Archaic England : $b an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, place-names, and faerie superstitionsBayley, Harold
History
Archaic England : $b an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, place-names, and faerie superstitions
Bayley, Harold
Archaeology; England -- Antiquities
In the North of England Puck seems more generally Peg, whence the fairy
of the river Ribble was known as Peg O'Nell, and the nymph of the Tees,
as Peg Powler.[257] Peg--a synonym for Margaret--is generally
interpreted as having meant pearl.
The word _puck_ or _peg_, which varies in different parts of the country
into pug, pouke, pwcca, poake, pucke, puckle, and phooka, becomes
elsewhere bucca, bug, bogie, bogle, boggart, buggaboo, and bugbear.
According to all accounts the Pucks, like the Buccas, were divided into
two classes, "good and bad," and it was only the clergy who maintained
that "one and the same malignant fiend meddled in both". As Scott
rightly observes: "Before leaving the subject of fairy superstition in
England we may remark that it was of a more playful and gentle, less
wild and necromantic character, than that received among the sister
people. The amusements of the southern fairies were light and sportive;
their resentments were satisfied with pinching or scratching the objects
of their displeasure; their peculiar sense of cleanliness rewarded the
housewives with the silver token in the shoe; their nicety was extreme
concerning any coarseness or negligence which could offend their
delicacy; and I cannot discern, except, perhaps, from the insinuations
of some scrupulous divines, that they were vassals to or in close
alliance with the infernals, as there is too much reason to believe was
the case with their North British sisterhood."[258]
The elemental Bog is the Slavonic term for God,[259] and when the early
translators of the Bible rendered "terror by night" as "bugs by night"
they probably had spooks or bogies in their mind. In Etruria as in Egypt
the bug or maybug was revered as the symbol of the Creator Bog, because
the Egyptian beetle has a curious habit of creating small pellets or
balls of mud. In Welsh _bogel_ means the _navel_, also _centre of a
wheel_, and hence Margaret or Peggy may be equated with the nave or peg
of the white-rayed Marguerite or _Day's Eye_.[260]
It must constantly be borne in mind that the ancients never stereotyped
their Ideal, hence there was invariably a vagueness about the form and
features of prehistoric Joy, and Shakespeare's reference to Dan Cupid as
a "senior-junior, giant-dwarf," may be equally applied to every Elf and
Pixy. It is unquestionable that in England as in Scandinavia and Germany
"giants and dwarfs were originally identical phenomenon".[261]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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