TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Modern Fairies and Ladies podcast series one.
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So for their children and. Hello, this is Faye Heald and this is Caroline Larrington in the first episode in this series.
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We introduced our project, Modern Fairies and Loathly Ladies.
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In this project, we research traditional tales about fairies in the British Isles and then investigate how some contemporary musicians,
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writers and artists re mediate or are inspired by those tales to make new works of art that speak to our modern lives.
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Today, in the first episode of the series, we're going to talk about some of the most personal and distressing tales about fairies.
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These can involve the snatching away of human children and leaving a changeling an unresponsive,
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difficult, wizened child that doesn't seem to grow or thrive in its place.
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In another story, we'll hear about how some mysterious children appear near a village in Suffolk and they claim to come from another world entirely.
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And then they have to try to adjust or not to life in mediaeval East Anglia.
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But first, we're going to pick up on some of the stories we were talking about in the last podcast, and this is a story called Midwife to the Fairies.
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Here's a version that comes from Suffolk. Midwife to the fairies.
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In the town of Stowmarket in Suffolk, there lived a skilled midwife.
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One day she found a little man standing on her doorstep asking for her help with his wife, who was in labour.
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She went off with him and made sure that the baby was born safely. Sometime later, she was at the market in Stowmarket and to her surprise,
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she caught sight of the fairy man helping himself to quantities of beef in the butcher's shop as ferries are normally invisible to humans.
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The butcher, of course, was quite unaware of what was going on. The midwife greeted her acquaintance cheerfully and asked him how the baby was.
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Mother and child were doing well, she was told. And the little man asked her with which eye she could see him.
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She pointed to the eye for while in fairyland she had rubbed some ointment intended for the child's eyes upon her own eye,
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and the fairy man blew on it. After that, she never saw him or any other members of the family tribe.
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Again. So in that story, that's a very typical example,
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isn't the kind of service that the ferries need from humans that their babies can't apparently be born by themselves without human intervention?
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But, you know, although the midwife did her thing, a rather cruel in some ways.
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There has to be some kind of limitation on on the exchange there.
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So they need something from her. But she cannot just leave with all their knowledge and the ability to see fairy world and what's going on.
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You know, there's quite touching that she sort of gives herself away by behaving just like
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a human midwife would when she sees the father of a baby that she's delivered,
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that she says, oh, hello. And she also after the baby. And that's what reveals the fact that she's got that fairy ornament in her eye.
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You can see why the fairies need their invisibility. Well, yes.
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I can't imagine the fairies would get away with just wandering around through the market if we all knew they were there.
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Stealing bits of meat has perhaps for the baby. I mean, who knows? But that does show the fairy difference.
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I think that fairies don't necessarily sympathise with with the midwife just because she has warm, loving feelings towards the child.
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They just go, nope, he broke the rules. And we're going to punish you.
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But there is a different levels of viciousness on that punishment.
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So in some cases, the the fairy realises that this human can see the fairy world and can blow on the eyes to get rid of this magical power of vision.
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And in other cases, it's just a result. It's not the way that she spoke to the fairy, pokes out the eye.
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And that's, I think, a bit grim. Now, here's another story, the tale of the green children.
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And this is an extraordinary story that's recorded in two separate chronicles that come from the late 12th century in mediaeval England.
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And both tales tell about some strange children, bright green in colour, who appears suddenly one day near the village of Wolf Pitt.
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Yes, Brian McMahon again. Green children.
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Here's a version of this tale from William of Newburgh.
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In East Anglia, there is a village which is said to lie four or five miles from the famous monastery of the Blessed King and Mount Edmond,
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close to the village. Some very ancient ditches are visible in English.
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They are called wolf pits or wolf ditches, and they lend
Load full transcript
their name to the village close by.
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At harvest time, when the harvesters were busy in the fields gathering the crops.
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Two children, a boy and a girl, emerged from these ditches.
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Their entire bodies were greed and they were wearing clothes of unusual colour and unknown material.
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As they wandered bemused over the countryside, they were seised by the Reapers and led the village.
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Many people flocked to observe this most unusual sight, and for several days they were kept without food.
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So they were now almost fainting with hunger. Yet they paid no attention to any food offered to them.
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It then chanced that beans were brought in from the fields. They want grabbed these and looked for the beans in the stalks.
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But when they found nothing in the hollow of the stalks, they wept bitterly.
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Then one of the bystanders pulled the beans from the pots and offered them
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to the children who had once gleefully took and ate them for several months.
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They were nourished by this food until they learnt to eat bread.
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In the end, they gradually lost their own colour when the qualities of our foodstuffs had their effect.
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They became like us and also learnt the use of our speech.
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Persons of prudence decided that they should receive the sacrament of holy baptism.
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And this was also administered. But the boy, who seemed to be younger, lived only a short time after baptism and then died prematurely.
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Whereas the girl continued unaffected, differing, not even in the slightest way from the women of our kind.
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She certainly took her husband later at Llyn, according to the story, and was said to be living a few years ago.
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Once they had the use of our language, they were asked who they were and where they came from.
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They are said to have replied. We are people from St. Martin's land.
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He is accorded special reverence in the country of our birth.
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When they were next asked where that land was and how they had come from that war pit, they said we do not know either of these things.
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All we remember is that one day we were pasturing our fathers flocks in the fields when we heard a mighty din,
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such as we often hear at St. Edmunds when they say the bells are ringing out.
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When we turned our attention to the sound which caused to surprise, it was as though we were out of our minds,
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for we suddenly found ourselves amongst you in the fields where you were harvesting.
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When they were asked whether people believed in Christ there or whether the sun rose, they said that it was a Christian country and had churches.
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But the sun does not rise amongst the natives of our land.
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They said, and it obtains very little light from the sun's rays, but is satisfied with the measure of its brightness.
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Which in your country precedes its rising or follows its setting?
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Moreover, a shining land is visible not far from our own, but a very broad river divides the two.
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They are said to have made these and many other replies too long to narrate to interested enquirers.
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Another late 12th century chronicler, Ralph of Coggs Hall, has a slightly different version.
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Another wonderful thing happened in Suffolk at St. Mary's of the Wolf Pits,
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a boy and his sister were found by the inhabitants of that place near the mouth of a pit which is there.
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Who had the form of all their limbs like to those of other men.
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But they differed in the colour of their skin from all the people of our habitable world,
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for the whole surface of their skin was tinged of a green colour.
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No one could understand their speech when they were brought as curiosities to the house of a certain night, Sir Richard, to comb that wicks.
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They wept bitterly. Bread and other vittles were set before them, but they would touch none of them.
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Though they were tormented by great hunger.
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As the girl afterwards acknowledged at length when some beans just cut with their stalks were brought into the house,
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they made signs with Greater Vendetti that they should be given to them when they were brought.
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They opened the stalks instead of the pods, thinking that the beans were in the hollow of them, but not finding them there.
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They began to weep anew when those who were present saw this.
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They opened the pods and showed them the naked beans. They fed on these with delight.
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And for a long time tasted no other food. The boy, however, was always languid and depressed, and he died within a short time.
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The girl enjoyed continual good health and became accustomed
to various kinds of food, lost completely that green colour and gradually recovered.
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The sanguine habit of her entire body.
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She was afterwards regenerated by the boon of holy baptism and lived for many years in the service of that night,
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as I have frequently heard from him and his family, and was rather loose and wanton in her conduct,
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being frequently asked about the people of her country. She asserted that the inhabitants and all they had in that country were of a green colour
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and that they saw no sun but enjoyed a degree of light like what is after sunset.
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Being asked how she came into this country with the aforesaid boy,
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she replied that as they were following their flocks, they came to a certain cavern on entering,
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which they heard a delightful sound of bells ravished by whose sweetness they went for a long
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time wandering on through the cabin until they came to its mouth when they came out of it.
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They were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun and the unusual temperature of the air, and they thus lay for a long time.
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Being terrified by the noise of those who came on them, they wish to fly, but they could not find the entrance of the cabin before they were caught.
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I find this one fascinating because it's logged in a contemporary official record, lots of the others try iTunes.
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It's kind of a romantic aural narrative of where these stories came from.
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But this one seems so important to people that these children were recorded and in two different contexts.
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Yes, that's interesting. There is obviously a story people knew and that it went through their lives as well.
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And the daughter, the little girl, she she grew up and got married as well and became part of society.
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And the boy just couldn't hack it. And I always feel terribly sorry for the distress of those children.
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And they've emerged out of their their strange twilight world following the sound of church bells.
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Again, this kind of tension that we often get between church bells symbolising Christianity and
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the the side other world of the fairies and just being stuck and they can't go home again.
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Now, the slightly cynical, not believing in fairies, part of me thinks of these as not fairy children.
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And what it must be like to be believed to be fairy children if if they had come indeed from somewhere else and they still can't get home.
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And that's still in this very alien environment. And yet they didn't have the language immediately to explain.
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So they eventually learn to talk and then they explain it.
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But perhaps quite a long time off, though, where it was they came from.
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And perhaps it was just a village down the road. But they were they spoke a different kind of dialect.
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Yeah, well, the bit that I find particularly open now is that the daughter does go off and get married,
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but there's no record or whether she has children. So if indeed these were children of the fairies.
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Is there a bloodline still going on down through there? If you are a descendant of grandchildren, please write, right?
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Yes, let us know. In the meantime, however, here's a wonderful poem that Jane Yolen, an American poet, wrote about the green children.
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Here it is, sung by one of our artists on the project, Murray Waterson, who's slightly altered the words.
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Des Wyvern Lie and.
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Stones, the arms and legs scream, not the dark green 5V nor the green of apples.
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That and some arms, not the deep green of the sea, but solve the Liebreich in.
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When they. And they SWO could bring language which trees and flowers.
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The boy died of a waisting lived aid, saying she got angry.
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Why? To rage. To Kris Dunn.
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I'm married. Why not lie to me?
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Why not? Why? Travis Wax is.
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No. Why? To see us from the shadows.
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She was the White House. Shines.
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That is all that is. That is.
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That was Murray Waterson with Ben Nichols and Barney Moss Brown singing their version of Janice Allen's poem, The Green Children.
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Another kind of child based story is the swopping of human and fairy babies.
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At around 18 months to two years old, this seems to happen or where a previously healthy human baby starts to wither away and become less itself.
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The Stories of the Changelings. Here's a typical changelings story, which has got some quite nice comic elements in it.
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It's some Scotland and it's called Johnny in the Cradle. And it tells us what happens when you're changing.
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Baby is left to its own devices. Here's Brian McMahon again.
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Johnny at the Cradle.
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A man and his wife were not long married and they had a week, Kitty, called Johnny, but he was always crying and never satisfied.
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There was a neighbour near a tailor and he came to Market Day and Johnny was I greeting or crying and never growing.
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And the wife wanted to get a day at the market, so the tailor said he'd stay and watch what Johnny?
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So he was sitting sewing by the fire and a voice said.
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Is my mother and my father away? He couldn't think it was the baby speaking, so he went and looked out of the window, but there was nothing.
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And he heard it again. Is my mother and my father away?
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And there it was sitting up with its we hands gripping the side of the cradle.
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There's a bottle of whisky in the press. It says, here's a drink.
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Sure enough, there was one and they had a drink together. Then we Johnny wanted a blow on the pipes, but there was not a set in the house.
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So he told the tailor to go and fetch a round of straw from the buyer.
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And he played the loveliest tune on the pipes through the straw. They had a good talk together.
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And the way things said is my mother and my father coming home. And when they came.
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That was near the end. Yeah. And the cradle. By this time, the Taylor knew it was a fairy.
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They had there. So he followed the farmer into the buyer and told him all that had happened.
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Farmer just couldn't bring himself to believe it. So between them, they hit on a contrivance.
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They let on that a lot of things had not been sold at the market. And there was to be a second day of it.
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And the Taylor promised to come over again to sit by the band.
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They made a great stir about packing up and then they went through to the barn and listened to the peephole in the wall.
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Is my mother and my father gone, said the wee thing. And the mother could just hardly believe her ears.
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But when they heard the piping through the corn straw, they can say it was a fairy right enough.
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And the farmer went into the room and he set the griddle on the fire and heated it red hot.
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And he fetched in a half bag full of horse manure and set it on the griddle.
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And the wee thing looked at him with wild eyes when he went to grip it and put it on the griddle.
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It flew straight up the chimney and as it went, it cried out.
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I wish I had been a longer with my mother. I had a cancer better.
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So, yeah, lots of funny bits in there.
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But I can't help but feel the distress of the parents that are left with this child that they don't recognise as their own.
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And it's in some ways in that story, it's it's a bit less horrifying that they just thought heating the shovel but wants the baby.
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The fairy babies revealed itself, which is off up the chimney, and it doesn't get hurt or tortured in the way that we suspect.
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Lots and lots of fairy children or human children who just had developmental deficits of various kinds might have been horribly maltreated.
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So in these stories, it seems that the something has to happen in order to reveal the changeling for what it is.
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So either in some cases the very baby plays the pipes and it calls its family to them and they have to go back to their
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family or they expose themselves by speaking like 80 year old man rather than the toddler baby that is supposed to be.
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They need catching out in some way. That's right. Because they're so old, even though they're fairy babies that they know a lot in the in the story,
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a brewery of egg shells, which is quite a widespread one.
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The old wise woman that the village advises the mother to catch the fairy baby out by
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putting some water and some molton some hops in an egg shell and holding it over the fire.
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And this catches the fairies attention and it says, what are you doing?
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And the mother will say, I'm brewing beer in an egg shell.
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And then the fairy says, Well, I've lived for fifteen hundred years and I never seen that before.
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Whoops. And that breaks the spell, of course. Yeah.
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Which is some comfort to that.
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There are other records of women mistreating their babies in an effort to try and get this kind of confession out of them.
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And that's altogether darker. It's really horrible when we think of babies being left out,
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be exposed to the cold and the wet in the hope that the fairies will just come and swap the human baby back because they can't bear
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to see their own babies so mistreated or whether it's to torment them with the hot iron in order to get a confession out of them.
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There must have been quite a number of children who suffer them, very likely died.
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A children's tradition that we're probably all a bit more familiar with is the idea of a fairy godmother.
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Yeah, fairy godmother seemed to turn up from French rather later in to English tradition than these older and darker stories of the fairies.
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And of course, the fairy godmother is summoned to the christening of the child and showers.
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Blessings upon it. Good luck, beauty, wisdom, courage and so on.
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But then, of course, they can be the rather darker fairy godmother as well,
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the one who is left out at the christening and comes along and pronounces some kind of curse.
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But the idea that there is this connexion on a human child from birth with the fairy world,
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that there is a self-proclaimed themselves as as part of the human family, as a godmother in that case is a more recent tradition.
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But it's certainly interesting. The good fairy godmother always works Hathaway somehow to counteract the effects of the bad one.
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And that makes these stories, I think, more optimistic.
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Kids suggests that the kinds of of dark things that might cloud the child's first years don't have to stay with them forever.
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That with with help them with courage and perseverance, they can grow out of it and learn to thrive.
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Fairies are interested in human children in different ways, their own children seem not to thrive easily.
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And they like to steal human infants. Giving birth is difficult.
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And human midwives are often summoned to help.
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It's not clear whether this is because fairy mothers tend to be stolen human women or whether humans are just better at delivery.
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Fairy mothers may miss their own children when it's been exchanged.
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Or they may send them to a human to be nursed for a while in return for fairy gifts.
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Most widespread, however, are the changeling stories. The healthy human baby is exchanged for puny wailing infant who never grows or develops.
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The changeling must be made to betray itself by speaking or exclaiming, then threatened with violence.
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The fairy will then flee away up the chimney and the lost child will be restored.
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Sometimes there's a time lag between the changeling vanishing and the recovery of the human.
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Other feats may have to be performed to win it back. If you've enjoyed this podcast, join us in the next one in this series.
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Well, we'll talk about the strange figure of the lonely lady. And if you happen to be able to come to the stage at Gateshead,
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there'll be a residency with open rehearsals and actual performances of the artist's new work in progress.
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That'll be on April 26, 27 and 28.
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Nineteen. Follow us on Twitter at Model Underscore faries, find the page on Facebook or take a look at how websites and modern fairies dot code.