The Pixie Wars March 3, 2025
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Supernatural entites are tied to places and they are known by specific terms in different localities: this is something that we easily lose touch with when we read and write about the supernatural. Beach wants to give here just one version. ‘Pixies’ are a south-western word for fairies: though there are hints that these pixies were also believed in through the Welsh marches (including even Oxfordshire), in southern Wales and even along the southern coast of England to Hampshire in the early modern period. In the south west they went essentially by two names: ‘piskeys’ in Cornwall and parts of eastern Devon, and pixies/pixeys/pixys (orthography varies but pronunciation is the same) in Devon and Somerset and parts of Dorset (there is also the very rare pigsy and pisgy in Devon). Beach, this morning, charted these on Ngram, a recent obsession. What is fascinating is the slow assimilation of different terms to one: ‘pixie’. First, in the early nineteenth century Samuel Taylor Coleridge (in poetry) and Anna Dorothy Bray (in prose), two influential authors, used the term ‘pixy’ and for the first time pixies became popular and even started to feature as a synonym for fairies: the word appears in a thousand children’s books in the second half of the nineteenth century. There was subsequently a very brief tussle for dominance between the Cornish term piskey and pixy/pixie. Piskey never stood a chance and was flattened. It was less used in the south west (only Cornwall and Dartmoor) and also it had that unpleasant sibilant that recalled ‘piss’, not something likely to endear it to Victorian writers. Even Cornish authors sometimes preferred ‘pixy’, despite piskeys having a rather different character: the word has only survived thanks to some heroic Cornish nationalists. Next and more mysteriously (Beach at least does not get this) ‘pixy’ and ‘pixie’ do battle with ‘pixie’ emerging as clear favourite by the 1920s. Perhaps ‘pixie’ is a more American spelling, as a dominant west Atlantic culture took over the from UK between the wars? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com. This was then cemented, in any case, in the late 1980s, with the establishment of a rock band named the Pixies and has now become canonical with Pixie Hollow in the Tinker Bell cartoons. Here is a lesson in how complex supernatural realities with local names and features are sanded down, boxed and put on shelves for consumers to take home. There are similar stories of defeat and victory behind every supernatural name listed in Katharine Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies.
Victorian Urban Legends: Fine Art February 25, 2025
Author: Beach Combing | in : UncategorizedA couple of fine art urban legends. We live in a world where painting no longer has the same social value: what would be the modern equivalents of these? Drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com A man who was furnishing saw in Wardour-street an old portrait which he admired, but for which the dealer asked, as […]
Headingley Monster February 24, 2025
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Here is a weird and disturbing story from the Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 16 Apr 1912: Leeds Family Terrorised; Woman Bitten. For three months past, a strange little beast has been alarming a Headingley household. It has been variously held to be weasel, a rat, or some strange creature from the East. On several, occasions the animal […]
St Charles Fort? February 23, 2025
Author: Beach Combing | in : UncategorizedCharles Fort was a fiercely eccentric and independent individual who collected, in the early twentieth century, anomaly reports, as some of his contemporaries collected cigarette cards. He described and lovingly collated these anomalies in five books he published between 1906 and 1932: after thousands of visits to libraries, most in New York. These books are […]
Are Mermaids Fairies? July 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Medieval, Modern
Chris starts our new podcast episode (Mermaid 101) with this question (see title) and I answer ‘yes’. Mermaids (which have featured for over a decade on this site) are social supernatural beings who happen to live in the water rather than on land. They are essentially marine fairies. But there is an important difference in […]
Early Modern Fairy Sex Spell June 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month’s podcast is on sex and the supernatural. The most extraordinary text I ran across in preparing for our hour ride is the following spell from an early modern English text, edited by Frederika Bain in her ‘The Binding of the Fairies: Four Spells’, Preternature 2 (2012), 323-354. It describes the ritual you should […]
Karl Banse: The Man Who Made the Case for Mermaids May 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Just a quick post as we move towards the summer. The podcast goes on with me and Chris recently talking about fairy artifacts, the Philip experiment (‘how to invent a ghost’) and this month ‘spectral evidence: the supernatural in court’. I, meanwhile, am diving into mermaid-lore, a love that started many years ago on this […]
The Wood Diva February 5, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
***I’ve been absent for a couple of months because I was locked out of the account! Just to let you know that Chris and I continue to do our podcasts and there has been an episode on medieval x-files and now bird spirits. This is a fragment of an article on Fairy Census 2 I’ve […]
The Dancing Fairies of Sennen Cove: December 12, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month Chris and I have been enjoying, on the Boggart and Banshee podcast, a fascinating fairy encounter at Sennen Cove, a hamlet, in Cornwall. In 1888 two young women go out to the well at midnight, up on the hill behind their house. I’ve put on this Victorian OS map a red line for […]
The Modern Western Ghost and Its Zombie Origins November 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern
This month’s Boggart and Banshee podcast is on ghosts and shrouds (Shrouded in Mystery: The Origins of the Iconic Sheeted Ghost). As often with Chris’s choices I didn’t at first get the point: I can only get so excited about textiles… But my attention picked up as I realised (ever the slow learner) that the […]
Horse Spirits: Colt-Pixy or Pixy-Colt? October 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
The latest episode of Boggart and Banshee is on horse spirits and Chris and I disagree on, well, just about everything… There is also a fun accompanying book with seventeen different tales of horse spirits (UK, US). However, you can listen to the podcast for that. I’ve, instead, been caught up with one very simple […]
The When of Levitation in the West September 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Fun and games on the latest Boggart and Banshee podcast with almost an hour given over to questions of levitation and teleportation. As always when I talk to Chris there were revelations, things I’d not realised before. The point that really blew me away was the chronology of levitation. I had assumed that people had […]
The Fairy Census: End Game August 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite
In 2014 (inspired by Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, which I had just edited) I started the Fairy Census. The aim was to gather together first-hand encounters with fairies; or unusual supernatural experiences that could be understood in fairy terms. It took me to 2017 to get to 500 encounters, which were then published freely online. […]
Immortals and Itinerants July 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month’s Boggart and Banshee Podcast concerns the immortals in our midst: the men and (in some rare cases) the women who are supposed to live for ever. I’ve long been interested in the most famous of these, the Wandering Jew: the individual cursed by Christ who traipsed from place-to-place imparting wisdom or (in some […]
Devil at the Wedding (Ritual) June 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Chris twisted my arm this month to do a podcast on wedding superstitions. I was rather pessimistic about how interesting this would be (dresses, jilting…), but after a couple of weeks of reading I’d changed my mind. As one folklorist explained things to me ‘it’s all about sex and death’. Here just to give you […]
