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Never the Wiser: Fairylore and Berry Picking in Newfoundland
| Article
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20260 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
4,478 Words |
| Author
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Peter Narvaez
Peter Narvaez is associate professor of folklore at the
Memorial s. University of Newfoundland. He recently edited
The Good People: New Fairylore Essays, published by Garland
(New York, 1991). |
The mention of "fairies" evokes images of diaphanous-winged figures from literature or, in contemporary stereotypes, male homosexuals. The first image is a figure of fantasy. The second, "straight," view is deprecatory, a response to the perceived threat of the homosexual's ambiguous identity. Significantly, it is the core meaning of the latter threat to identity that is most applicable to the fairy of traditional lore.
The ambiguous identity of the fairy of tradition implies danger; it poses the threat of potential immorality and bodily harm and prompts our anxious response. Indeed, in the fishing communities of Newfoundland, the fairy has been a powerful community figure even in recent items. To this day, many residents remember fairies as vital magico-religious components of their worldview. The locale for many of these memories is often the berry picking grounds. Marian White, who was raised in Carbonear, recollects the significance of bread in this regard:
When I was a child and went berry picking with my mother, which was many, many times, we always took bread with us for two reasons. One was for the snack you know, bread and molasses, but we also, always, left a piece of the bread on the hills for the fairies. My mother taught me that, just like she taught me how to say my night prayers. That went along with it.
Berry grounds: A risky threshold
Canada's tenth province, Newfoundland and Labrador, joined Confederation in 1949. At that time, more than 1,100 of the 1,300 settlements that dotted the jagged 6,000 mile coastline of the island portion of the province were fishing outports. These were each inhabited by fewer than 500 persons, mostly of West Country English and Irish ancestry, adherents of Protestant and Roman Catholic faiths. Shaped by fishing economies since the sixteenth century, many facets of Newfoundland culture in 1949 were "island-arrested" and tradition-directed. Thus, as folklorists and other social scientists have shown, Newfoundland has been a rich repository of oral tradition, folk custom, and belief.
Since Confederation, the population has almost doubled (ca. 600,000), but the number of communities has declined sharply (ca. 720). The dissolution of many outports has been attributed to the effects of government policies that were initiated in 1953. These offered incentives to the residents of small communities to resettle in "growth centers." Moreover, there has been a steady stream of immigration to
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