Note 43 — Chapter X · Difficulties of the Folklorist

Another version of the story seems to have been current, which represented the bogie as in no wise to blame43: but I attach some importance to the foregoing tale as forming a link of connexion between the Rumpelstiltzchen group of fairies, always trying to get hold of children; the brownie kind, ever willing to serve in return for their simple keep; and the troublesome bogie, that used to haunt Welsh farm houses and delight in breaking crockery and frightening the inmates out of their wits. In fact, the brownie and the bogie reduce themselves here into different humours of the same uncanny being. Their appearance may be said to have differed also: the bogie had a very long nose, while the brownie of Blednoch had only ‘a hole where a nose should have been.’ But one of the most remarkable points about the brownie species is that the Lincolnshire specimen was a small creature, ‘a weeny bit of a fellow’—which suggests a possible community of origin with the banshee of the Irish, and also of the Welsh: witness the wee little woman in the story of the Curse of Pantannas (pp. 188–9), who seems to come up out of the river. All alike may perhaps be said to suggest various aspects of the dead ancestor or ancestress; but Bwca’r Trwyn is not to be severed from the fairy woman in the Pennant Valley, who undertakes some of the duties, not of a dairymaid, as in other cases mentioned, but those of a nurse. Her conduct on being offered a gown is exactly that of the brownie similarly placed: see p. 109 above. But she and Bwca’r Trwyn are unmistakably fairies who take to domestic service, and work for a time willingly and well in return for their food, which, as in the case of other fairies, appears to have been mostly milk.