Miss Jane Stade wrote to me from Devonshire recently requesting information about a word used in both Devon and Cornwall, spriggan. I can tell her that I have heard her word near Carnsore in Co Wexford.
Not for the first time I have to draw on a word list I collected from Phil Wall, a man who was 90 or thereabouts when I met him in the late 1970s, having been introduced to him by Mr Leo Carthy, a recent recipient of an honorary degree from the National University. A spriggan to Phil Wall was an unruly child; the word, according to Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, is of Cornish origin, and means a fairy, a goblin. I suppose that Irish people who live outside the Barony of Forth in south-east Wexford would find an affinity between the spriggan and the cluthracan, an unruly sprite known for mischief-making. This is what Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England (1865) has to say about spriggans:
"They appear to be offshoots from the family of the Trolls of Sweden and Denmark. They are found only about the cairns, coits or cromlechs, burrows or detached stones, with which it is unlucky for mortals to meddle. "They are a remarkably mischievous and thievish tribe. If ever a house is robbed, a child stolen, cattle carried away, or a building demolished, it is the work of the spriggans. "Whatever commotion took place in earth, air, or water, it is all put down to the work of these spirits. It is usually considered that they are the ghosts of the giants of old; they have the charge of buried treasure."
Another bluirin of folklore was recorded in the English Folk-Lore Journal, Vol iv 1886: sad to say, the poison of anti-Semitism had even then reached the Cornish tin mines: "Knockers and Springgans, and all underground spirits . . . always heard working where there is tin, and who are said to be the ghosts of Jews who crucified Jesus."
Margaret McCann of Newry, Helen O'Neill of Swords, late of Co Down, and June Baird of Bangor wrote to me giving out about my ignorance in implying that a Killinchy muffler was a male embrace. The Killinchy muffler, I am now told, was what the woman applied to the man. "The Killinchy men, being cold, slow and useless are given a hoult round the neck to get them closer; muffler as in scarf, geddit?", explained Ms McCann, who very kindly indeed offered me a demonstration.