Feeding the Fairies and Celebrating Gaelic Culture at Book Festival
Gaelic poetry and placename talks from Ceitidh Campbell
From helpful house sprites to dark, dangerous spirits – Sarah Clegg revealed the strange history of the faerie folk at Wigtown Book Festival.
Gaelic culture also took centre stage with guests such as Ceitidh Campbell, who presented her debut poetry collection Dàn nam Ban and also ran a session helping hill walkers and climbers understand the Gaelic names of the landscapes they love.
Among the famous names appearing for the second Saturday of the 10-day annual event in Scotland’s National Book Town was Gavin and Stacey star Larry lamb, talking about his long career in acting and how, coming up to 80, he’s turning his attention to writing poetry.
Sarah took the opportunity to visit the location of one of the much-loved 1828 Scots poem The Brownie of Blednoch by “The Bard of Galloway” William Nicholson.
It tells the tale of Aiken-drum a three-clawed magical creature who turns up in the village on the River Cree, just outside Wigtown, and starts to do people’s chores.
Brownies, traditionally only demand bowls of milk in return for their services and are deeply offended if humans attempt to pay them with money or gifts of clothes.Sarah’s book, Perilous Enchantment: A True History of Fairies, looks at how today’s Fae folk emerged from many sources including nymphs and pans of ancient Greece and Rome, the aes sidhe of Ireland and the elves of Germanic myth.
She says it was in around the 12th century that they first came together as a specific set of creatures, with set behaviours and appearances – and these are the ones she is drawn to.
Larry Lamb with Mairi Kidd
Ceitidh Campbell
Vince Cable
Sarah, a best-selling folklorist, said: “My personal preference is the dark, dangerous, alluring fairies of the middle ages, and I especially love the otherness of them – this feeling in so many of the stories that their interactions with humans are a sideline for them, that they have other things going on, things that we don’t understand and possibly couldn’t ever understand.“
There’s real power and dread in them – this destabilising effect where you never know what will happen when a fairy appears, but you certainly know you need to be on your guard, no matter how beautiful and enchanting they might be.”
However, she thinks their durability is precisely because they are beings of human inventiveness.
She said: “Fairies have been with us for so long because there are so many versions of them – they’re darkness and danger, mischief and madness, cuteness and safety. “We’re aware culturally of all of these different forms and we choose whichever work best for us, or whichever ones work best for a story.”
Sarah’s appearance was part of the festival’s Witches and Other Lore strand which included speakers such as best-selling historical novelist Mairi Kidd (author of Newes of Witches), Strathclyde University historian Steven Veerapen (Witches).
Former Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable appeared at the festival to talk about his book Eclipsing the West which examines the speed and extent to which China and India are becoming the world’s dominant economic powers.
During his talk Sir Vince noted that China is already well ahead of the USA in many spheres and its manufacturing capacity already equals the next 10 countries combined – with India advancing increasingly fast.
He said: “While all this is going on, the international order, sadly, is collapsing. The world that we all grew up in, of international rules, basically underwritten by the Americans, no longer has the force it did.”
He cited the US undermining of international trade rules and systems along with its walking away from climate negotiations.