Oakmen Fairy Fakes? August 11, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
***Sorry this post was accidentally pre-released!***
Ah, there are few things as warming to the heart as duffing up a made up folklore creature and Beach recently came across the oakman, which he now hopes to remove like a tic from the body of folklore. Katharine Briggs in her fairy dictionary writes: ‘There are scattered references to oakmen in the North of England, though very few folktales about them: there is no doubt that the oak was regarded as a sacred and potent tree.’
So far so good, Katharine, but what are these scattered references? Well, one is Beatrix Potter’s A Fairy Caravan, which has some characters called the oakmen: ‘squat, dwarfish people with red toadstool caps and red noses who tempt intruders into their copse with disguised food made of fungi’ (Briggs’ summary.) Needless to say that Beatrix Potter was writing fiction here, and though she certainly had knowledge of British folklore, this description seems inherently unlikely to Beach (who has wasted several hundred hours in the glades of Northern English lore). KB’s second proof is even more disappointing, a story by Ruth Tongue, a fiction-monger posing as a folklorist.
The only genuine oak tradition that Beach has come across (and one that Briggs does not mention) is the possible association of oaks and fairies in a seventeenth-century poem; and a monster in a list of bogeys by Reginald Scott called ‘the Man-in-the-Oak’. It is not much to base a mythology on. Can anyone save the oakmen from certain death? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
It goes without saying that there are lots of fun references to oakmen in the various fairy encyclopedias out there but they all come from Beatrix/Ruth via Briggs.
Ruth in VA, 30 Aug 2016: Well, Beachy, I think it’s too late to excise the characters from the body of fairy lore. If you have that many instances of their mention then it has probably already created a “Tulpa” figure of them, and they are here to stay. And of course, you mentioned them, so now they are here to stay.
