Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

The purpose of this post is to answer the question: Do New England fairies have kings and queens? Or, to put it another way, did New England folklore inherit the European tradition of depicting some fairies as belonging to monarchical societies? References to fairy kings and queens in British and Irish folklore might lead one to expect the appearance of similar characters in European immigrant folklore. This doesn’t mean all fairies in British and Irish folklore belonged to monarchical societies: many solitary fairies belonged to human households rather than otherworldly societies; others belonged to social groups that were only vaguely defined. All this is likely to be a feature of New England folklore too.

When analyzing American fairy traditions about kingship, one has to take into account the fact that the United States was founded after breaking from the monarchical Great Britain: would Americans be less likely to incorporate kings and queens into their folklore due to a distaste for monarchy, or would they continue to find such portrayals acceptable (and entertaining) in the realm of story?

According to historian Brendan McConville, New England colonists expressed profound devotion to King George III in the lead up to the American Revolution and rarely questioned the monarch’s role in society. Hence, one might expect that any fairy folklore planted in New England between 1620 and 1776 would continue to depict fairy kings and queens. Unfortunately, the earliest references to fairies living in New England don’t appear in the historical record until after the American Revolution when fairies are encountered in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and in other places such as Campton, New Hampshire.

Marblehead’s fairy palaces

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story shared the earliest-known folklore about fairies in Marblehead, a fishing village on Massachusetts’ North Shore, in the nineteenth century. Relating events from the late eighteenth century, this folklore makes no mention of fairy kings or queens. According to Story, Marblehead’s fairy beings tended to be of the more primitive type, i.e., household spirits such as bogles and hobgoblins, and other relatively simple beings such as will-o’-the-wisps.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Marblehead’s fairies had become a lot more sophisticated, and although they weren’t described in explicitly monarchical terms (i.e., no reference to Marblehead fairy queens has survived), they lived in underground “palaces built of gold and silver, ornamented with pearls and precious stones.”

These palaces were first mentioned in writing in 1894, not long after the Gilded Age when industrialists built ostentatious mansions in Southern New England. Although these real-life mansions were certainly palatial, they weren’t necessarily a reference point for Marblehead’s fairy palaces. The word palace is never used to describe American buildings and has obvious associations with royalty, nobility, or episcopacy. Furthermore, these fairy palaces have clear antecedents in European folklore.

It seems likely, then, that Marblehead’s fairies and their palaces derive from traditions of monarchical fairy societies. The fact that the fairies in Marblehead were seen in a positive light (“uniformly sweet-natured”) suggests that American republicanism had failed to influence British traditions about fairy monarchies (whether by repressing or tarnishing them). This is probably because nineteenth-century Marbleheaders continued to romanticize monarchy or see it as an entertaining archaism suitable for fairy stories.

Calvin Ellis Stowe’s vision

Calvin Ellis Stowe is perhaps most famous nowadays as the husband of author Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was also a biblical scholar and spiritualist who enjoyed many visions of spirits and fairylike beings as a young man in Natick, Massachusetts, in the early nineteenth century.

One of Stowe’s most vivid visions involved a company of fairies dancing on his windowsill, ruled over by a king and queen who were slightly larger than the rest.

Stowe was certainly educated in European literary traditions involving fairy kings and queens, so the monarchical aspect of his fairy vision is perhaps not very surprising. Evidently, any anti-monarchy sentiments he possessed as an American didn’t prevent him from seeing a fairy king and queen who even bore a “sceptre and crown.” On the other hand, Stowe described the fairies’ faces as having a “sinister and selfish” expression that stopped him from trusting them completely (despite their smiling at him).

Does Stowe’s portrayal of this sinister royal pair—which certainly smacks of parody—betray an American distrust of nobility and hierarchy or does it derive from European traditions about threatening, untrustworthy fairies? Stowe definitely expressed a preference for a republican system of government over other forms. Perhaps this bias was reflected in his royal fairy vision.

Tsienneto, the Fairy Queen

A collection of New Hampshire folktales published in 1945 contained a story about a “fairy queen” called Tsienneto who lived in Beaver Lake outside Derry. The woman who supplied the tale stated she’d heard the legend from her Scots Irish ancestors, who’d founded the town of Derry in 1719. Scotland was an important source of fairy legends in the United States, and the Scots Irish (who’d migrated to North America from Scotland via Ireland’s Ulster province) carried stories about fairies into territories as far apart as Southern Appalachia and New England.

Whether the Fairy Queen Tsienneto was an authentic figure of Scots Irish folklore or a more recent invention is an open question. The name Tsienneto was apparently a fanciful nineteenth-century name for Beaver Lake and was later applied to the fairy queen who lived there. Although poets and historians claimed Tsienneto was an Algonquian name, it was probably inspired by the Irish name Sinead (it’s pronounced similarly, the t being silent).

Despite being fiercely patriotic republicans who adored Revolutionary War heroes such as John Stark, the Scots Irish evidently continued to tell tales about fairy monarchs. Tsienneto’s benevolent nature (she rescued an early colonist from the Abenaki) suggests that, like the English of Marblehead, the Scots Irish retained a fondness for fairy monarchs in their fairy stories. Tsienneto herself appears to have been a solitary fairy, and despite being called a queen, she seems to have lacked a people.

Algonquian fairy kings and chiefs

As for Native American folklore, one might expect to see chiefs ruling over Algonquian Little People as opposed to kings and queens, but this isn’t always the case.

The American Revolution was a distant memory when American folklorists started to collect and record the Algonquian folklore of New England. This meant they were less dependent on the conceptual framework of monarchy for an understanding of authority in Algonquian societies. Compared to earlier generations, they may have been less likely to inquire about the Little People’s “kings and queens.”

In the case of Algonquian stories originating before the American Revolution (when colonists lacked a clear understanding of Native American societies and often understood Algonquian authority in terms of kingship), one might expect Algonquian storytellers to use the word king to describe the Little People’s leaders when conversing with English speakers.

Before sachem and chief became the established terms for Native American leaders, the Algonquian peoples did sometimes use the word king to denote people in positions of authority. This can be seen in the case of King Philip, the adopted name of seventeenth-century Wampanoag sachem Metacom. Therefore, the question remains: To what extent and when did the Algonquian tribes of New England call the leaders of their Little People kings and queens? And did those words in fact signify chiefs and sachems and other types of leaders in the early postcolonial period?

Between the early nineteenth century and the 1930s, a clear shift took place in Algonquian folklore from descriptions of monarchical Little People to depictions involving chiefs and great chiefs (sachems). This may reflect a semantic shift, the latter words replacing king in English discussion of tribal organization.

In 1833, the Penobscot elder Sauk Ketch described the Little People of the Penobscot River as belonging to eleven tribes, each tribe ruled by a king. Ketch’s depiction of these kings appears to have been influenced by his nation’s contact with Europeans: one king wears “black shining moccasins with silver clasps,” “close-fitting leggings,” and an “olive-green” coat with a “bright blue and red inside.” As folklorist Peter Muise pointed out, the king resembles “someone of European descent” and may even represent a critique of white authority (the king eats Penobscot children). Interestingly, the king’s clothes recall European traditions of colorful fairy garments; his coat, in particular, recalls the blue and red uniforms worn by fairy king Gwyn ap Nudd’s attendants in Welsh mythology.

Traditions of Little People kings and queens continued among the Southern New England tribes until at least 1928 when a Wampanoag storyteller on Martha’s Vineyard described the Little People as belonging to a monarchical paradise located underground. This storyteller claimed that a king ruled over the Little People and that his son was heir apparent, suggesting the monarchy followed European patterns of inheritance. The prince wanted to take a Wampanoag woman to be his wife, promising her she’d be “queen of all the land.” In fact, a slightly earlier version of the legend by the same storyteller refers to a chief instead of a king, suggesting the storyteller may have altered the tale to make it more reminiscent of a fairy tale.

Existing alongside these traditions are descriptions of Algonquian Little People that do not conform to a monarchical pattern. In the early twentieth century, Mohegan storyteller Fidelia Fielding described the Little People as belonging to a non-monarchical tribe. In the 1930s, two Wampanoag storytellers described the Little People (i.e., the pukwudgies) as belonging to tribes with chiefs and one great chief (sachem). The storytellers responsible for these pukwudgie tales were influenced by the twentieth-century movement of pan-Indianism, which emphasized the sharing of traditions among Native American peoples. Hence, it seems Mohegan and Wampanoag stories about the Little People incorporated various influences, including European traditions of fairy kingship and the traditions of other Algonquian nations in which the Little People had chiefs.

Conclusion

New Englanders’ inheritance of fairy monarchy traditions was probably quite complex between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. This applies to the traditions of European immigrants and the traditions of the Algonquian peoples.

Even where no fairy kings and queens are mentioned, one can safely assume that many New Englanders were familiar with such figures. When it came to incorporating such figures into their folklore (or, conversely, rejecting them), European immigrants would have been subject to a number of influences, including the appeal of literary fairy tales (with their stock kings and queens), their memories of British fairy folklore involving underground fairy palaces, and the pressures of American republicanism. The latter may not have greatly affected American portrayals of fairy monarchy except to confine them to the non-threatening realm of archaic, romantic storytelling.

The postcolonial Algonquian peoples clearly had their own traditions of Little People and didn’t require European terms such as king and queen to understand them. However, when they shared their stories with New Englanders before and some time after the American revolution, it’s likely they used European terms to express Algonquian concepts. This may explain the appearance of kings in nineteenth-century Penobscot and twentieth-century Wampanoag stories.

Elsewhere, Wampanoag, Mohegan, and Wabanaki storytellers described non-monarchical Little People societies or used the word chief to define their leaders. When kings do appear in Little People stories from the same time period (i.e., the 1920s and 1930s), storytellers may have added them to traditional stories to evoke a fairy-tale atmosphere. In the one Penobscot story where a Little People’s king appears, he has a European appearance. This may represent an early addition of kings to Northeastern Algonquian folklore. Non-monarchical Little People, on the other hand (such as the Little People of Mohegan Hill), may have older roots.