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Fairies and the Fifth Kingdom
Foraging Through Folklore Garden
Ella Leith Oh, I never saw fairies but I had a certain belief in fairies, and what gave me this belief in fairies— have you ever seen a fairy ring? It’s the most perfect thing. Round, round with the little paddock steels and the one in the centre’s for the fiddler. And you see these in certain places. I’ve seen them at the ben and the— and other places. And it’s a perfect ring, a circle. It’s a strange thing. [And it’s for a dance, is that it?] It’s where they dance, this is the track they leave and the tiny wee paddock steels and this one, a bigger one in the centre of the ring, this is for the fiddler. That was the belief. [Who’s the fiddler supposed to be?] Remember the d— oh, it wouldha been the Deil! Helen Galloway, 1972 These are the words of Helen Galloway (19031987), from Port Logan, Wigtownshire. Helen was being interviewed by her nephew, folklorist John MacQueen, and spoke of the rings of toadstools (puddock or paddock steels in Scots) left behind in places where the fairies go dancing. It’s the most perfect thing, she says, but also a strange thing, and something a little bit dangerous— after all, the fiddler might just be the Devil. Certainly, it is something uncanny. This sense of unease may be attributable only to the appearance of a circle: stone circles and perfectly round hillocks are also often associated with fairies, and if you join a ring of dancing fairies you might never be able to step out again. But I think it’s the fungus as well. There’s something strange and a little bit dangerous about fungus. The association of fungi with fairies is often seen as a particularly Irish or Gaelic folk belief. Asked whether fairy rings got their name because of the dances of the fairies, Helen’s sister Grace responds dismissively, “Not at all, nothing like that, no— we werena Heilan [Highland] or Irish!”
However, there has long been a link in the popular imagination between toadstools, mushrooms, all manner of fungi, and the supernatural. Frank Dugan’s article ‘Fungi, folkways and fairy tales’ provides an accessible overview of how various fungal forms have appeared, incidentally or integrally, in literature, folklore and folk practices across Europe. He contrasts the traditions of Northern and Western Europe, where fungi tend to be associated with witches, malign supernatural creatures, and ‘lower’ animals like toads, snails and snakes, with the Eastern European tendency to celebrate fungus and associate it with magical powers and sexual prowess. In both cases, however, anything fungal is almost invariably linked to something arcane. Even in strongly pro-mushroom cultures they retain an ‘atmosphere of mystery and taboo’ (Toporov 1985, quoted by Dugan 2008). Perhaps this ambivalence reflects our discomfort with the unknowable. Mycologists aside, most of us would probably struggle to put our finger on exactly what a mushroom is. It seems to sit somewhere between categories: it is not quite a plant, but not quite not a plant— not an animal, either (despite the folklorists’ classification of the Russian ‘The War of the Mushrooms’ as an Animal Tale), but fungi are ‘more closely related to animals’ than plants, according to mycologist Bryce Kendrick. Fungi are also organisms of extremes: some mushrooms are edible (and delicious) and even healing; others (often termed ‘toadstools’) are deadly poisonous— and it is not always easy to differentiate between the two. As well as potentially causing death, fungi feed on it, sprouting from decaying wood and foliage. They are both intrinsically earthy and somewhat unearthly— and some even have the hallucinogenic power to help you cross the threshold into another world. Only since 1969, when Robert Whittaker proposed that fungi belong in a class entirely their own, have they been recognised as belonging to a distinct biological kingdom: the fifth kingdom, a territory apart from the kingdoms
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