Sounds of Silence: Fairies and Incest in Scottish Witchcraft Stories

Abstract

This chapter is about storytelling, about two stories told by two seventeenth-century Scottish women accused of witchcraft. The stories these women told are fairy stories, in every sense; stories that had been told before, stories that pass the time, stories that express cultural truths, stories that circulate in oral form and baffle those who wish to add them to the written lexicon, and above all, stories about fairies. I want to argue here that Scottish witches told stories about fairies not out of any straightforward belief in fairies, not out of any longing to satisfy their interrogators, but because the court setting allowed these women to talk about feelings, experiences, and desires that could never normally be given a hearing within their cultures. The women might have told the stories before, but here they were giving their stories to their entire world. The fairy stories I am going to be discussing are the sounds of silence in two senses. Firstly, they represent a moment when a normally silent group — women of the lower orders — makes an appearance as storytellers on the historical stage. Secondly, they represent the things those women could not ordinarily say.