Fairy List
THE LHIANNAN-SHEE.
Of
the Island's individual fairies the best known-unless we call the
Fenoderee a fairy-is the Lhiannan-shee. She is, in the literal meaning
of her name, a fairy follower or sweetheart, but she stands apart from
the main body of the fairy inhabitants and is capable of a more purely
psychological explanation. No superstitious conception, however, is
wholly unmixed with another, and more than a single quality is covered
by this name. On one side of her traditional character she is the "
succuba " to whom so much attention was paid in medieval times, and
thereby she belongs to the subject of demoniality ; she is the modern
form of the classical lamiae and of the ancient Gaulish bandusiae, and
Merlin's Nimiie or Vivien was one of her manifestations. Thus she is
for the Manxman, In the opposite extreme, she has in some parts of
Ireland added to her nature the compensating qualities of a guardian
spirit and inspiring genius of poets and musicians ; this is also the
motive of the Italian legend concerning Giotto and his fairy lamb,
previously cited. Though called a fairy she comes, in her character of
lamia, from the land of the dead ; hence in the main she is a vampirish
kind of creature who attaches herself to a man, in the form of a woman
invisible to all save himself, whom eventually, if he yields to her
seductions, she ruins, body and soul. Among the Manx people, in whose
ethos the artistic impulse is weak, this is her normal character. Dr.
Kelly in his Dictionary compiled about the junction of the 18th and
19th centuries, translates " Lhiannan-shee " as " a genius, a sprite or
spirit, a familiar spirit, a guardian angel " ; but he adds
significantly, " I have seen this word used for nightmare."15 It is
still occasionally used as an affectionate reproof to a small child
which clings to its mother's skirt and demands an undue share of
attention ; just as an urchin who is restless or mischievous out of the
ordinary is " a little ferrish."
The Lhiannan-shee often haunt
the vicinity of wells and pools, whence they attach themselves
temporarily or permanently to the men of their choice. There was one at
the Chibber Roon in Marown, another at the Fairy Well near Tholt y Holt
in Lonan, and something of the kind at some roadside water near Glen
May. Of the male of the species we hear very little, doubtless because
he does not take up his residence with his human bride but carries her
away privately to his own country. His presence, however, may be
detected in a beautified tale related by Train 16 which pretends to be
an explanation of the Fenoderee: a fairy-man woos a Glen Aldyn girl
under the Blue Tree there.
Roeder has a story about a
Lhiannan-shee that a man picked up at a dance at Ballahick, Malew, and
could never shake off,17 and half a dozen other tales of the same kind,
all belonging to the South..18 One I heard last year needs a good deal
of filling in to make it satisfying. A former tenant of a Port St. Mary
farm -remotely former, be it understood, though the narrator's tone, as
is often the case, was that of a man going back a dozen years or so-was
haunted by one of these instruments of darkness. " The people could
hear it noising when all was quiet." The man thought it might be one of
the women he employed on the farm, and he dismissed one after another
in the hope of getting rid of the culprit, but this did him no good,
she kept on bothering him. Some men from another part of the Island
stopped in the house and watched for her, but they could do no good for
him either. He died in the end.18
The man's suspicion of his
female servants belongs to the belief that strong passions focussed by
a strong will can send out an influence in a more or less material form
on an errand of hatred, envy, or love. An account of such a sending at
Dalby has been given in the previous volume ; another, having a
different motive, will be found herein on page 99.
In a Manx
legend which has already seen publicity the Lhiannan-shee has developed
from a personal familiar into a family guardian. She has, in fact, come
to resemble the fairy being of the Highlands called a Glaistig, who "
was held to have been a woman of honourable position, a former mistress
of the household, the interests of the tenants of which she now
attended to."19 With her in the Manx instance was associated a glass
tumbler with flutings resembling fingers and a scroll-work
ornamentation, called the Fairy Cup of Ballafletcher because it
pertained to the old manor-house of that name. In honour of the good
fairy it was ceremonially drained at Christmas (and Easter ?) by the
head of the Fletcher family. It was a fetish or palladium ; whoever
should break it would be haunted by the Lhiannan who was hidden in it
or to whom it belonged, and the family fortunes would be similarly
shattered.
Of the two themes here interwoven, the fairy and the
drinking-glass, the former is the more promising from a folk-lore point
of view. The original cup was probably brought into the Island by the
branch of the Lancashire Fletchers who took possession of Kirby and
renamed it Ballafletcher at some date previous to 1580. By what whim or
accident it became associated with a fairy can now only be guessed at ;
Manx legends of cups won from the fairies, and English traditions such
as that of the Luck of Edenhall, were perhaps jointly responsible. But
it may be remarked that the house occupied by the Fletchers adjoined
the great boulders of the prehistoric " fort " on the river-bank, and
stood within a stone's-throw of the old Kirk Braddan graveyard and the
Chibber Niglus.20 Wherever the Fletchers' invisible châtelaine came
from, she had so far departed from her presumable native character of
lamia or seductive vampire that Dr. Oswald, whose account of the matter
is much the earliest, calls her " the Lhiannan-shee of the hearth and
domain."21
Perhaps it would be juster to her memory to think of
her as a family banshee ; if so, she was the only Manx one I have heard
of. The Fletchers died out a hundred and fifty years ago, and the house
she presided over, having been superseded by one built by Colonel
Wilkes in another part of the estate in 1820, has long been merely a
site ; so the influence of this particular Lhiannan-shee and the virtue
of her cup may be deemed to have perished equally.
To sum up the
several accounts of the vessel's wanderings: after leaving its home at
Ballafletcher it passed from the Fletchers to the Caesars, from them to
the Bacons, from them to Colonel Wilkes, from him to Lady Buchan, and
from her to the Bacons again.22 Reasons other than superstitious ones
can doubtless be found to explain the dying out of the three Manx
families which in turn held the cup. When in recent years the Bacons
became extinct in the male line it passed into other hands. Whether
what is now called the Fairy Cup of Ballafletcher is the original one
or one substituted at a date unknown is open to doubt.23
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