the little ram was no other than a hare, which, poor creature, was dying of fright and fatigue. I need scarcely point out the similarity between this and the story of Peredur, who, as a boy, drove home two hinds with his mother's goats from the forest: he owned to having had some trouble with the goats that had so long run wild as to have lost their horns, a circumstance which had greatly impressed him1. To return to the fenodyree, I am not sure that there were more than one in Man-I have never heard him spoken of in the plural; but two localities at least are assigned to him, namely, a farm called Ballachrink, in Colby, in the south, and a farm called Lanjaghan, in the parish of Conchan, near Douglas. Much the same stories, however, appear to be current about him in the two places, and one of the most curious of them is that which relates how he left. The farmer so valued the services of the fenodyree, that one day he took it into his head to provide clothing for him. The fenodyree examined each article carefully, and expressed his idea of it, and specified the kind of disease it was calculated to produce. In a word, he found that the clothes would make head and foot sick, and he departed in disgust, saying to the farmer, 'Though this place is thine, the great glen of Rushen is not.' Glen Rushen is one of the most retired glens in the island, and it drains down through Glen Meay to the coast, some miles to the south of Peel. It is to Glen Rushen, then, that the fenodyree is supposed to be gone; but on visiting that valley in 18902 in quest of Manx-speaking peasants, I could find nobody there who knew anything of him. I suspect that the spread

For the text see the Oxford Mabinogion, pp. 193-4, and for comparisons of the incident see Nutt's Holy Grail, p. 154 et seq.; and Rhys' Arthurian Legend, pp. 75-6. A more exact parallel, however, is to be mentioned in the next chapter.

This chapter was written mostly in 1891.

of the English language even there has forced him to leave the island altogether. Lastly, with regard to the term fenodyree, I may mention that it is the word used in the Manx Bible of 1819 for satyr in Isaiah xxxiv. 141, where we read in the English Bible as follows: 'The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow.' In the Vulgate the latter clause reads: et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum. The term fenodyree has been explained by Cregeen in his Manx Dictionary to mean one who has hair for stockings or hose. That answers to the description of the hairy satyr, and seems fairly well to satisfy the phonetics of the case, the words from which he derives the compound being fynney, 'hair,' and oashyr, 'a stocking'; but as oashyr seems to come from the old Norse hosur, the plural of hosa, ‘hose or stocking,' the term fenodyree cannot date before the coming of the Norsemen; and I am inclined to think the idea more Teutonic than Celtic. At any rate I need not point out to the English reader the counterparts of this hairy satyr in the hobgoblin 'Lob lie by the Fire,' and Milton's 'Lubber Fiend,' whom he describes as one that Basks at the fire his hairy strength, And crop-full out of doors he flings, Ere the first cock his matin rings.

Lastly, I may mention that Mr. Roeder has a great deal to say about the fenodyree under the name of glashtyn; for it is difficult to draw any hard and fast

The spelling there used is phynnodderee, to the perversity of which Cregeen calls attention in his Dictionary. In any case the pronunciation is always approximately fun-ó-đur-i or fun-óđ-ri, with the accent on the second syllable.

2

I am inclined to think that the first part of the word fenodyree is not fynney, the Manx word for 'hair,' but the Scandinavian word which survives in the Swedish fjun, 'down.' Thus fjun-hosur (for the fjun-hosa suggested by analogy) would explain the word fenodyree, except its final ee, which is obscure. Compare also the magic breeks called finn-brækr, as to which see Vigfusson's Icelandic Dict. s. v. finnar.

line between the glashtyn and the fenodyree, or even the water-bull, so much alike do they seem to have been regarded. Mr. Roeder's items of folklore concerning the glashtyns (see the Lioar Manninagh, iii. 139) show that there were male and female glashtyns, and that the former were believed to have been too fond of the women at Ballachrink, until one evening some of the men, dressed as women, arranged to receive some youthful glashtyns. Whether the fenodyree is of Norse origin or not, the glashtyn is decidedly Celtic, as will be further shown in chapter vii. Here it will suffice to mention one or two related words which are recorded in Highland Gaelic, namely, glaistig, 'a shegoblin which assumes the form of a goat,' and glaisrig, 'a female fairy or a goblin, half human, half beast.'

The fairies claim our attention next, and as the only other fairies tolerably well known to me are those of Wales, I can only compare or contrast the Manx fairies with the Welsh ones. They are called in Manx, sleih beggey, or little people, and ferrishyn, from the English word fairies, as it would seem. Like the Welsh fairies, they kidnap babies; and I have heard it related how a woman in Dalby had a struggle with the fairies over her baby, which they were trying to drag out of the bed from her. Like Welsh fairies, also, they take possession of the hearth after the farmer and his family are gone to bed. A man in Dalby used to find them making a big fire in his kitchen: he would hear the crackling and burning of the fire when nobody else could have been there except the fairies and their friends. I said 'friends,' for they sometimes take a man with them, and allow him to eat with them at the expense of others. Thus, some men from the northernmost parish, Kirk Bride, went once on a time to Port Erin, in the south, to buy a supply of fish for the

winter, and with them went a Kirk Michael man who had the reputation of being a persona grata to the fairies. Now one of the Port Erin men asked a man from the north who the Michael man might be: he was curious to know his name, as he had seen him once before, and on that occasion the Michael man was with the fairies at his house-the Port Erin man's househelping himself to bread and cheese in company with the rest. As the fairies were regaling themselves in this instance on ordinary bread and cheese at a living Manxman's expense, the story may perhaps be regarded as not inconsistent with one mentioned by Cumming1 to the following effect:-A man attracted one night as he was crossing the mountains, by fairy music, entered a fairy hall where a banquet was going on. He noticed among them several faces which he seemed to know, but no act of mutual recognition took place till he had some drink offered him, when one of those whom he seemed to know warned him not to taste of the drink if he had any wish to make his way home again. If he partook of it he would become like one of them. So he found an opportunity for spilling it on the ground and securing the cup; whereupon the hall and all its inmates instantaneously vanished. On this I may remark that it appears to have been a widely spread belief, that no one who had partaken of the food for spirits would be allowed to return to his former life, and some instances will be found mentioned by Professor Tylor in his Primitive Culture, ii. 50-2.

Like the Welsh fairies, the Manx ones take men away with them and detain them for years. Thus a Kirk Andreas man was absent from his people for four years, which he spent with the fairies. He could not

1 Cumming's Isle of Man (London, 1848), p. 30, where he refers his readers to Waldron's Description of the Isle of Man: see pp. 28, 105.

tell how he returned, but it seemed as if, having been unconscious, he woke up at last in this world. The other world, however, in which he was for the four years was not far away, as he could see what his brothers and the rest of the family were doing every day, although they could not see him. To prove this, he mentioned to them how they were occupied on such and such a day, and, among other things, how they took their corn on a particular day to Ramsey. He reminded them also of their having heard a sudden sharp crack as they were passing by a thorn bush he named, and how they were so startled that one of them would have run back home. He asked them if they remembered that, and they said they did, only too well. He then explained to them the meaning of the noise, namely, that one of the fairies with whom he had been galloping the whole time was about to let fly an arrow at his brothers, but that as he was going to do this, he (the missing brother) raised a plate and intercepted the arrow: that was the sharp noise they had heard. Such was the account he had to give of his sojourn in Faery. This representation of the world of the fairies, as contained within the ordinary world of mortals, is very remarkable; but it is not a new idea, as we seem to detect it in the Irish story of the abduction of Conla Rúad1: the fairy who comes to fetch him tells him that the folk of Tethra, whom she represents, behold him every day as he takes part in the assemblies of his country and sits among his friends. The commoner way of putting it is simply to represent the fairies as invisible to mortals at will; and one kind of Welsh story relates how the mortal midwife accidentally touches her eyes, while dressing a fairy baby, with an ointment which makes the fairy world visible to her: see pp. 63, 213, above. See Windisch's Irische Grammatik, p. 120.