Fairies, Folklore and Forteana

TREE SPIRITS

In the past two issues of FT I have written about how we see fairies today. I mentioned the SWFs (small-winged fairies) and the dwomes (dwarf-gnomes) who together go to make up about two thirds of fairies glimpsed by British and Irish fairy-seers. However, there is one much smaller category that I cannot stop thinking of: the tresps. These ‘tree spirits’ were responsible for about seven per cent of British and Irish sightings in the first round of the Fairy Census. Tresps are usually tall and thin. They are tree-shaped or with tree appendages (branches etc). They often have awkward movements as they lumber along. An example: “The figure was approximately seven foot tall, slim… a trunk-like body from the waist up, branch-like arms and a quite haggard face with short branches coming from the top of the head and sides, but not like a true tree, they didn’t seem to taper to twigs… walked… as though putting one foot down and then making [an] effort to pull forward, arms swinging’ (§39).

Tresps (I also played around with ‘treens’, remembering Dan Dare) are new kids on the supernatural block. Now there were, in centuries past, fairies associated with trees or fairies that came out of trees. But there is nothing that looks so, well, tree-like. Marjorie Johnson has dryads in Seeing Fairies: but,

“A TRUNK-LIKE BODY FROM THE WAIST UP, BRANCH-LIKE ARMS AND A QUITE HAGGARD FACE”

again, they don’t have twigs or branches as part of their body. Here is one post-war account from Ireland describing a ravishing beech spirit. “It was a female figure dressed in green, flowing drapery… The hair, which was a lustrous metallic green, was long and flowing free; the skin of the face was very pale with a luminosity hard to describe; the features were fine and delicate, with an aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and full lips.” Impressive, but no tresp. The only really treelike quality in the account is Beech’s height: she was some 10ft (3m) tall! We have with the tresps a very old problem: supernatural beings changing their form from one generation to another. This does not necessarily mean that supernatural beings do not exist. But it does, I think, presuppose some kind of expectation management either in our brains or in the minds of the entities encountered.

So where do tresps come from? My guess would be that they depend in part on growing environmental consciousness and in part on the Froudian ‘turn’ in fairy art, with plant-like fairies. But I’d bet that the most important contribution to the rise of the tresps was Tolkien’s Ents, particularly those unforgettable scenes in the movie The Two Towers in 2002. Treebeard has a lot to answer for.