When the Manx tongue is dead there will remain, however, just one badge
of our race--our superstition. I am proud to tell you that we are the
most superstitious people now left among the civilised nations of the
world. This is a distinction in these days when that poetry of life,
as Goethe names it, is all but gone from the face of the earth. Manxmen
have not yet taken the poetry out of the moon and the stars, and the
mist of the mountains and the wail of the sea. Of course we are ashamed
of the survival of our old beliefs and try to hide them, but let nobody
say that as a people we believe no longer in charms, and the evil eye,
and good spirits and bad. I know we do. It would be easy to give you a
hundred illustrations. I remember an ill-tempered old body living on
the Curragh, who was supposed to possess the evil eye. If a cow died at
calving, she had witched it. If a baby cried suddenly in its sleep,
the old witch must have been going by on the road. If the potatoes
were blighted, she had looked over the hedge at them. There was a charm
doctor in Kirk Andreas, named Teare-Ballawhane. He was before my time,
but I recall many stories of him. When a cow was sick of the witching of
the woman of the Curragh, the farmer fled over to Kirk Andreas for the
charm of the charm-doctor. From the moment Teare-Ballawhane began to
boil his herbs the cow recovered. If the cow died after all, there was
some fault in the farmer. I remember a child, a girl, who twenty years
ago had a birth-mark on her face--a broad red stain like a hand on her
cheek. Not long since, I saw her as a young woman, and the stain was
either gone entirely or hidden by her florid complexion. When I asked
what had been done for her, I heard that a good woman had charmed her.
"Aw, yes," said the girl's mother, "a few good words do no harm anyway."
Not long ago I met an old fellow in Onchan village who believed in the
Nightman, an evil spirit who haunts the mountains at night predicting
tempests and the doom of ships, the _dooinney-oie_ of the Manx, akin to
the _banshee_ of the Irish. "Aw, man," said he, "it was up Snaefell way,
and I was coming from Kirk Michael over, and it was black dark, and I
heard the Nightman after me, shoutin' and wailin' morthal, _how-la-a,
how-a-a_. But I didn't do nothin', no, and he came up to me lek a besom,
and went past me same as a flood, _who-o-o!_ And I lerr him! Aw, yes,
man, yes!"
I remember many a story of fairies, some recited half in humour,
others in grim earnest. One old body told me that on the night of her
wedding-day, coming home from the Curragh, whither she had stolen away
in pursuit of a belated calf, she was chased in the moonlight by a
troop of fairies. They held on to her gown, and climbed on her back, and
perched on her shoulders, and clung to her hair. There were "hundreds
and tons" of them; they were about as tall as a wooden broth-ladle, and
all wore cocked-hats and velvet jackets.
A good fairy long inhabited the Isle of Man. He was called in Manx the
Phynnodderee. It would appear that he had two brothers of like
features with himself, one in Scotland called the Brownie, the other in
Scandinavia called the Swart-alfar.
I have often heard how on a bad night the Manx folk would go off to bed
early so that the Phynnodderee might come in out of the cold. Before
going upstairs they built up the fire, and set the kitchen table with
crocks of milk and pecks of oaten cake for the entertainment of their
guest. Then while they slept the Phynnodderee feasted, yet he always
left the table exactly as he found it, eating the cake and drinking the
milk, but filling up the peck and the crock afresh. Nobody ever intruded
upon him, so nobody ever saw him, save the Manx Peeping Tom. I remember
hearing an old Manxman say that his curiosity overcame his reverence,
and he "leff the wife," stepped out of bed, crept to the head of the
stairs, and peeped over the banisters into the kitchen. There he saw
the Phynnodderee sitting in his own arm-chair, with a great company of
brother and sister fairies about him, baking bread on the griddle, and
chattering together like linnets in spring. But he could not understand
a word they were saying.
I have told you that the Manxman is not built by nature for a gallant.
He has one bad fairy, and she is the embodied spirit of a beautiful
woman. Manx folk-lore, like Manx carvals, Manx ballads, and Manx
proverbs, takes it for a bad sign of a woman's character that she has
personal beauty. If she is beautiful, ten to one she is a witch. That is
how it happens that there are so many witches in the Isle of Man.
The story goes that a beautiful wicked witch entrapped the men of the
island. They would follow her anywhere. So she led them into the sea,
and they were all drowned. Then the women of the island went forth to
punish her, and, to escape from them, she took the form of a wren and
flew away. That is how it comes about that the poor little wren is
hunted and killed on St. Stephen's Day. The Manx lads do it, though
surely it ought to be the Manx maidens. At midnight they sally forth in
great companies, armed with sticks and carrying torches. They beat the
hedges until they light on a wren's nest, and, having started the wren
and slaughtered it, they suspend the tiny mite to the middle of a long
pole, which is borne by two lads from shoulder to shoulder. They then
sing a rollicking native ditty, of which one version runs:--
We'll hunt the wren, says Robbin the Bobbin;
We'll hunt the wren, says Richard the Robbin;
We'll hunt the wren, says Jack of the Lan';
We'll hunt the wren, says every one.
But Robbin the Bobbin and Richard the Robbin are not the only creatures
who have disappeared into the sea. The fairies themselves have also gone
there. They inhabit Man no more. A Wesleyan preacher declared some years
ago that he witnessed the departure of all the Manx fairies from the Bay
of Douglas. They went away in empty rum puncheons, and scudded before
the wind as far as the eye could reach, in the direction of Jamaica. So
we have done with them, both good and bad.
However, among the witches whom we have left to us in remote corners of
the island is the very harmless one called the Queen of the Mheillia.
Her rural Majesty is a sort of first cousin of the Queen of the May. The
Mheillia is the harvest-home. It is a picturesque ceremonial, observed
differently in different parts. Women and girls follow the reapers
to gather and bind the corn after it has fallen to the swish of the
sickles. A handful of the standing corn of the last of the farmer's
fields is tied about with ribbon. Nobody but the farmer knows where that
handful is, and the girl who comes upon it by chance is made the Queen
of the Mheillia. She takes it to the highest eminence near, and waves
it, and her fellow-reapers and gleaners shout huzzas. Their voices are
heard through the valley, where other farmers and other reapers
and gleaners stop in their work and say, "So-and-so's Mheillia!"
"Ballamona's Mheillia's took!" That night the farmer gives a feast in
his barn to celebrate the getting in of his harvest, and the close of
the work of the women at the harvesting. Sheep's heads for a change on
Manx herrings, English ale for a change on Manx jough; then dancing led
by the mistress, to the tune of a fiddle, played faster and wilder
as the night advances, reel and jig, jig and reel. This pretty rural
festival is still observed, though it has lost much of its quaintness. I
think I can just remember to have heard the shouts of the Mheillia from
the breasts of the mountains.
You will have gathered that in no part of the world could you find
a more reckless and ill-conditioned breeding-ground of suppositions,
legends, traditions, and superstitions than in the Isle of Man. The
custom of hunting the wren is widely spread throughout Ireland; and if
I were to tell you of Manx wedding customs, Manx burial customs, Manx
birth customs, May day, Lammas, Good Friday, New Year, and Christmas
customs, you would recognise in the Manxman the same irresponsible
tendency to appropriate whatever flotsam drifts to his shore. What I
have told you has come mainly of my own observation, but for a complete
picture of Manx manners and customs, beliefs and superstitions, I will
refer you to William Kennish's "Mona's Isle, and other Poems," a rare
book, with next to no poetic quality, and containing much that is
worthless, but having a good body of real native stuff in it, such as
cannot be found elsewhere. A still better anthology is likely to be soon
forthcoming from the pen of Mr. A. W. Moore (the excellent editor of
"Manx Names") and the press of Mr. Nutt.
It is easy to laugh at these old superstitions, so childish do they
seem, so foolish, so ignorant. But shall we therefore set ourselves so
much above our fathers because they were slaves to them, and we believe
them not? Bethink you. Are we so much wiser, after all? How much farther
have we got? We know the mists of Mannanan. They are only the vapours
from the south, creeping along the ridge of our mountains, going north.
Is that enough to know? We know the cold eye of the evil man, whose mere
presence hurts us, and the warm eye of the born physician, whose mere
presence heals us. Does that tell us everything? We hear the moans which
the sea sends up to the mountains, when storms are coming, and ships are
to be wrecked, and we do not call them the voices of the Nightman, but
only the voices of the wind. We have changed the name; but we have taken
none of the mystery and marvel out of the thing itself. It is the Wind
for us; it was the Nightman for our fathers. That is nearly all.
The wind bloweth where it listeth. We are as far off as ever. Our
superstitions remain, only we call them Science, and try not to be
afraid of them. But we are as little children after all, and the best of
us are those that, being wisest, see plainest that, before the wonders
and terrors of the great world we live in, we are children, walking
hand-in-hand in fear.