As Homer fables of the dead, their speech is a kind of whistling like the cry of bats—another indication of the…
- Date of account
- Written 1691; later edited edition
- Source
- The secret commonwealth of elves, fauns & fairies
- Reference
- The secret commonwealth of elves, fauns & fairies · selected passage 15
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English/Scots historical text
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
As Homer fables of the dead, their speech is a kind of whistling like the cry of bats—another indication of the pre-Christian Hades.[6] They have feasts and burials; and Pashley, in his Travels in Crete, tells the well-known Border story of a man who fired on a Fairy bridal, and heard a voice cry, “Ye have slain the bo…
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyAs Homer fables of the dead, their speech is a kind of whistling like the cry of bats—another indication of the pre-Christian Hades.[6] They have feasts and burials; and Pashley, in his _Travels in Crete_, tells the well-known Border story of a man who fired on a Fairy bridal, and heard a voice cry, “Ye have slain the bonny bridegroom.” It is, of course, to be noted that the modern Greek superstition of the Nereids, who carry off mortal girls to dance with them till they pine away, answers to some of our Fairy legends, while it will hardly be maintained that the Nereids are a memory of pre-historic Finns. “Antic corybantic jollity” is a note of Nereids, as well as of the _Sleagh Maith_. “The Inconvenience of their _succubi_,” the Fairy girls who make love to young men, is well known in the Breton ballad, _Le Sieur Nan_. The same superstition is current among the Kanekas of New Caledonia. My cousin, Mr. Atkinson, was visited by a young Kaneka, who twice or thrice returned to take leave of him with much emotion. When Mr. Atkinson asked what was the matter, the lad said that he had just met, as he thought, the girl of his heart in the forest.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
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