“The Hunters and the Maidens”^[1]

The above rendering of the “The Hunters and the Maidens” features some of the key features of a migratory folk legend, although the style is clearly a literary one–the details are specific, but variants still exist as to exact location and the events. As mentioned earlier regarding the components of a folk legend, this account does offer the components that Tangherlini identified: “mono) episodic, highly ecotypified, localized” etc. The specific location is mentioned and there is a single complicating incident with the intrusive predation of the women–sometimes identified as Baobhan Sith (Scotland) and Dearg-due (Ireland). Folklorist Sean O’Sullivan has even claimed he knew of the particular spot where such a vampiric attack by fairy women had occurred in the Magillycuddy Reeks of Kerry Ireland. Alternate tales of the dearg-du involve a female revenant who takes vengeance against an abusive husband but then remains a wild raging entity perpetually endangering the unwary traveler. Today websites feature one version of the dearg-du legend said to have occurred in the vicinity of Waterford City Ireland and asserting that the body of the revenant lies beneath a tree known as Strongbow Tree.^[2]

The location is not exotic but integrated into the generally known locale of the participants in the tale and the implied teller, as well as literary reteller: “one night in the shieling at Airigh nan”–a shieling is not a mysterious place but a hut intended for shelter and the location is named rather than in some mysterious otherworld. David Puglia remarks in the introduction to his recent anthology on monsters about the role of how the site of monsters has become proximate rather than distant: “The legendary monsters once ‘out there’ are now ‘in here.’ They do not live on distant shores and in far-off places; modern legendary monsters live in our own liminal spaces, at our own social boundaries, on the edges of our own civilization.”^[3] Although Puglia is referring to North America in particular, the dynamic is similar for folk legends shared by communities globally. This proximity to civilization is indeed also “liminal” and a hallmark often of some types of the literary fantastic, which frequently position a conflict between two or more cultures and situated on the border between the wild and the civilized.^[4] A “metaphysical contact zone” often is a feature of folk legends and the literary fantastic. Familiar to many students of English literature is the monster Grendel and his mother; notably, their lair is not that far away from the mead-hall. Or, consider the Saami people’s folk legends of little people and revenants that haunt the shores–the ocean itself serves as an exemplar metaphysical contact zone where physical division is marked by the shoreline itself and it is also a place of incursion, trade, and influence of one culture upon another. Robert Paine identifies exactly this dynamic in his article “Night Village and the Coming of the Men of the Word: The Supernatural as a Source of Meaning among Coastal Saami”: “the Little People and the raw’ga [revenants from the sea] – located on the boundaries of tundra (with pastoral Saami) and sea (with Norwegians) – are lightning rods for the traumas and conflicts (with their brew of fear,stigma, ambiguity, and ambivalence) that villagers experience in their betwixt-and-between world.”

As the afterword by C. M. Robertson explains, some of the versions of the “Hunters and the Maidens” contain distinctions in the reason for taking shelter, the number of men, and the motif of the tell-tale “cloven foot”–an international motif that appears as a sign of the supernatural Other, often the Devil in fact. Tracking the motif is the work of the historical-geographic method pioneered by Anti Aarne and Stith Thonmpson and refined by Hans-Jörg Uther as mentioned above. Specifically, it is in Stith Thompson’s Motif Index that one finds the following: “G303.4.5.4.1. G303.4.5.4.1 Devil is betrayed by his goat hoofs.”^[5]

Reflecting on the diverse elements in this folk legend and the ambiguity between fairy and vampire and devil, we see how rather porous the metaphysical aspects of storytelling can be when there is no controlling authoritative orthodoxy. One might true to assert, well, these female entities are either fairies or vampires, not both! But that distinction does not hold water when it comes to the attributes of the fairies, which include blood-drinking as a potential behavior, as also noted by Reverend John Gregorson Campbell (not to be confused with the other nineteenth-century Scottish prodigious folklore scholar John Francis Campbell!) : “The reason assigned for taking water into the house at night was that the Fairies would suck the sleeper’s blood if they found no water in to quench their thirst.”^[6] Notably also, the human characters in this legend have no defense against the supernatural predation, and the escaping hunter only barely gets away. Defenses against the fairies and other supernatural beings of folklore are not so absolute as often suggested in films; for instance, though some tales claim that running water can prevent the crossing of an evil being (like Tolkien’s Nazgul who pause at the ford near Rivendell), in other instances the running water is no obstacle.This variability of apotropaic strategies among folk beliefs even confuses some of the collectors, who occasionally will generalize about material in their own collections and ignore or overlook the exceptions: Gregorson in fact asserts, “A running stream could not be crossed by evil spirits, ghosts, and apparitions, but made no difference to the Fairies”–in his own collection there’s the Banshi who stands in the running stream and crosses the ocean, but there’s also the fairy who tries to coerce a herd-boy across a stream as though she can’t cross it.^[7]

It is this anti-orthodoxy and resilient narrative flexibility that is particularly engaging to literary critics and folklorists because oral tales vary so much in their particular arrangement of motifs and structure and interpretative implications as well. Despite the rich proliferation of fantasy images in art and popular depictions of fairies in literature and film, there has yet to be a well-known adaptation of fairy lore that does justice to the range of amoral and volatile attributes of the mysterious other crowd.

In terms of interpretation, one might argue socio-psychologically that the events of the legend help express anxiety over the dangers of spending a night out in the interface between civilization and the wilderness, as well as a potential sense of vulnerability ironically expressed: the hunters become the hunted. In some versions of the tale, the hunters (or bagpipers) express a longing for their missing “sweethearts” or wives or at least dancing partners, which heightens the subtext of sexual longing precariously and transgressively fulfilled by the arrival of the women. Their identity as blood-thirsty baobhan sith or dearga du, etc. might externalize culturally a form of sexual anxiety and associated violence, though any such reading is theoretical, and to be empirical as possible, a folklorist would interview the teller and audience to hear what the community itself offers in terms of any meaning, and leave any psychoanalysis to a later stage of critique or to a literary critic. An in-depth study of a tale like this should also involve a close examination of other occurrences of the baobhan sith and dearga-du, including all available variants of the tale. By accretion of the larger storytelling tradition within the Scottish and Irish traditions, light would then be shed on which variant might be an exception or a more typical instance of an interaction between the male and female characters. In this particular case, it’s hard not to believe there is a sense of humor in the details as well, with the chastisement by one pursuer to the other: “You are not your mother at your age. Slender Christina, can’t you catch him!” It’s also an interesting moment of investing the seeming villain in the legend with a personal history and community. She, the speaker here, is not merely a hungry spirit but a personal historian to her companions.

A more modern approach would be to record the storytelling session visually as well as the words themselves–getting permission from the participants and clarification on any attributions and release of their information and performance. But this account above lacks details on the legend-telling session and the participants.