, The conjunction between fairy and diabolic medieval chivalric romance) but, unlike magic may be comically mined in a Bannatyne Mayiola, defeats her suitor by delivering ‘sic ‘eldritch’ lyric (King Berdok’s mother ‘was ane ane blaw’12 that he bleeds copious amounts Farie Quene, Gottin be sossery … ’); but it has of a soup-like substance. And this, as the more poignant consequence in Henryson’s poem continues to deliver its eldritch vein version of the Orpheus myth when Eurydice of comedic horror, is so hilarious a sight to is taken to an imaginative fusion of classical the ogress that she physically expels, almost and fairy realms. And it becomes the stuff of literally ‘births’, a geological landscape – spe- satirical cursing and profanity in early modern cifically ‘north Berwick law’ (a volcanic hill material such as the drama, Philotus (‘Gang overlooking the coastal town). This recognis- hence to Hell or to the Farie / With me thow able local topography gives an oddly ‘homely’ may no longer tarie’; ‘I coniure the be Sanct feel to a creature who has other folkloric Marie / Be alrisch king and Quene of Farie’), affinities (there is something ‘Baba-yaga’-like or in Robert Sempill’s early modern polemical about her; according to the folklorist, Ernest broadsides on behalf of the Reformed cause Marwick, ‘[g]iants’ wives have been called where allusion to the ‘Quene of Phareis’ is a gyrecarlings in Orkney’13; and hers is a ‘ple- term of abuse. sand storye’ worth the telling, according to The world of fairy, then, becomes ideologi- David Lyndsay’s poem ‘The Dreme’ [c. 1528], cally charged, and tragically so in the case of although this may allude to a far different the Scottish witchcraft trials in which accounts version of her story). And although she may of fairy communion, through their perceived seem utterly unlike fairyland’s most famous associations with witchcraft, were essentially female inhabitant, in her linking of bodily and punishable by death. creative powers, she provides a bridge to Back in the world of the ballad, the fairy Thomas the Rhymer’s iconic captor, the fairy queen metamorphosizes into, and shifts queen herself: through, other feminine typologies. Eve-like, she plucks ‘an apple from a branch / As she True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank, went riding by’, at once a curse and a gift, for A ferlie he sied wi’ his ee, through her Thomas acquires the prophetic And there he saw a lady bright, power of truth (‘a tongue that will never Come riding down by the Eildon Tree. lie’). But this incarnation of the fairy queen remains so powerful an emblem of female Her shirt was o the grass-green silk, otherworldliness because she embodies these Her mantle o the velvet fine, simultaneous binaries and oppositions: ves- At ilka tett of her horse’s mane tiges of both Eve and the Virgin Mary in one Hang fifty siller bells and nine.14 version, and therefore a source of simultane- ous redemption and damnation. And perhaps As in the fairy mistress tradition of medieval most powerfully of all, she is a purveyor of European romance, the fairy queen in the secret visions and sights, and the giver (and ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (Child 37, and keeper) of his truth-telling powers; we never first transcribed from Anna Brown of Falkland) know what Thomas witnesses in the other- is a vision of physical beauty, associated with worldly voyage on which she takes him. Like active sensuality and the idea of transgres- the ballad’s winding road to the distinctly sion, as sealed by the kiss which is Thomas’s ‘bonny’ ‘Elfyn land’, the representation of the tiend. Both idealised and feared, she is viv- fairy queen is threaded through with inter- idly associated with ideas and images of linking associations between creativity and the sinful and demonic through the typically desire, beauty and transgression, sin and compressed but evocative ballad idiom: they redemption. ‘wade’ ‘thro red blude to the knee’; she shows The supernatural feminine, as here por- Thomas the road ‘of wickedness’.