Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/200

 184 Collectanea.

Strange to say, they had no knee or ankle-joints, and their feet grew to the rear instead of to the front.

" There appears also to be a kind of Banshee in Chitral, which wails round the walls of Shoghrot Fort, a week or so before the death of the Melitar or King of Chitral, and differs from the Irish variety in not being [ ? haunting] a residence of the doomed man."

11. — Iti the Faroe Islands.

[The following notes are from the pen of an American lady who has been spending the last ten or twelve months in one of the most northerly and inaccessible of the Faroe Islands. The allusion in the opening sentence is to her correspondent's previous reference to the Rev. J. G. Campbell's Superstitions of the High- lands and Islands of Scot/and, p. 191, where he classes "the Niagruisar of the Faroe Islands " with the Scottish Brownie, as a " drudging goblin." — Ed.]

I think your Niagruisar must be the same word as our Ni3a- grisur, but the Faroe creature is not a Brownie. A Brownie is a Vattrir ; he lives about houses and cow-stalls, and comes out in the twilight and sits under the eaves, and careful housewives when they throw out the dishwater call out a warning to him and his fellows. Like the Brownie he, if well-treated, will perform little friendly services for the family.

A Ni^agrisur is the spirit of an unbaptised child (generally a murdered illegitimate child), that takes the shape of a round- bodied creature that often goes on all-fours and is as a rule malignant, lying in wait for people in the dark and doing them harm, though just how I have not learned. Sometimes they haunt a pastor, begging to be given a name, and to be buried in sanctified earth ; a former pastor here was haunted in that way. Long ago, a servant-girl here had an illegitimate child, killed it, and buried it in a stocking belonging to a serving-man called Pisli (he was not the father). Some time afterwards she married Pisli ; and the bride's dance was under way in the big kitchen