Spriggan

Also Known As: from the Cornish spyrysyon, “spirits”, plural of spyrys; sometimes glossed in the older Cornish collections simply as “sprites”
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Celtic Mythology, English Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Small, ugly guardian spirits that can swell to almost giant size, raise sudden storms and whirlwinds, and carry off goods, cattle and children.
Role in Mythos: They keep the buried treasure of the old hill castles, cairns and barrows of west Cornwall, and punish anyone who digs for it.
Relation to Humans: They are the tribe Cornish country people blamed when a house was robbed, a building fell down, a beast went missing or a baby was swapped in its cradle. They can be bargained with, frightened off by a turned garment, and driven to give back what they took, but they hold a grudge and repay it in small, lasting ways.

The pick struck something hollow well past midnight, and the man digging on Trencrom Hill knew he had the crock’s lid under his blade. Then the moon went out. Cloud came over the cairns so quickly that the granite went from silver to nothing at all, the wind stood up and roared among the rocks, and the thunder began to come down on the heels of the lightning. In one of those white flashes he saw them: small shapes working out of every crack in the stone, more than he could count, and every one of them growing. By the time he had the sense to run they stood almost at giant height, looking, as he said afterwards, as ugly as if they would eat him. He got home. He also took to his bed, and did not work again for a long time.

That is a spriggan doing precisely what a spriggan exists to do. Robert Hunt printed the story in his west-of-England collection in 1865, and William Bottrell, gathering tales in the same parishes a few years later, had it in a slightly different key: a tinner of Lelant who dreamt three nights running of a crock of gold buried between the rocks inside the castle on Trecroben hill, went up on the first clear moonlit night, dug for two or three hours, and reached a flat stone that rang hollow when he scraped round its edges. The weather turned black. The wind went through the cairns. He looked up from the hole he had made for his hands and saw hundreds of ugly spriggans coming out of the rocks and closing in. He dropped the pick and ran. When he came back to the castle later, the pit had been filled in and the turf laid neatly back over it, and he never dug there again.

Bottrell explained the name in one plain line: another kind, called spriggans, which simply means sprites, believed to guard treasures buried in cliff and hill castles. The Cornish word behind it is spyrysyon, spirits, which is why the middle of the word is soft and the thing is a spridgen rather than a spriggen. That is nearly the whole of what can be said with confidence about where they came from. The rest is what nineteenth-century Cornwall said about them, which is a good deal more colourful.

Hunt sorted the fairy population of Cornwall into five tribes, and gave the spriggans a class of their own: the ghosts of the old giants, keeping a giant’s strength in a small body, found only about the cairns, the coits and cromlechs, the barrows and the standing stones that it is unlucky for mortals to meddle with. They were a thievish tribe. If a house was robbed, a child taken, cattle driven off or a building brought down, the spriggans had done it. They raised whirlwinds to bewilder travellers on the moors and sent weather to spoil the corn. The English Dialect Dictionary, recording the word in 1905, reached for the Scandinavian trolls as the nearest comparison, and Katharine Briggs, reading Hunt and Bottrell together, called them fairy bodyguards, which fits the way they appear: never courting anybody, always turning up in a swarm around something that is being taken.

The tidy list is Hunt’s, not Cornwall’s. Henry Jenner, writing from Hayle in 1910 for Evans-Wentz’s survey of Celtic fairy belief, called the classification simply incorrect, and said the Small People, the spriggans and the piskies could not really be told apart, the spriggan being only one aspect of the pisky. So the spriggan is real Cornish speech and real Cornish story, but the neat species boundary around it was drawn by a collector with a taste for order.

What they are most feared for is the cradle. In Bottrell’s telling, Jenny Trayer of Brea Vean, at the foot of Chapel Carn Brea, fed her baby, banked the fire, turned down the brandis, laid the fire-hook and furze-prong across the hearth for luck, and went off to help cut the neck at harvest. She came home in the dark to an overturned cradle, straw and rags on the floor, and no child. She found it at last in the wood-corner among turves and ferns and furze, asleep. By daylight there was something wrong with it. It fed constantly and screamed like a bull when it was not feeding, and all that winter the more it ate the leaner it got. The neighbours knew what that meant, and told her to take it to the Chapel Well in May.

Three Wednesdays running she carried it on her shoulder over the moor to Chapel Uny, dipped it three times from west to east, and dragged it three times round the well against the sun. The third Wednesday was wet and the creature enjoyed the storm, crowing like a cock when the wind was loudest. Coming round the hill by the big rocks she heard a shrill voice out of the empty air call, “Tredrill! Tredrill! Thy wife and children greet thee well,” and the thing riding her shoulder answered in the same shrill voice that it cared nothing for wife or child while it rode on Dowdy’s back to the Chapel Well and got its fill. She threw it on the ground. Then she picked it up, because she had to, and ran.

The remedy the old women of Brea gave her was ugly, and the story does not soften it: beat the changeling on the ashes pile with a broom, lay it naked under a church-way stile, and keep out of sight and hearing until the turn of night. She did it. At daybreak her own child was lying on dry straw at the stile, washed clean and wrapped in a piece of old flowered chintz of the kind that goes missing off furze bushes when it is put out to dry. He was never quite right afterwards. He wandered, he took fits, he was given orphan lambs to rear and reared them well, and at about thirty he was found lying among his sheep on the moor between the Chapel Hill and Bartinné with his arm under his head, apparently asleep, and dead.

They can be beaten, though, and the way to do it is unglamorous. A miner’s widow living alone at Chyanwheal, under the hill where Knill’s monument now stands, had the Trencrom spriggans in her cottage most nights to divide their plunder while she lay still and pretended to sleep, and they always left a small coin on the table by her bed for the courtesy. One night the haul was gold and jewellery, heaped and glittering on her floor, and the little thieves fell out over the shares. Under the bedclothes she managed to turn her shift inside out, which is a charm that does not fail, then jumped up, put her hand flat on a gold cup and told them they should not have one of them. They scattered. The last and boldest of them swept his hand across her one garment on the way out. She moved to St Ives on the proceeds and lived like a gentlewoman, and every time she wore that shift again the pain was past bearing. The doctors had long names for it. The wise women knew.

The pattern under all of it is consistent. Their strength is the strength of the dead giants and it arrives as sheer size, coming on fast, with weather in front of it. They are bound to the places where old things are buried, and outside those places they do very little. They do not kill anyone in the record; they frighten, they steal, they swap, and they punish. Iron, holy water and a turned garment work against them the way they work against any of the Cornish tribes, and the rituals that recover a stolen child are rough, specific and effective, which suggests a people who expected to have to use them. The treasure they keep has never once been carried off by anyone who dug for it. It has only ever been won by someone who was not looking for it and had the nerve, at the right moment, to say out loud that it was hers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a spriggan?

A spriggan is a small, ugly guardian spirit from Cornish folklore, particularly associated with West Penwith. The name comes from the Cornish spyrysyon, meaning “spirits”. Spriggans haunt cairns, barrows, cromlechs and old hill castles, where they guard buried treasure and punish anyone who tries to dig it up.

Are spriggans really the ghosts of giants?

That is how Robert Hunt’s nineteenth-century Cornish informants explained them: small in body but keeping the strength of the giants who once held the hills. It is the reason spriggans can swell from knee-height to almost giant size when they are angered, as they did to the treasure-hunter on Trencrom Hill.

What do spriggans do to people?

They guard hoards, raise sudden whirlwinds and storms, blight crops, and steal. Cornish tradition blamed them when a house was robbed, cattle went missing or a building collapsed. Their worst habit is taking a baby out of its cradle and leaving one of their own in its place.

How do you defeat a spriggan?

Turning a garment inside out breaks their power, which is how a miner’s widow at Chyanwheal kept a floor full of their stolen gold. A stolen child could be recovered by bathing the changeling three times in Chapel Uny Well on the first Wednesdays of May, or by leaving it under a church-way stile overnight and staying out of sight and hearing.

Are spriggans the same as piskies?

Not according to Robert Hunt, who made them a separate tribe. Henry Jenner and W. Y. Evans-Wentz disagreed flatly in 1911, arguing that the Small People, the spriggans and the piskies cannot really be told apart and that the spriggan is only one aspect of the pisky. The word is genuinely Cornish; the neat species boundary around it was a collector’s idea.