Hi Khem, thanks, I have Evens-Wentz's book but haven't looked at it for
quite a long time. Purkiss's book is very much concerned with birth and
stillbirth and the fairies - this is really the fascinating bit for me, and
she talks a lot about Scottish women, sometimes cunning women, like Bessie
Dunlop, who were later accused as witches and who had encountered fairies
during traumatic child-bed experiences. Sometimes say, right after birth
there would be a male fairy wanting to have sex with the woman, or another
time the Queen of Elphame would appear and say "I'm taking this baby"..
Purkiss' fairies are so scary and weird, I can't do justice to them at all.
Her book is actually one of my favorite books ever.
~Caroline.
> Caroline Tully doth schreibble :
>>
> <SNIPS>
>> Admittedly Purkiss was the first place I read
>> about identifying fairies with the dead.
> <SNIPS>
>
> There is an earlier treatment of this
> subject in Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz'
> *The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries*,
> Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1911,
> with online text available here :
>
> http://tinyurl.com/324e5d
>
> See Section III, The Cult Of Gods,
> Spirits, Fairies, and the Dead :
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2uzh8u
>
> In that section, Evans-Wentz cites from
> Jeremiah Curtin's *Tales of the Fairies
> and of the Ghost World*, 1895 : " The
> attributes of a ghost--that is to say,
> the spirit of a dead man--are
> indistinguishable from those of a fairy. "
>
> Cors in Manu Domine,
>
>
> ~ Khem
>
> " Certainly the children have seen them
> In quiet places where the moss grows green.
> Coloured shells
> Jangled together,
> The wind is cold
> The year is old
> The trees whisper together,
> And bent in the wind they lean... "
>
> ~ The Incredible String Band
>
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