the NEW BOTTRELL diaries: Alpine Fairy Music

22 Dec 2012

Alpine Fairy Music

Posted by Beachcombing

Fairy music is one of the least studied and yet one of the most curious parts of the world of fairy. Why are these curious beings so strongly associated with melodies? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com What is fairy music like? And do all fairy peoples in the world play the violin? Beach can’t even begin to answer most of these questions, but for the last one (distribution) he wants to share some nineteenth-century sources from the German-speaking part of the Alps, that he finds unspeakably beautiful.

Once my wife was standing before her house on a bright moonlit night, and to pass the time she looked out into the ‘world’. At once she heard in the distance a music so lovely that she had never in all her life heard anything like it, just as if the angels were playing. She went away from the house and inched, bit by bit, farther and farther, in order to hear the music better, and the farther she went the more lovely it sounded. At last my wife could no longer stand still, and she walked and walked, and came, just by hearing and listening, all the way to the mountain ravine. There she saw the people of the night travelling through the ravine as if they were in a cloister, and making such magnificent music that it seemed to the foolish woman that she could never get enough of it.

The parallels with fairy music from Britain and Ireland are there, perhaps if anything this is more seductive. Here is an unheard of detail from another late account where a tree plays music for the fairies:

Once a hunter was resting overnight under a dead tree. At midnight he awoke suddenly from his sleep and saw the night people coming toward him. And he thought, ‘one can’t be too careful’ with this kind of people, and so he walked a bit over to one side. The people of the night came closer and closer and took up positions under a small tree, and suddenly the little tree began to play delightful music. One little branch sounded as if it were playing a flute, another as if it were the clarinet, and one little twig made the sound of a small pipe. And the night people began to dance around the tree in pairs so energetically that dust rose up in the wind.

Perhaps music is just a feature of fairy society, which mimics human society in every way? In that case, why is it that fairies are responsible in Ireland, Scotland and apparently on the continent for teaching music.

Having arrived up there, he opened the door by the hay bar in the main room he saw a joyous society, who cordially invited him in to join them in eating. He thought they were tourists [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!] and because hw as hungry he fell to with an appetite. After a while they asked him if he would like to learn to sing or play the fiddle. He said he’d rather learn to sing because he was too poor to be able to play the violin. The next morning he left this society and walked, singing and yodelling, down the mountain. And everyone came out to listen to his beautiful voice. The chief shepherd asked him, however, where he had learned to sing so beautifully all of a sudden. And the herdsman told him everything so that the shepherd grew jealous and decided that he would exploit the opportunity himself to learn to play the violin.

This, of course, is not going to end well: the wicked shepherd was found ‘bearing the deep impression of a violin on his chest’. Beach knows stories where pipers get their gift from the fairies from the gaelic-speaking world. He also knows stories where greedy unpleasant people get their just deserts when they ask for boons from the fairies. But he knows no other example where the motifs are combined in this way.

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william bottrell 1816-81

William Bottrell was born at Raftra (or Raughtra) in St. Levan, within a couple of miles or so of the Land’s End, on the 7th of March 1816. He was the son of William Vingoe Bottrell and Margaret, daughter of William and Margaret (née Andrew) Bosence, of Sancreed. The latter couple were married at St. Levan, 27 Sept. 1788, and Margaret, their daughter, was baptised at St. Buryan, on the15 June 1792. William Vingoe Bottrell was also born at Raftra in 1790, and baptised at Sennen. He was the son of Richard Bottrell, of St. Levan, and Mary Vingoe, who were married at Sennen, 2 Aug.1788. Williams father was a Yeoman Farmer of some means, so the first few years of William’s life were spent on the family farm at Raftra. It was in these surroundings that he heard his first stories while sitting by the fire in the kitchen with his Grandparents, Mary and Richard Bottrell. His Grandma told him how as a young girl her own mother had died, and how she had been sent to live with an aunt and uncle at Alverton in Penzance and had befriended Edward Pellew (Admiral Lord Exmouth) as a young boy. Bottrell later went on to tell this story in volume three of his Folktales.

Grandma Mary had a great influence on young William. She would take him for walks over the fields and cliffs around the Lands End telling him stories that had been handed down from generation to generation of Vingoe’s for hundreds of years. Stories that later became the basis of the three volumes. William was an only child so his parents were able to give him what was for those times a good education. This more formal education was started at Penzance Grammar School under William Purchase, who was the English master there, and under Nicholas Bice Julyan until 1831, when he was sent to Bodmin School, then under the headmastership of Leonard James Boor. William gained a love for the classics and mathematics, which stayed with him for the rest of his life. He left Bodmin School in 1837 and little is known of his life between 1837 and 1851 other than like so many of his fellow Cornishmen and women he travelled the world. About 1837 he visited France and went on to invest heavily in land in the Basque area of Spain. Later in his life he used to speak of his love for his Spanish garden with its herbs, fruit and flowers. He also collected local Basque folk tales but this idyllic life came to an end when his land was confiscated and given to the Catholic Church and Bottrell returned to Cornwall a ruined man.

Within months he was on the move again, this time to Canada where he had obtained a position as English Teacher in a College in Quebec (1847–1851). He became unsettled with academic life and left for the forests of the interior where he worked for a short time as an overseer for a timber company, returning to Penzance, in 1852 where he lived at No. 4, Clare Street. At some stage he married and took his wife to live in Australia where she unfortunately died. This was a black time in his life, which he refused to discuss with anyone, but would dismiss it with the words “I lost my love and my money so came home.”

On his return from Australia he lived the life of a recluse at Hawke’s Point Lelant. A friend of his later wrote: “Here he lived in a hovel and cultivated a little moorland, He had a black cat called ‘Spriggans’ plus a cow and pony. These animals would all follow him down the almost perpendicular cliff, over a goats path, to the spring which was their water supply and no accidents happened to either.” His friend went on to tell how Bottrell became a friend of the tinners who worked in near-by mines. They would do a days work underground then think nothing of spending a couple of hours helping Bottrell clear ground in order that he could create a garden. It was from these men that Bottrell learned more of the ancient tales of west Cornwall. As they sat by the fire in the cottage which he had made his home, one of the number would tell a tale whilst William drew a sketch of the man. Bottrell always acknowledged the debt he owed to these men, he said of them “they have intelligence, mother-wit and memories and I am able to garner from the ample harvest.”

Only a few years later and most of the stories which make up the volumes of not only Bottrell’s own work but also a large part of the two volumes produced by Robert Hunt would have been lost. Much of his work was utilised by Hunt in his two-volume Popular Romances of the West of England, first printed in 1865, of which upward of 50 “drolls” were communicated to him by Bottrell, a help which is not as handsomely acknowledged as it deserved. The then editor of the “Cornish Telegraph” suggested to Bottrell that he should write and publish the stories himself.

William Bottrell’s first appearance in print was in the columns of The Cornish Telegraph of 1867, where he gave an account of “The Penzance of our Grandfathers.” Many articles of his appeared subsequently in this paper and in One and All, a particularly interesting periodical, and in 1873 he contributed to the Reliquary. Of all these various articles the best were gathered together and published in the three volumes. Life began to improve for William and he moved into St Ives. Before the completion of his last volume, however, he suffered a stroke and was paralysed. After six weeks of suffering he died at 10am on the 27 August, 1881 at Dove St., St. Ives and was buried in the churchyard he loved the most, St. Levan amongst his ancestors.

William Bottrell had become:

“A sun-dial pillar left alone,
On which no dial meets the eye;
A black mill-wheel with grass o’ergrown,
That hears no water trickle by:
Dark, palsied mass of severed rock,
Deaf, blind and sear to sun and rain;
A shatter’d gravestone’s time worn block
That only shows an honoured name.”

Anon.