Date:
Author: Brandi Goddard, Assistant Lecturer, History of Art, Design & Visual Culture, University of Alberta
Original article: https://theconversation.com/we-knew-she-was-a-fairy-when-we-saw-her-how-irish-folklore-around-spinning-instructed-women-artisans-241432
Today, while we hear a fair bit from wellness experts and commentators about the importance of boundaries — whether related to “doomscrolling” with our phones, overwork or relationships — it’s not always easy to heed this advice for our own good.
My research into Irish folklore and traditional women’s craft reminds me that in this context, instead of advice coming through news stories, medical journals or TikTok gurus, people often received warnings through oral folklore and storytelling.
In many cases, these folklore tales contain elements of the supernatural or otherworldly encounters intended to scare or unsettle someone towards good patterns of behaviour — as part of a larger theme of passing down embodied knowledge relevant to specific places.
Here’s a look at Irish folklore surrounding women’s craft in time for Halloween, a time of the year when boundaries between worlds are said to be thin.
Forms of knowledge
Oral histories allow a glimpse into the lives, histories and forms of knowledge of people who are often not reflected within larger national histories that have privileged written records.
As part of my doctoral research on female-led craft advocacy organizations in Ireland, I worked closely with the Irish National Folklore Archive’s Schools’ Collection folklore archive, which includes digitized notebooks containing folkloric tales collected by school-aged children from their families and neighbours.
This folklore and oral history is a fascinating repository of traditional and alternative forms of knowledge, much of which deals with many of the same issues we are facing today — such as how to structure and utilize the limited number of hours in a day.
(The Photographic Collection/B063.29.00014/by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection)
‘It was not right to wait up late spinning’
In 1930s rural Ireland, 60-year old Kate Corcoran provided an oral recollection of a folktale commonly told as a warning to women not to overexert themselves by sitting up too late at night at the spinning wheel.
“Once upon a time there lived an old woman who used to be up very late spinning. One night after all the rest had gone to sleep she remained at the wheel. When she had finished she looked up to the fire and saw an old woman spinning in the corner. She saw another old hag under the bed spinning. She turned around and saw another at the backdoor. She knew at once that they were fairies and that it was not right to wait up late spinning. She put out the light and went to bed. From that time forth she never waited up late spinning.”
In Irish folklore, fairies — or the Good People (na Daoine Maithe), as they prefer to be called — are mischievous beings that can intervene into the lives of humans, and not always for the better.
Despite the helpful nature of the fairies, this folktale is a warning for the spinner to ensure she is getting enough rest at the end of a long day. Another version of the same tale takes things startling further: in this case, a dozen fairies enter the home of the spinner, and when she fails to offer an acceptable beverage to her guests, they threaten to make water from her blood.
Working sheep fleeces
Irish folklore is filled with these sorts of hidden daily frameworks that set the pace of daily life, especially in rural areas. An alternative example documented in a craft survey of Ireland, in about 1950, is the assertion that one should not spin sheep fleece into yarn until all the animals are asleep, hinting towards the labour expected of a woman on a farm that involved caring for children, maintaining the household, gathering eggs, milking cows and producing many of the textiles to be utilized in the home.
As I argue in my research, this form of thinking intimates a form of reciprocity between humans and animals that takes into considerations craft production within wider ecological systems.
(Daniel Sandvik/Unsplash)
Spinning yarn was work, but it was a form of work that occurred at the end of the day, when all other tasks were complete. Pragmatically, as well, waiting until later in the evening to work the fleeces ensured that the cottage’s central hearth would have had ample time to radiate heat and warm the natural oils of the fleece, making it easier to work.
This sort of knowledge is often forgotten and lost, but forms an essential part of a community’s intangible cultural heritage. The perpetuation of oral folklore ensures this priceless knowledge gets passed down.
Read more:
Peatland folklore lent us will-o-the-wisps and jack-o-lanterns, and can inspire climate action today
Wise women’s knowledge
The focus of my doctoral research was on the Irish Homespun Society (IHS), a female-led craft advocacy group which set out to “keep women spinning in their homes” as the motto went. Muriel Gahan, the leading figure of the IHS, left urban Dublin and travelled into the Irish hinterlands in the 1930s and 1940s to meet and support rural women who were still producing cottage-made textiles on farms.
Gahan’s recollections of her time in the western county of Mayo also provide another glimpse of the discursive connection with the fairy realm that permeates these records. As she noted in her diary upon meeting a rural spinner:
“We knew she was a fairy when we saw her. Unlike other women, she was dressed in a shawl and a scarlet petticoat with a white cloth tied round her head. Her face, rosy red, was seamed with a thousand wrinkles, and smiles ran out of her eyes and round her mouth. When she spoke, her deep voice echoed down the valley.”
(The Photographic Collection, B063.29.00012/by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection), CC BY-NC
Worlds of tradition and modernity
The time period during which Gahan was supporting rural female textile workers was also the moment when they were being increasingly pushed from paid work through the industrialization and mechanization of textile work in small factories.
Scholars such as political theorist Silvia Federici and historian Joanna Bourke have explored the ways in which women’s labour opportunities have been “enclosed” — subsumed under other ownership and control — in the shift towards industrial capitalist modes of production.
In Ireland, one form that this took was the emergence of small spinning factories which were owned and operated primarily by men, while women stayed on the farms to care for the children and animals.
The “fairy” encountered by Gahan was a woman caught between the worlds of tradition and modernity, and the support offered by the Irish Homespun Society was intended to preserve and protect an endangered craft tradition and its skilled artisans.
Slowing down with story
Today, especially post-COVID-19, as in times before, women are the subject of admonitions or warnings to set boundaries or manage time as to not become overwhelmed under the mountain of daily tasks.
In our busy, hyper-connected lives, perhaps a bit of attention to spinning folklore could do us all a bit of good, even if it is only to force us to slow down with a nice warm drink and a selection of Irish legends and stories this Halloween season.