Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/248

236 deid men" with the fairies—James V. and Thomas the Rymour, whose amour with the fairy queen was the subject of a mediaeval poem, as well as the well-known ballad, and who has been associated with elfland in Scottish tradition ever since. The doings at the fairy revels resembled these at the witch Sabbat: they are described graphically, and the language is coarse, though the meaning is not obscure. Andro added some details of a curious eschatology, gained from Christsonday, who showed him the fires of hell. Christsonday—a name otherwise unexplained, occurs in the evidence of other Aberdeenshire witches, who spoke of his dancing with them and wdth the fairy queen. Fairy revels were thus being transmuted into the witch Sabbat; we are in elfland, but the cloven hoof is showing itself.

A series of trials which took place in Orkney in 1615-1616 shows the same mingling of beliefs. Katherine Carey, a healer, admitted that at sundown among the hills, "ane great number of fairie men mett her," among them "a maister man," perhaps the devil. Another woman, Janet Drever, found guilty of sorcery, had caused the removal of a child into a fairy hill and had conversation with the fairies for twenty-five years. A third, Katherine Jonesdochter, who was able to transfer disease, had seen the trow's come out of their hills and knew too much about them. Elspeth Reoch had been taught her craft by a man in green tartan who appeared to her wath another man in black. The latter, who called himself "a farie man," was the spirit of a dead relative, neither dead nor living, and doomed for ever to go betwixt the heaven and the earth, i.e. he was with the fairies. Her sapient judges regarded him as the devil. A fifth woman, Isobel Sinclair, was under fairy control, as a result of which she had second sight.