It is not wise to upset some things. Apple carts,
for one. Or the Kindly Ones. That’s why we call them the Kindly Ones –
so as not to upset them. The Eumenides, that’s Greek for the Kindly Ones, were
really the Furies, the Erinyes, but you don’t go around calling them that, not
if you know what’s good for you. No, you’re respectful, you give them a nice
euphemistic name and you hope that they don’t notice you. Bad things happen to
you if you bring yourself to their attention, so speak softly and with a little
respect.
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| The Erinyes |
The same is true of the Little People, or the Good Folk. You don’t go
calling them by their proper name either because they just might hear you. And
then they might come looking for you, just to see who is talking about them.
And you don’t want that to happen, not if you can avoid it. Puck is another
one. Don’t speak his name aloud. Call him something else. Call him Robin
Goodfellow instead. Best be on the safe side. Just to be sure. Robin Goodfellow
has a long pedigree – he may even be the Green Man, and in Reginald Scot’s A
Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584) he appears amongst a great list of menacing
things that our ‘mother’s maids’ have named to scare us: -
“… bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changlings. Incubus, Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell waine, the fierdrake, the puckle, Tom thombe, hob gobblin, Tom tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes.”
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| William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream - 1600 |
Shakespeare used Scot’s book as a
reference for his plays, it’s one of the places from which he got the model for
the witches in Macbeth (… or The Scottish Play, if you prefer to
play it safe), and Puck appears in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600),
where he gets up to his merry pranks along with the other Little People. Robin
Goodfellow had been around in print long before Shakespeare wrote about him,
and he almost certainly had read a pamphlet entitled Robin Goodfellow, his
Mad Prankes and Merry Jests, the earliest existing version of which we have
now have dating from 1628 but earlier versions existed to at least 1588.
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| Robin Goodfellow - His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests - 1628 |
A
woodcut illustration on the pamphlet depicts a goatish satyr, holding a candle
and a broomstick and with a hunting horn hanging about his neck and surrounded
by tiny, black, dancing figures, with a black cat, a jug and Tom Thumb playing
his pipe set nearby. He looks very like someone else who we don’t speak of,
just in case he appears. In the verses and tales of the pamphlet are the said
mischievous pranks and jests which Robin performs; blowing out candles, hiding
property, pinching people, knotting their hair, souring milk and so forth. None
of it is malicious and all are accompanied with Robin’s characteristic “Ho,
ho, hoh,” laughter (there is a Norfolk proverb, ‘To laugh like Robin
Goodfellow’). Indeed, if someone pleases Robin, he will do their drudgery
for them, cleaning hearths, sweeping chimneys, sweeping floors, leaving money
in their shoes, and so on; as befits his goatlike appearance, he is capricious.
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| Richard Dadd - Puck |
The name Robin Goodfellow also gives us many variations – Robin, a diminutive
of Robert, supplies us with hob, as in hob-goblin, hob-thrush and hob-in-the-lantern.
There are the Yorkshire Dobbies, revived by J K Rowling as house-elves, the
Dobbins of the Midlands and there are the Lancashire Hobbils, transformed by
Tolkien, who was at Stonyhurst, into the Hobbits. Robin Redbreast, of course,
and Robin Goodfellow is one step away from Robin Hood, in turn one step
away from the Green Man. Fellow may derive from the Greek Φαλλος through
the French fallot, a lantern or candle affixed to a pole, (as seen in
the woodcut of Puck), with connections to phallus and thyrsus, and maybe
indicating the bright and shining humour of a wit like Robin.
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| Rudyard Kipling - Puck of Pook's Hill - 1906 |
Perhaps the most
pleasing incarnation of Robin Goodfellow appears in Puck of Pook’s Hill
(1906) by Rudyard Kipling. Two children, Dan and Una, are acting out A
Midsummer Night’s Dream in a meadow when Puck himself appears, telling them
that he is ‘the oldest Old Thing in England’, and begins to relate tales
of Old England, from Weland the Smith’s sword, a soldier on Hadrian’s Wall, a
Norman who took part in the Conquest and so forth, culminating with the signing
of Magna Carta.
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| Rudyard Kipling - Rewards and Fairies - 1910 |
Kipling returned to Puck four years later, in Rewards and
Fairies, which continues the story of Dan and Una one year on, when they
meet Puck again and he tells them more stories of Old England, this time with a
more supernatural slant. It was in Rewards and Fairies that Kipling
first introduced the poem If- which has been voted the most popular poem
in English. If you haven’t read Puck of Pook’s Hill or Rewards and
Fairies, you really should. They are a fantastic recreation of a lost time.
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| Puck, Dan and Una - Kipling - Puck of Pook's Hill |
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