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

I recently came across the following pukwudgie illustrations by the writer and artist L.J. Bridgman, who’s known for publishing children’s literature in magazines at the end of the nineteenth century. Bridgman drew the images to illustrate a story about the pukwudgies’ winter migration to the shores of Lake Superior (gichi-gami in the Ojibwe language), where they’d hibernate in shells.

In his depictions of the pukwudgies, Bridgman was most likely inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Hiawatha, which popularized aspects of Ojibwe folklore. Appearing in the children’s magazine Wide Awake in 1890, these pukwudgies aren’t “authentic” Ojibwe pukwudgies (not being Ojibwe creations), and it’s unclear whether they were produced under Ojibwe consultation. The stories themselves are probably the writer’s own inventions—an example of an Anglo-American writer appropriating Ojibwe folklore to entertain American children, raising the question of cultural exploitation.

As for the form the pukwudgies take in the images, it seems closer in spirit to nineteenth-century Algonquian folklore than the depictions of troll-like pukwudgies found today. (The latter depictions appear to have originated in Jean Fritz’s 1982 children’s book The Good Giants and the Bad Pukwudgies). Like many nineteenth-century descriptions of Algonquian Little People, Bridgman’s pukwudgies are clearly miniature people and resemble (from a distance) young children.

I believe these images are worth sharing here because they add to the diversity of pukwudgie images available on the Internet. They also challenge the animalistic cryptid-like depiction of pukwudgies found so commonly today.

To read about more fairies, order my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.