The Mooinjer Veggey

The Mooinjer Veggey — the little people — were the fairies proper, living under the hills and sometimes helping, sometimes harming. You did not speak of them carelessly. You did not cross their ground without acknowledgement. You left food out for them on certain nights and you did not look too closely at the places where they were known to gather, because the boundary between their world and yours was thin and permeable and you gained nothing by testing it.

Waldron, writing around the 1720s, recorded the native belief that the first inhabitants of the Island were fairies, and that these little people still had their residence among the Manx. They called them the good people and said they lived in wilds and forests and on mountains, shunning great cities because of the wickedness acted therein. A person would be thought impudently profane who should suffer his family to go to bed without having first set a tub of clean water for these guests to bathe themselves in. If anything happened to be mislaid and found again in an unexpected place, they presently told you a fairy took it and returned it.

Waldron also observed that the Manx people “would be even refractory” to their clergy if the clergy tried to preach against the existence of fairies. The Church knew better than to try. The accommodation between Christianity and the older world meant the fairy faith and the Sunday service coexisted without contradiction.

Courts, Customs & Protections

The interior of Fairy Hill in Rushen was supposed to be the palace of the Fairy King. Many a tale was told of the midnight revels of the fairy court of Mona. The fairies were especially fond of the glen at Glentrammon, and were always abroad during the harvest moon. The fairy hills were the ancient tumuli, the burial mounds of an older people, and the connection between the fairy world and the land of the dead ran through everything.

An entire system of domestic customs existed to maintain good relations. A fire was kept burning through the night so the fairies might come in and enjoy it. Bread was left out. Water crocks were filled with clean water before bed, used by the fairies for bathing and thrown out in the morning, never used for any other purpose. Women would not spin on Saturday evenings. At every baking and churning a small piece of dough and butter was stuck on the wall for fairy consumption. The mountain ash, in the form of a cross made without a knife, was placed over the threshold. Yellow flowers growing in a hedge offered protection. These were not quaint survivals. They were practical measures in a world where the fairy folk were neighbours.

The Fairy Bridges on the road south of Douglas still prompt a greeting from passers-by — not antiquarian curiosity but living practice, observed into the present day.

Changelings & Fairy Doctors

One of the most feared actions of the fairies was to steal children, especially before baptism. If a child were taken, a decrepit and emaciated fairy would be left in its place. The prettier the child, the greater the risk. Protective measures included laying an iron poker on the child when left alone, tying a red thread around the child’s neck, and carrying bread and cheese to give to the first person met on the way to christening. Salt and iron were the most reliable protections. The changeling tradition reflected a world where children were vulnerable and the community had rituals to express and manage that anxiety.

The fairy doctors — men and women who had acquired the reputation of being able to counter the malevolence of the fairies through incantations and herbs — occupied a recognised position in the community. Their remedies were usually applied to the cure of cattle. One of the most renowned, Teare of Ballawbane, told Train in 1833 that the malevolence of the fairies had caused the seed potatoes to become tainted in the ground, and that all the potatoes he had taken under his protection had vegetated vigorously. The fairy doctors mediated between the human and fairy worlds through knowledge passed down across generations.

Fairy Encounters

A young sailor, coming ashore at Douglas on a fine moonlit night, was crossing the mountain toward his sister’s house at Kirk Malew when he heard the noise of horses, a huntsman’s halloo, and the finest horn in the world. He counted thirteen riders, all dressed in green, gallantly mounted, riding so close he could have touched them. He was so delighted he would gladly have followed. When he reached his sister she clapped her hands in relief: those you saw were fairies, and it is well they did not take you away with them. Waldron recorded the Fairy Hunt at Kirk Malew as though it had happened to someone he knew.

The Bollan Bane Tune was a melody the Manx people said had been learned from the fairies themselves. A farmer wearing mugwort for protection went into the hills and heard the fair folk playing music. He went back three times to memorise the tune, each time returning home later, until finally arriving at sunrise to be met by an angry wife. But he had the tune, and it passed into the tradition of the Island. Fairy music made safe by the protective herb, captured and carried back to the world of men.

And then there was the story of how the Island received its arms. Before the Christian era, the Island was inhabited by fairies and all business was carried on in a supernatural manner. A blue mist hung continually over the land. When fishermen, stranded by a storm, struck the first spark of fire on the beach, the fog began to move up the mountainside, closely followed by a revolving object resembling three legs of men joined together at the upper thigh, spinning like the spokes of a wheel. The blue mist was Manannán’s cloak of protection in another form.

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