The Gifts of the Little People
Told by Alice Lannon to Martin Lovelace and Barbara Rieti, June 26, 1999, in Southeast Placentia. (MUNFLA 2019-029)
That was, Grandma told us that—
there was the old story about
this woman
she had a hump on her back.
And she was berry picking
and she saw the fairies dancing around in a ring
and they were singing
[singing] Saturday, Saturday Sunday
Saturday Sunday.
And she jumped in and sang
[singing] Saturday Sunday Monday too
Saturday Sunday Monday too.
And they took the hump off her back.
And when she came back to the town they [asked]
What happened to it?
The fairies took it away.
So there was another man
with a hump on his back
and he said he was going to same spot
wait for the fairies.
And when they start singing
Saturday Sunday Monday too
he decided he’d add Tuesday.
See that didn’t rhyme good,
So the hump they took off her back they put on his
and he came back with two! [laughs]
But I think that was more of a joke story, you know.
ATU 503 The Gifts of the Little People
Motifs:
- F 331.3. Mortal wins fairies’ gratitude by joining in their song and completing it by adding the names of the days of the week.
- F 344.1. Fairies remove hunchback’s hump (or replace it).
Comments
We have designated this short piece with the tale type’s title; Alice did not name it when she narrated it in the process of an interview, rather than as a formal telling. Indeed, as we discuss below, story titles can be malleable, just like their contents. Alice told this story to Barbara and Martin during a discussion of fairies and the extent to which people she had known believed in them. Her grandmother had been a firm believer and made her grandchildren carry bread crusts with them if they were going out to play. Bread had power against fairies because of the sign of the cross made over the rising dough by the home baker. Alice remembered her father grumbling that he could still feel the itchy crumbs that his mother put down his neck when she had to leave him to go out to the washing line. To be “taken” by fairies was a frightening prospect; encounters with fairies were generally said to have left people “changed,” “never the same,” as in the case of Pius’s brother-in-law Jimmy.
Both Pius and Maggie believed in the existence of “the good people;” you were not supposed to call them “fairies” because doing so might give offense and make them turn against you and cause you trouble with the fishing or the animals you kept. Maggie claimed to have seen them more than once in the evenings as she was passing the old schoolhouse in Clattice Harbour. She said they were very small in stature, not more than a foot high, wearing red caps, singing and dancing to a strange, high music, and the desks in the schoolhouse were covered in small cakes and dainty sandwiches. John Joe English from Branch told this same story, singing a high convoluted tune to the words. He said that the good people loved beautiful things and hated ugliness. That’s why they gave the fellow who spoiled the tune two humps.
Barbara Rieti’s authoritative work on the subject, Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland (1991), based on field research and archive accounts, clearly demonstrates the liveliness and fervor of fairy belief. Rieti explores the fairies’ nature, narratives and customs expressing ideas about them, and why people tell stories about them. The “good people” emerge as ambivalent figures who substitute changelings for human babies, abduct children and adults, and alternatively assist and play tricks, as Alice narrates.
Like Pius, Alice knew many stories of fairies, though she said she did not believe in them. Her comment that this tale was “more of a joke story” emphasizes that, unlike legends and personal experience stories of encounters with fairies that Rieti discusses, the story was not told to be believed. It lacks the usual depth of circumstantial detail that allows tellers and listeners to speculate on whether or not everyday reality was so strangely broken in upon. Nevertheless, it does conform to the traditional idea that it is dangerous to let fairies know that you are aware of their presence. Alice spoke of the trapper who told her that he would sometimes see fairies from the corner of his eye while traveling through the back country but would never risk looking directly at them. Uncle Joe Strang, her own relative, made the mistake of applauding the fairies he saw dancing; one of them threw something that struck his knee. It gave him terrible pain that no doctor could relieve. On the anniversary of his fairy encounter a thorn worked its way out of his knee and he began to recover (Lannon and McCarthy 1991, 37–39).
This telling is not a “fairy tale” in the way that Alice’s three longer stories are: there is no marriage to be gained or restored. It is categorized among other accounts of “Supernatural Helpers” in Uther’s Types of International Folktales (2004), and has been recorded through much of the world. As a cante fable, it turns upon a rhyme or song. In international fairy tales, those who sing or rhyme are often supernatural, like the fairies here—though such figures can also use prosaic language (Greenhill 2018). Alice sang the inset verses, her lively singing adding to the tale’s humor and aesthetic qualities.