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

I’ve become increasingly interested recently in how, throughout history, folkloric characters once deemed evil are rehabilitated as figures of fun and how figures deemed good sometimes become threatening or evil.

British fairy folklore specialist Francis Young drew attention to this phenomenon (in his book Twilight of the Godlings) when he pointed out that:

the devil steadily became a figure of fun in Western European folklore throughout the middle ages, to the point that the devil of folklore is arguably a character rather different from the devil of theology.

Other examples include the nature of elves and dwarves in Northern European folklore. As Claude Lecouteux claimed:

Between roughly the ninth and thirteenth centuries, there was a character reversal: the good creature, the elf, to whom propitiatory rites had been addressed, became malevolent, while the formerly harmful being, the dwarf, was transformed into a sympathetic and benevolent individual of the sort that we often encounter in the tales and legends.

Both Young and Lecouteux create distinctions and oppositions between the ways people have engaged with supernatural beings throughout history. Young opposes the Devil of theology to the Devil of folklore. Lecouteux distinguishes between the elves of early religious practice (propitiation of good, “shining” beings) and the elves of later magical/medical practice (curing the influence of malevolent beings). An implicit distinction also exists between religion (systematic belief) and legend (especially ad hoc storytelling).

All these distinctions point to folklore’s potential to upend systematic thinking about supernatural beings. A priest may have a clear idea of who and what the Devil is and may try to teach his congregation what to think, but once the teaching about the Devil has been received (if it’s received correctly at all), oral storytelling inevitably distorts and mutates how the teaching is transmitted. These distortions and mutations, meanwhile, are more likely to be successful when transmitted through oral storytelling, as opposed to systematic thinking, because the latter is more vulnerable to accusations of heresy and organized resistance. Oral storytelling is rarely subject to authority and is often not taken seriously.

But from where does the distorting power of storytelling arise? Perhaps there exists an innate human desire to turn evil into good or the serious into the comedic, as in the case of folklore’s transformation of the Devil into Old Nick. That desire to transform may rest on the psychological instinct for security, i.e., turning the Devil into a figure of fun takes away his power.

On the other hand, the distorting power of storytelling may arise from the pleasure of irony, i.e., the human desire to puncture systematic thinking through the portrayal of failure and surprising reversals. According to this idea, reversals may arise from the desire to laugh at static ideas such as “the Devil is always and in every way evil” or “the Devil is a spirit.” One example of such irony can be found in the folkloric story of the Devil landing in a blackberry bush when he fell to earth. This tale is ironic because, according to theology, the Devil is a powerful spirit: the notion that the one who fell to earth to become “Prince of the World” should land on a lowly bush is incongruous. The enlisting of theology or scripture to account for seasonal changes in produce and diet (the story’s ultimate purpose) also seems to represent an ironic misuse of theology. Nevertheless, it’s precisely this ironic misuse or puncturing of theology that means the integrity of theology and religion will always be somewhat vulnerable to the impulses of the people whom religion attempts to educate.

Time clearly plays an important role in the distinction between theology and folklore. This is because theology aims to explain truths located outside of time, whether drawn from what we know naturally or what has been revealed to us by supernatural means. Folklore, on the other hand—to the extent that it aims to tell stories or to address local concerns—is subject not only to time but to geography. Unlike theology, folklore has no qualms about existing in time; it depends on time for its transmission, for stories are chronological by nature and are passed down generationally. (Having said that, folkloric theologies and theological folklores clearly exist, and they must aim, in different measures, to describe static truths and realities.)

Robin Goodfellow: Demon or jester?

An example of a fairy who’s an embodiment of irony and of the transformation from good to evil and back again is Robin Goodfellow. Robin is also called a hobgoblin in a number of early modern sources.

Both names—Robin Goodfellow and hobgoblin—attest to the being’s various transformations.

Robin is a diminutive version of the name Rob, which, being short for Robert, is, according to this etymologist, a medieval English name for the Devil. The hob of hobgoblin is also a version of Rob, suggesting that Robin Goodfellow is twice associated with the Devil via his personal name and generic name. Finally, there’s the euphemistic nickname Goodfellow, which apparently represents the namer’s attempt to propitiate and familiarize Robin as an originally frightening being. Hence, Robin Goodfellow appears to be a fairy who’s undergone various transformations before arriving at the form in which we know him today: he may have origins in a good or neutral being; at some point he was strongly associated with the Devil; and now he’s a figure of fun and goodness (both traits appear in the 1628 jestbook The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Good-fellow).

Robin Goodfellow, depicted as a faun, in a seventeenth-century jestbook.

But that’s not all there is to Robin Goodfellow. As a hobgoblin, he’s also associated with the hob, a name for an English household spirit known to protect the home and perform beneficial tasks (if propitiated with offerings of bread and milk). This aspect of Robin Goodfellow aligns with the fact that, in many sources, Robin is not some frighteningly monstrous being but is actually extremely social, oriented toward people, and an educator of sorts, often playing pranks on others to teach them a good lesson. Based on this portrayal, it seems that folklore’s rehabilitation of evil beings follows a path from evil to comedic to good, achieved via the medium of stories.

Of course, attempts have been made to reestablish Robin Goodfellow as a figure of evil, but these have had to draw on systematic ways of thinking, i.e., Christian theology. According to a speech in Antonio de Torquemada’s Garden of Curious Flowers (1570), hobgoblins are actually deeply malicious beings, rendered harmless only by the restraining power of God:

in truth, as I said before, if they had free power to put in execution their malicious desire, we should find these pranks of theirs, not to be jests, but earnest indeed, tending to the destruction both of our body and soul, but as I told you before, this power of theirs is so restrained and tied, that they can pass no farther then to jests and gawdes: and if they do any harm or hurt at all, it is certainly very little, as by experience we daily see.

Although Torquemada agrees with English folklore that Robin Goodfellow tends not to harm people seriously, he undermines the folkloric depiction of Robin as a figure of fun when he portrays him as harmless only as a result of external restraint. This seems to represent another transformation of Robin Goodfellow—motivated by Christian theology—from a folkloric jester to a lesser demon.

Conclusion: A composite figure

So far I’ve considered Robin Goodfellow as if he were a product of successive transformations. But what if it’s a mistake to describe these transformations as chronological? Perhaps the transformations have always coexisted, like entwining layers, in the same figure, sometimes competing, sometimes fusing.

In this light, Robin Goodfellow may always have been a composite figure—part “shining” elf of Germanic paganism (the name Robert from which Robin derives actually means shining fame, and the earliest evidence suggests elves were beautiful, shining beings); part demon or companion of the Devil; part household spirit open to different interpretations (lesser demon or “Sweet Puck”); and part merry jester, a literary construct whose activities, when put to writing, are supposed to cure people of melancholy.

Read about more fairies in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.