Aids household or construction tasks for the respectful
A motif · Behaviour · Thompson F420.5.1, Marvels
8 figures carry it.
Nearby in Thompson's index
Motifs this bestiary also holds from F420 and below. The codes are the index's; the names and counts are ours.
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F420Feeds on dreams of sleepers 1 figure -
F420.1.3.3Combs golden hair by water 5 figures
Carried by
The Bwbach is the Welsh counterpart of the brownie, and it resembles that creature very closely on both sides of the brownie's divided character: genuinely and substantially useful about a house, and entirely capable of turning obstreperous and even dangerous when annoyed.
The Kaboutermannekin is the household and mill sprite of Dutch tradition, and it keeps the bargain that the whole northern European class of such beings keeps: it works hard, quickly and unseen, it is paid in food rather than in wages, and the single thing that ends the arrangement permanently is being given clothes.
In that role he performs prodigious overnight work: threshing an entire barn of corn in a single night, mowing a meadow before dawn that would take a team of men days, or driving the whole flock of sheep down from the mountain in one uninterrupted sweep.
They are known to help with household chores, agricultural tasks, or even in the construction of bridges and mills, often completing these feats with supernatural speed and efficiency.
Like the brownie he resembles — the collectors file him beside it as the Highlands' rough hairy spirit — the urisk attaches to households and farms, herding, threshing, and doing heavy work for the families that tolerate him, and the type is fixed in the poetry of the region as a haunter of lonely linns.
A creature of this kind haunted the cellar of a Mr Macarthy, and a closely related being called Little Wildbean kept the cellar of a Quaker gentleman named Harris — where, if a servant carelessly left the beer-barrel running, he would wedge himself bodily into the cock and stop it until somebody came to turn it off.
Their defining power is prodigious, cooperative building: legend holds that a Menehune work party could raise a substantial structure, such as a fishpond or heiau wall, in a single night, provided the work was finished before daybreak and provided the humans who commissioned it did not watch them at their labor.
Some tellings describe the sounds as the Knockers continuing the miners' own labor by night after the human workers have gone home, mimicking pickaxe blows and other mining noises deep in the tunnels.