Ghoulies and Ghosties and Long-Legged Beasties Quiz

Answer: The Gwragedd Annwn

The Gwragedd Annwn (pronounced Goo-rageth Anoon) are water fairies inhabiting lakes in Wales. They are wonderfully beautiful and Welsh folklore is full of stories about Gwragged Annwn who have taken mortal men as their husbands. There's always a catch, though, when mortals and fairies intermarry. Any thoughtless cruelty or indifference visited on the fairy wife by the mortal husband will result in her leaving him and returning to the depths of the lake from which she came.

In other Welsh stories, the Gwragedd Annwn inhabit beautiful islands that are only visible on New Year's Day and are only accessible via a small door in a rock on the mainland. Any mortal man lucky enough to find the door will be able to visit the island and find himself feted and fed with delicacies by the beautiful inhabitants.

Unfortunately, the poor fellows always wake up on the shore of the lake on the day after New Year's Day and can never find their way back to the enchanted island. In these stories, the unhappy mortals usually waste away with longing.

Answer: Spriggans

Spriggans were malicious little creatures, well-known for their criminal behaviour. They were known to blight crops, destroy fields of corn, rob the homes of humans and kidnap human babies (leaving an ugly little Spriggan in the baby's cradle). They had the ability to puff themselves up to enormous size, and they must have been a terrifying sight.

They were also footpads, waylaying travellers and robbing them. Spriggans were, however, trusted by their fellow faeryfolk to guard the faery gold buried in the hills of Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall.

Answer: Iron

You won't get much protection from a rose, a silver coin or a new-laid egg, but if you carry an iron nail in your pocket or have iron hinges on the door of your house, you'll be safe. Other protective devices are bells, a crucifix or cross and if you mark the cake you just baked with a cross that will prevent the mean little people from dancing on it. You can also use prayer, mould from a churchyard, or a daisy chain. Sprinkling flax seed on the floor of your house, or drawing a pig's head or a pentagram on the door of your house will work, too. St. John's Wort is also very effective and it's available at your local herbalist's.

In Scotland, a red thread will do the trick, and you can protect your horse by hanging a stone with a hole in it on the beast's bridle. If the fairies steal your child, gather some thorns, burn them on top of the fairy hill and the kidnappers will be forced to release your youngsters.

Answer: Finvarra

Finvarra is an interesting character. His main hobbies are chess and womanizing. If you ever play chess against him, you're bound to lose - not just the game, but everything you own and everything you prize most. If you have a very beautiful wife, my advice is to avoid Ireland or Finvarra will be sure to carry her off.

O'Donaghue is a much nicer fairy king than Finverra. He lives in a lake and is known to do great favours for human beings, like endowing them with great wealth.

Oisin is not a fairy or a sprite of any sort. He was an Irish prince of legend who was allowed to visit and spend time in the fairy land of Tir Nan Og (which is old Irish for 'The Land of the Young').

Manannen was the son of Ler, the Irish God of the Sea.

Answer: Water fairies

The Selkies are beautiful water sprites who assume the shape of seals and in this guise they will venture onto the sands of the islands of Orkney and Shetland. There they will doff their seal skins and dance. Should a mortal man find a discarded seal skin and hide it, the Selkie who owns it will be forced to marry him. Evidently, Selkies make very good wives but they never cease longing for their old home. If it happens that the Selkie wife finds her old seal skin where her human husband has hidden it, she will leave him and their children and disappear into the sea, never to be seen again.

Answer: Knockers

Tin mining was once an economic mainstay in Cornwall, and the Knockers were elfin creatures who lived in the mines. By and large, they were not malicious even though they were reputed to be as ugly as sin with large hooked noses, mouths like slits from ear to pointed ear, unkempt hair and spindly arms and legs. They were mischievous and delighted in making grotesque faces at the miners they came across. The miners tended to treat them with great respect and more often than not would share their food and drink with the little fellows, because if one was kind to the Knockers one was apt to be led by them to the richest veins of ore. If, however, any miner was abusive to the Knockers, bad luck would dog him both above and below ground.

According to legend, the Knockers are the souls of those who crucified Christ and are confined to the mines as punishment. On high and holy days of the Christian faith, the Knockers can be heard singing carols and hymns.

Answer: Robin Goodfellow

Puck or Robin Goodfellow is a mischievous sprite, and etymologists are uncertain as to whether or not the name Puck is derived from the old Norse Puki (a little devil) or the Celtic pwca (Welsh) or puca (Irish), both pronounced Pooka.

In his Celtic/English persona, Puck was a sprite who could be very good to those whom he liked, and very malicious toward those who did not treat him with respect. For people he liked, Puck would do household chores like making butter, doing needlework, mending shoes. However, those whom Puck disliked would get very different treatment. He would sour the milk as it hit the pail, pelt the unfortunate people with stones, and even set their thatched roofs on fire.

Puck has long been celebrated in song and story. When I was a child, one of my favourite books was Rudyard Kipling's 'Puck of Pook's Hill', in which Puck teaches Dan and Una about English history.

Answer: Pay him

Remember the Grimm's fairy tale about 'The Elves and the Shoemaker'? Offering payment of any kind to the helpful house brownie is an insult and will cause him to pack up and leave you. Since the house brownie delights in doing every imaginable household chore, were I lucky enough to have one at my house, I'd go out of my way to make sure that I never paid him in either cash or kind!

Answer: Christianity

All our legends of fairies, sprites, goblins, trolls and the rest spring from our pagan past. With the arrival of Christianity in Europe, belief in faeryfolk began to diminish, which caused them, too, to dwindle in size.

Answer: Vampires

The first ballet I ever saw was 'Giselle' with Alicia Markova dancing the title role (quite a feat for a ballerina who was then in her forties, because the role requires great expertise and technical excellence). That experience prompted in me a life-long love of classical ballet. Giselle is a young peasant girl who falls in love with a young huntsman who tells her his name is Loys.

When she finds out that not only is he a nobleman named Albrecht but that he is about to marry Bathilde, the daughter of the Duke, she dies of a broken heart and becomes a wili. Wilis are vampiric ghosts of young women who died either of unrequited love or on the eve or day of their wedding.

It's a very sad ballet based on a poem by Heinrich Hesse, which he based on an old Slavic folk tale.