Some hobland on ane hempstalk, hovrand [ascending] to the height;
The King of Pharie and his court, with the Elfe Queen,
With many elfish Incubus was rydand that night."
There followed these "the Weird Sisters"—the three Fates or the three Fairies who attend on a birth, the prophetic weird women who became the witches of Macbeth. Then came "Nicneven with her nymphs, in number nine" skilled in charms—"venerable virgins, whom the world calls witches," riding on swine, on dogs, or on monks.[1] Fairies, the Weird Sisters, and Nicneven and her train are thus conjoined in the great Hallowmas riding, which combines the fairy ride and the witches' jaunt.
Nic-neven is the well-known Gyre-carline regarded at once as a fairy-queen and a Hecate or mother-witch, well known to the peasantry and to literature, and of whom Sir David Lindsay, as he relates in the prologue to his Dream, told stories to his little pupil James V. "when that I saw thee sory." Elfin beings followed in her train, and though witch-like in all her aspects, she is constantly associated with the fairy world.[2]
(2) We turn now to the records of the witch trials. The Inquisition never reached Scotland, and it is to the credit of the pre-Reformation clergy that trials for sorcery were few in number, when these were matters of everyday experience in Europe; and, moreover, the witch Sabbat and its horrors was never in question before the beginning of the sixteenth century. Regular trials for witchcraft came in with the Reformation and the predominance of
- ↑ A. Montgomery, Poems, ed. J. Cranstoun (Scottish Text Society), Edinburgh, 1887, pp. 69 ff.
- ↑ For Nic-Neven and the Gyre-Carline see Leyden's Introduction to The Complaynt of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1801, ii. 318; D. Laing, Select Remains of the Ancient Popular Poetry of Scotland, London, 1885, p. 272; Scott, Minstrelsy, p. 199; Heron, in Pinkerton's Voyages, ii. 227; R. H. Cromek, Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, London, 1810, p. 293.
