Getting Shot of Elves Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the….Image.Marked.pdf

Getting Shot of Elves: Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials Alaric Hall [Preprint of Alaric Hall, ‘Getting Shot of Elves: Healing, Witchcraft and Fairies in the Scottish Witchcraft Trials’, Folklore, 6 (2005), 19–36. The pagination of this preprint matches that of the final text.] Abstract This paper re-examines the evidence of the Scottish witchcraft trials for beliefs associated by scholars with “elf-shot.” Some supposed evidence for elf-shot is dismissed, but other material illuminates the interplay between illness, healing and fairy-lore in early modern Scotland, and the relationship of these beliefs to witchcraft itself. 1. Introduction The study of popular belief in early modern Scotland is in good health. The unusually numerous attestations of Scottish fairy-belief in the witchcraft trials, on which this paper focuses, have recently received close attention (Purkiss 2000, especially 85– 157; 2001; Wilby 2000; Henderson and Cowan 2001; cf. Maxwell-Stuart 2001; Hutton 2002, especially 27–32). Open-access web resources now include the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (hereafter D OST), the Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots and the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft (hereafter SSW), conceived as “an extensive database of all people known to have been accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736,” published in January 2003. [1] These resources facilitate and invite the critical reassessment of our inherited assumptions about the subject: accordingly, I consider here our earliest Scottish evidence for one aspect of this subject, elf-shot. Scholarly usage of the term “elf-shot” varies. The New Shorter Oxf ord nglish Dictionary (sub Elf n. ) offers “a disease, esp. of livestock, attributed to the agency of elves,” adding that in Scots elf -shot could be synonymous with elf -arrow, “a flint arrowhead (regarded as an elves’ weapon).” Perhaps in co