Look, I don’t believe in God, but I will not disrespect the Good Gentlemen of the Hills. That’s just common sense.
Between this and the Icelanders with their elves I do not understand what is going on above the 50th parallel.
My general rule of thumb: you don’t have to believe in everything, but don’t fuck with it, just in case.
^^^ that part
This is truer than true. Especially the Irish part.
Let me tell you what I know about this after living here for nearly thirty years.
This is a modern European country, the home of hot net startups, of Internet giants and (in some places, some very few places) the fastest broadband on Earth. People here live in this century, HARD.
Yet they get nervous about walking up that one hill close to their home after dark, because, you know… stuff happens there.
I know this because Peter and I live next to One Of Those Hills. There are people in our locality who wouldn’t go up our tiny country road on a dark night for love or money. What they make of us being so close to it for so long without harm coming to us, I have no idea. For all I know, it’s ascribed to us being writers (i.e. sort of bards) or mad folk (also in some kind of positive relationship with the Dangerous Side: don’t forget that the root word of “silly”, which used to be English for “crazy”, is the Old English _saelig_, “holy”…) or otherwise somehow weirdly exempt.
And you know what? I’m never going to ask. Because one does not discuss such things. Lest people from outside get the wrong idea about us, about normal modern Irish people living in normal modern Ireland.
You hear about this in whispers, though, in the pub, late at night, when all the tourists have gone to bed or gone away and no one but the locals are around. That hill. That curve in the road. That cold feeling you get in that one place. There is a deep understanding that there is something here older than us, that doesn’t care about us particularly, that (when we obtrude on it) is as willing to kick us in the slats as to let us pass by unmolested.
So you greet the magpies, singly or otherwise. You let stones in the middle of fields be. You apologize to the hawthorn bush when you’re pruning it. If you see something peculiar that cannot be otherwise explained, you are polite to it and pass onward about your business without further comment. And you don’t go on about it afterwards. Because it’s… unwise. Not that you personally know any examples of people who’ve screwed it up, of course. But you don’t meddle, and you learn when to look the other way, not to see, not to hear. Some things have just been here (for various values of “here” and various values of “been”) a lot longer than you have, and will be here still after you’re gone. That’s the way of it. When you hear the story about the idiots who for a prank chainsawed the centuries-old fairy tree a couple of counties over, you say – if asked by a neighbor – exactly what they’re probably thinking: “Poor fuckers. They’re doomed.” And if asked by anybody else you shake your head and say something anodyne about Kids These Days. (While thinking DOOMED all over again, because there are some particularly self-destructive ways to increase entropy.)
Meanwhile, in Iceland: the county council that carelessly knocked a known elf rock off a hillside when repairing a road has had to go dig the rock up from where it got buried during construction, because that road has had the most impossible damn stuff happen to it since that you ever heard of. Doubtless some nice person (maybe they’ll send out for the Priest of Thor or some such) will come along and do a little propitiatory sacrifice of some kind to the alfar, belatedly begging their pardon for the inconvenience.
They’re building the alfar a new temple, too.
Atlantic islands. Faerie: we haz it.
So I was at Torc Waterfall and there’s a really steep patch and it was wet and slick and handrails are for someplace else and okay, I’m a weirdo, I apologize to trees when I have to grab them for stability. (This is probably a gardener thing. I also talk to bugs and cuss at weeds and inform flowers that I am just gonna put them here, hope they like it, here’s some water for you…)
So anyway, I’m slithering down this muddy patch going from handhold to handhold: “‘Scuse me. Pardon. Pardon. Just gonna grab you here. Sorry. ‘Scuse me–”
And I reached out and grabbed a particular tree branch and I do not know my European trees so maybe this is a Thing That Happens but the damn thing buzzed in my hand. Like I’d grabbed the handle of the Dremel or an electric toothbrush. It wasn’t a zap, like static electricity, it was a vibrating buzz like the twig was full of bees, but we’re talking about a twig not quite as thick around as my thumb (and I have small thumbs) so the bees would have to be lined up politely single file.
Obviously I dropped it like I’d been burned because that is NOT a thing you feel when you grab a twig.
Now, I get pretty sappy about plants, but I’m fundamentally pretty rational. I am also very polite when startled. So I said “I’m sorry, you clearly didn’t want to be grabbed. That was wrong of me,” and went on to the next tree (which didn’t care) and then once I was off the skiddy muddy bit of the trail I thought What the hell just happened?
I mean, undoubtedly it was a bug or some weird trick of vibration. I know that. Trees do not shiver irritably when tourists grab them.
Still. Kinda glad I apologized, anyway. Just in case.
This is the kind of content I’m here for!
I’d love to hear more stories about this (but at the same time I know there are places where it is Not Wise to discuss these sorts of things). But the part of me that collects stories, the part that made charts of the same folkloric characters occurring simultaneously on completely different continents when I was 12 or 13, that part of me wants to know.
Thank goodness 12 year old me never went to these places. Considering that when I was young and my grandmother told me that swirling circles of leaves were leprechauns, I’d run up and try to catch them, there’s no telling what kind of trouble I’d have gotten into!
Mooncustafer 