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Fairies, Pixies, Elves, Sprites & Other Little Folk

I find one reference to attercop in Shakespeare:
Full text of "Natural history in Shakespeare's time: being extracts illustrative of the subject as he knew it"
CENTRE for REFORMATION and RENAISSANCE STUDIES

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY TORONTO

...

Sapphire.
MRRV Wves OF WINDSOR, V. 5' 75"
S.,VVUV, is a precious stone, and is blue in colour, and
most liketo heaven in fair weather and clear, and is best
among precious stones, and most precious, and most apt and
able to fingers of kings, for it lighteneth the body, and
keepeth and saveth limbs whole and sound. In the same
veins of Sapphire in the middle is a certain kind of car-
buncle found; therefore many men ween that the Sapphire
is the carbuncle's mother. And the Sapphire hath wrtue
to rule and accord them that be in strife, and helpeth
much to make peace and accord. Also it hath virtue to
abate unkind [unnatural] heat, for the Sapphire cooleth
much the heat of burning fevers, if it be hanged [aigh the
pulse and the veins of the heart. Also it hath vrtue to
comfort and to glad the heart. His virtue is contrary to
venom, and quencheth it every deal. And if thou put an
attercop [spider] in a box, and hold a very Sapphire of

[The quote ends there!]

https://www.archive.org/stream/naturalhistory00seaguoft/naturalhistory00seaguoft_djvu.txt

But knowing where to look helps, so here goes: but it's still too time-consuming, so I leave it to anyone more expert than I.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
And you can leave it at that. No more big spider pics please. brrrr....
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Your reaction to spiders... I mean spithers is clearly similar to mine.

rynner2 said:
I find one reference to attercop in Shakespeare:
Full text of "Natural history in Shakespeare's time: being extracts illustrative of the subject as he knew it"
CENTRE for REFORMATION and RENAISSANCE STUDIES

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY TORONTO

...

Sapphire.
MRRV Wves OF WINDSOR, V. 5' 75"
S.,VVUV, is a precious stone, and is blue in colour, and
most liketo heaven in fair weather and clear, and is best
among precious stones, and most precious, and most apt and
able to fingers of kings, for it lighteneth the body, and
keepeth and saveth limbs whole and sound. In the same
veins of Sapphire in the middle is a certain kind of car-
buncle found; therefore many men ween that the Sapphire
is the carbuncle's mother. And the Sapphire hath wrtue
to rule and accord them that be in strife, and helpeth
much to make peace and accord. Also it hath virtue to
abate unkind [unnatural] heat, for the Sapphire cooleth
much the heat of burning fevers, if it be hanged [aigh the
pulse and the veins of the heart. Also it hath vrtue to
comfort and to glad the heart. His virtue is contrary to
venom, and quencheth it every deal. And if thou put an
attercop [spider] in a box, and hold a very Sapphire of

[The quote ends there!]

https://www.archive.org/stream/naturalhistory00seaguoft/naturalhistory00seaguoft_djvu.txt

But knowing where to look helps, so here goes: but it's still too time-consuming, so I leave it to anyone more expert than I.
Click to expand...
Great find, Ryn! I haven't been able to find anything more in Shakespeare yet, but in looking came across something which I had initially discovered when I first began looking into this creature. Apparently, the 'cob' of cobweb originated from an older word for cobweb, 'attercob'.
 
Why the Swedes came up with the name "spindel" while Denmark and Norway use Edderkop and Edderkopp is beyond me. Norway and Denmark has always been connected in some way since the middle age/viking age, while Sweden became a kingdom separately after the viking age. Before "spindel" became common in the 1850s, they used the word "spinnel". In Southern Sweden which is close to Denmark, they got the word Edderkoppa.
 
rynner2 said:
Sapphire.
MRRV Wves OF WINDSOR, V. 5' 75"
S.,VVUV, is a precious stone, and is blue in colour, and
most liketo heaven in fair weather and clear, and is best
among precious stones, and most precious, and most apt and
able to fingers of kings, for it lighteneth the body, and
keepeth and saveth limbs whole and sound. In the same
veins of Sapphire in the middle is a certain kind of car-
buncle found; therefore many men ween that the Sapphire
is the carbuncle's mother. And the Sapphire hath wrtue
to rule and accord them that be in strife, and helpeth
much to make peace and accord. Also it hath virtue to
abate unkind [unnatural] heat, for the Sapphire cooleth
much the heat of burning fevers, if it be hanged [aigh the
pulse and the veins of the heart. Also it hath vrtue to
comfort and to glad the heart. His virtue is contrary to
venom, and quencheth it every deal. And if thou put an
attercop [spider] in a box, and hold a very Sapphire of

[The quote ends there!]

https://www.archive.org/stream/naturalhistory00seaguoft/naturalhistory00seaguoft_djvu.txt

But knowing where to look helps, so here goes: but it's still too time-consuming, so I leave it to anyone more expert than I.
Click to expand...

That isn't actually from the Merry Wives of Windsor ( http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merry_wives/full.html ). I suspect it's an imperfect OCR scan of an old book that got the text a bit jumbled.

Edit : some high-res (huge file size) scans of the original book :

https://ia800308.us.archive.org/27/...s_orig/naturalhistory00seaguoft_orig_0292.JPG

https://ia800308.us.archive.org/27/...s_orig/naturalhistory00seaguoft_orig_0293.JPG

So it appears to be from the works of from the works of Bartholomew (maybe Bartholomaeus de Granville)?
 
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Frideswide said:
great, wonderful, enjoyable and MAGNIFICENT thread peoples! :glee:
Click to expand...
It's fascinating! Everyone's proving themselves as smart as I knew they were. But, dang it, my snake fairies are still nowhere to be seen. And I'm increasingly of the view that they're a modern invention and not an artefact of Saxon folklore at all.
 
Loving this thread.

Can't find anything on the snake fairies.
But I'm reassured that attercops are continuing the fairy theme of not being wholly one thing nor another: "the position of Attercopus is secured as one of palaeontology's great 'transitional fossils'."
http://coo.fieldofscience.com/2008/12/attercop.html#sthash.CtcCGj9t.dpuf

I'll keep looking.
 
staticgirl said:
goth13girl666 - have a look at the people of Iceland. Some of them firmly believe in the fair folk and make sure their houses and roads don't go through elvish settlements. You occasionally hear of something similar happening in Scotland, Ireland and Wales....
Click to expand...


On a holiday back in 2006, I was climbing up the grassy hill to the Perlan in Reykjavik with my daughter and we both heard a strange sound near us, seemingly coming from the ground. It sounded like a burbling "bodobodobodbodobo" vocalisation, vaguely reminiscent of a bullfrog. There was no-one else anywhere near us and, as there are no frogs in Iceland, I have no explanation as to what it could have been. Later that day, on returning to the hotel, I did a little Googling on strange sounds reported in Iceland and found a very weird website published in Icelandic and English by a Reykjavik woman claiming to have had a sexual relationship with an elf. Think the website was called something like "helpyours_elf" but it doesn't seem to exist any more. Here's the photo I took looking back down the hill, very close to where we heard the strange sound.

Iceland_Perlan_Hill.jpg
 
UnknownUnknown said:
Loving this thread.

Can't find anything on the snake fairies.
But I'm reassured that attercops are continuing the fairy theme of not being wholly one thing nor another: "the position of Attercopus is secured as one of palaeontology's great 'transitional fossils'."
http://coo.fieldofscience.com/2008/12/attercop.html#sthash.CtcCGj9t.dpuf

I'll keep looking.
Click to expand...
Transitional fossils is an interesting turn. Good find!

blessmycottonsocks said:
On a holiday back in 2006, I was climbing up the grassy hill to the Perlan in Reykjavik with my daughter and we both heard a strange sound near us, seemingly coming from the ground. It sounded like a burbling "bodobodobodbodobo" vocalisation, vaguely reminiscent of a bullfrog. There was no-one else anywhere near us and, as there are no frogs in Iceland, I have no explanation as to what it could have been. Later that day, on returning to the hotel, I did a little Googling on strange sounds reported in Iceland and found a very weird website published in Icelandic and English by a Reykjavik woman claiming to have had a sexual relationship with an elf. Think the website was called something like "helpyours_elf" but it doesn't seem to exist any more. Here's the photo I took looking back down the hill, very close to where we heard the strange sound.

View attachment 2320
Click to expand...
So you could have heard an elf's mating call.
 
PeteByrdie said:
And I'm increasingly of the view that they're a modern invention and not an artefact of Saxon folklore at all.
Click to expand...

What we know :

Edder/ether/adder/etter (poison) was used to describe a variety of poisonous/venomous beasties - spiders, lizards and dragonflies.

Dragonflies are often associated with fairies or the Devil.

Tolkien brought the word "attercop" back into the spotlight through "The Hobbit". Unknown if he got it from a British dialect or from his love of Germanic languages.
Gary Gygax likely took the word from Tolkien to create the spider-humanoid Ettercap for D&D, thus bringing it to an even wider audience.

"etterkop" is used in Dutch, and Northern England dialect, to mean peevish or ill-natured person.

With a little imagination/confusion and blending of sources, it's not too difficult to effectively invent a bad-tempered, poisonous lizard-fairy.
 
Tribble said:
What we know :

Edder/ether/adder/etter (poison) was used to describe a variety of poisonous/venomous beasties - spiders, lizards and dragonflies.

Dragonflies are often associated with fairies or the Devil.

Tolkien brought the word "attercop" back into the spotlight through "The Hobbit". Unknown if he got it from a British dialect or from his love of Germanic languages.
Gary Gygax likely took the word from Tolkien to create the spider-humanoid Ettercap for D&D, thus bringing it to an even wider audience.

"etterkop" is used in Dutch, and Northern England dialect, to mean peevish or ill-natured person.

With a little imagination/confusion and blending of sources, it's not too difficult to effectively invent a bad-tempered, poisonous lizard-fairy.
Click to expand...
Those are the kinds of lines I'm thinking along. Still, I shall continue to seek out ancient sources for my snake fairies. But thank you everyone for your work on this subject.:)
 
There was an article in the FT about flying snakes a few years ago (assuming fairies have wings, that may be a "new" addition to the folklore), though they were in North America. Could this have prompted a memory blip from you?
 
GNC said:
There was an article in the FT about flying snakes a few years ago (assuming fairies have wings, that may be a "new" addition to the folklore), though they were in North America. Could this have prompted a memory blip from you?
Click to expand...

I remember that article, and it's probably one I've kept in a folder somewhere. But no wings are mentioned on the attercroppe in the scarce sources I have.
 
The idea of fairies having wings seems to have begun in the 1800s, according to the fairy special that FT had last year.
 
A quick update. Shortly after posting about the attercroppe on this thread, I tweeted a link to it to no less an expert and reseacher than Doctor Karl Shuker. Doctor Shuker has tweeted me back to say he's looked into it but that there's very little information available. :( That's unfortunate, but supports my suspicion that this little fairy beast doesn't originate in Saxon folklore. I thank Doctor Shuker for taking time out of his busy schedule to give it a look. :) I suppose the next step is to determine exactly what the earliest sources are for Saxon folklore, and for English fairylore in general.
 
You should contact Simon Young who writes the FT's folklore column. He might be on social media?
 
GNC said:
You should contact Simon Young who writes the FT's folklore column. He might be on social media?
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Good call! And I seem to be one of the few here who really likes that column (I've kept them all). I should've thought of that.:oops: (I need to make a facepalm smiley)

UPDATE Dr Young kindly replied to my email. Unfortunately, he also hasn't heard of the attercroppe, which doesn't bode well for the validity of the being's Saxon provenance. :( He's offered to look into it when he gets an afternoon. Thank you, Dr Simon Young, for your attention to this matter. :) All help is very much appreciated.
 
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Dear Peter [putting this up here in case of interest to anyone more generally], Thanks so much for introducing me to the Attercroppe. I include here three screen captures that might be of interest. The first is the long Oxford English Dictionary. The second (and perhaps the most important) is Joseph Wright’s Dialect Dictionary (first volume): Wright is very good at picking up supernatural meanings and there is nothing of that kind here.
attercop oed.jpg
attercop.jpg
attorcoppe.jpg
The third is a book (Cortelyou, Die altenglischen namen der insekten,Spinnenund Krustentiere, Heidelberg 1906) on Germanic forms for this 'family' of words: the word (or related forms) is clearly well established in the wider Germanic world. ‘Attercop’ was a spider. Note also that Wright gives some idea of the dialect range and that secondary sense of a malicious person. The forum had pretty much come to this conclusion.

The question is where the ‘fairy’ came from. As you know a lot of these fairy encyclopedias just feed off each other: in other words, I’m writing a fairy A-Z and go to the five or six others to see what I’ve missed out on and paraphrase or embroider. (This isn’t a criticism, I’d check the sources and do the same). The two entries seem to rely on each other and my guess would be that Bane borrowed from Matthews. Bane was published in 2013 (one of her sources, Geddes-Ward in 2007) and Matthews in 2005. At that point Bane’s three sources might just have been her attempt to find out where the Matthews had found the original (your Rossendale book is cited in Wright, my guess is she found it there)? She failed apparently as you and I now have.

Boiled down I would guess that the real mystery here is how did the Matthews come up with the Attercroppe? Their entry is: ‘A curious and malicious fairy creature from Saxon folklore. Its name means 'Little Poison Head', and it resembles a small snake with human arms and legs’. I suspect ‘Saxon’ here refers to something out of German folklore: i.e. Saxon, east German, rather than our sense of Saxon, south English. Snakes and spiders feature a lot in English folklore but in terms of remedies, superstitions, not in terms of supernatural creatures: at least I know of none save dragons and close relations… On the Continent there is apparently more of this. (Note the 'apparently' I'm at the edge of my knowledge here). Do the Matthews have anything on German folklore in their book or alternatively did they borrow from an earlier encyclopedia which had used a German source (in German or English)? I have been looking through my folklore encyclopedias and I can’t find but I seem to remember one that had a German author but was published straight into English? I tried going onto Google with my shaky German and varying the spelling but came up with nothing: the croppe as opposed to coppe or cop is interesting and might be the clue to getting to their original.

A great thing about folklore is that it is relatively easy to create a fairy. I wrote once in FT about Cornish Browney, an invented British bee fairy who has become famous and we seem to have here a new English bogey here: and what an attractive one! I was thrilled to find that there are images of the Attercroppe online: perhaps from the Matthews or Bane’s book? It has also made its appearance, too, on online forums (apart from this one). It would be interesting to try and actually launch a series of supernatural creatures on the world and see how many ‘took’. A kind of immortality…

A couple of thoughts about other places to look. One would be to get in touch with the Matthews, by all accounts nice people. Another would be to ask in the TalkingFolklore forum, which is though very quiet. A final possibility would be to use folklorethursday, the most lively folklore forum on the net, even if Twitter is limited for these kinds of reasoned arguments… I'll put in a link to these pages next week.

I'd love to do a column for FT on this one day with your permission.

Good luck and thanks for giving me an entertaining hour in a hectic moment of term!

Simon
 
As soon as I put up the last post I thought of another solution and came up, on a search, with
Edain McCoy, A Witch's Guide to Faery Folk (1994)
attorcroppe.jpg

Note Saxony here. I'd revise what I wrote before then. I guess that the Matthews picked up from here (or another intermediate source) and it was in their writing that the crucial cross-over began and Saxony became Saxon: this is still technically correct but there is then ambiguity about which Saxons, British or Germans.

The snake men of Rossendale have taken a hit... Our consolation must me that they are not of 'magickal and ritual help'!

Of course, Edain McCoy will have picked all this up from somewhere else. I don't have Edain's book on my shelves unfortunately so I can't check. This screen capture is from Google Books.

Simon
 
SimYou said:
A great thing about folklore is that it is relatively easy to create a fairy. I wrote once in FT about Cornish Browney, an invented British bee fairy who has become famous
Click to expand...

By coincidence, I was recently reading that issue (FT332, Oct 2015). I'm up for inventing a fairy or two :)

And welcome to the forums :)
 
This is excellent information, and thankyou very much for all your work.:clap:I'm struggling to take in as much as I can in the short time I currently have but I'll give it a proper read later. It is interesting that an item of folkloric wildlife could be created and accrue a reality and validity of its own, perhaps in quite a short space of time. Certainly, I'd be trilled to read a column on the attercroppe by you in FT some time. Thank you again for your work!
 
SimYou said:
...and we seem to have here a new English bogey here: and what an attractive one! I was thrilled to find that there are images of the Attercroppe online: perhaps from the Matthews or Bane’s book?
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Indeed, one of the reasons the attercroppe has fascinated me so much in spite of there being so little information about it is that its brief description conjures to mind such a splendid image. The Banes and Matthews books contain no images of the attercroppe, unfortunately, but in its limited representation in the world it's inspired a few artists who have put their work online. I might even turn my own meagre abilities to it.

One of the reasons I've been so enthralled by this wee beast is that it 'feels' so unlike something from fairylore. Had it been another diminutive pixie like creature or ugly little brownie, or perhaps a zoomorphic barguest kind of thing, I'd have been interested to learn of its specific qualities and traditions, but there's something out of place with this snake-thing that would wonderfully expand my understanding of the little people were it to belong with them. But that same feeling of incongruity is also what made me suspect a snake among the kindling.

SimYou said:
A couple of thoughts about other places to look. One would be to get in touch with the Matthews, by all accounts nice people. Another would be to ask in the TalkingFolklore forum, which is though very quiet. A final possibility would be to use folklorethursday, the most lively folklore forum on the net, even if Twitter is limited for these kinds of reasoned arguments… I'll put in a link to these pages next week.
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I'll explore these options further over the next few days if time allows. Also, I'll try a deeper examination of the bibliographies of the two books I have with entries for the attercroppe, now armed with the knowledge we're looking at Saxony rather than English folklore. And I've ordered Edain McCoy's book, because apparently the attercroppe wants all my money.

Thanks again for your work on this subject. It's very much appreciated.
 
Wow! This thread turned out to be everything that I love about Forteana: the hunt for answers. Plus I am now able to use the word "spithers". It doesn't make the dastardly things any less scary but it's lovelier on the tongue.
 
EyronRen said:
Wow! This thread turned out to be everything that I love about Forteana: the hunt for answers. Plus I am now able to use the word "spithers". It doesn't make the dastardly things any less scary but it's lovelier on the tongue.
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But is it 'spi-thers' or 'spie-thers'? I prefer 'spi-thers'.
 
I think "spi(f)thers"...just on the off chance that eight legged demon monsters might occasionally run an illegal betting shop on the side, wearing a dandy hat and a sharp suit
 
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I was just explaining the contents of this thread to my mother, and she said those webs were not cobwebs but 'irish lace'. I said that's just a cop out, or as we now know, an attercob out.
 
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