Usually when I write about fairies here (or elsewhere) I'm writing about fairies as they are found in existing material or anecdotal accounts. Today I would like to take a look at a fairy that can be found in multiple 21st century sources online identified as an Irish fairy yet is not to be found anywhere in Irish folklore. I want to point this example out today and talk about how this pseudo-Irish fairy came to be because I think it points to a couple issues that more widely need to be addressed with people outside Irish culture relating to Irish folklore and fairies, namely, appropriation and colonialism. I realize these are unpopular terms in many corners of paganism today but this is a critical conversation that needs to be had.
If you do a quick online search for 'Bean Tighe' you will turn up multiple links to articles and sites from the last decade all of which will describe a gentle friendly fairy, often referring to her as a type of Brownie house spirit*, who cleans around a home and watches over children. Images of her, again found online, depict a plump grandmotherly figure. All emphasize her Irish folklore and many connect her to the witch hunt period, claiming that human women who had a Bean Tighe in their home would intentionally mess the house up a bit in the morning to hide the thoroughness of the Bean Tigh's cleaning lest other people notice and accuse them of witchcraft for having a fairy helper**.
I first ran across this fairy when someone mentioned her as the Irish Brownie and was genuinely puzzled for two reasons. Firstly the name literally means 'woman of the house' or 'housekeeper' and is used in modern Irish with absolutely no fairy connotations. Secondly despite being pretty deeply immersed in Irish fairylore I had never heard of this being before. I began asking around of friends and acquaintances in Ireland and quickly found that no one else had heard of this fairy before either, which I found concerning given that the Irishness - alleged Irishness - of this fairy was firmly attached to all the online narratives I was then seeing. So I decided to research, as I do.
What I found was that there was one reference to a fairy Bean Tighe in a 20th century source but that was far from the modern invention, however since the modern one used the archaic spelling of the 20th century source I felt safe in assuming that the modern idea was based, albeit very loosely, on that older one. We will begin then with the older source, which is a single paragraph in Evans-Wentz's 'Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries'.
The entire entry about the Bean Tighe in Evans-Wentz's book:
"The Bean-Tighe -The Bean-Tighe, the fairy housekeeper of the enchanted submerged castle of the Earl of Desmond, is supposed to appear sitting on an ancient earthen monument shaped like a great chair and hence called Suidheachan, the 'Housekeeper's Little Seat' [sic literally seat], on Knock Adoon (Hill of the Fort), which juts out into the Lough. The Bean-tighe, as I have heard an old peasant tell the tale, was once asleep on her Seat, when the Buachailleen, or 'Little Herd Boy' [sic little boy] stole her golden comb. When the Bean-Tighe awoke and saw what had happened, she cast a curse upon the cattle of the Buachailleen, and soon all of them were dead, and then the 'Little Herd Boy' himself died, but before his death he ordered the golden comb cast into the Lough."
Evans-Wentz also suggests in a footnote the the Bean-Tighe is elsewhere called the Bean Sidhe and identifies her with Áine. The story as related by Evans-Wentz is far more like a Bean Sidhe story than anything else, even featuring the golden comb, so I'm personally inclined to believe this probably was Bean Sidhe lore rather than a distinct being.
That all said it seems clear that the passage was not meant to refer to a fairy called a 'Bean-tighe' but to a fairy bean tighe, or fairy housekeeper. Just as the Buachailleen mentioned wasn't the name of a type of fairy but simply a term in Irish, although Evans-Wentz also tries to argue that in a footnote. To make either of these terms a fairy being the word sidhe (or sí) would have to be included, hence bean sidhe = fairy woman or cú sidhe = fairy hound; without including that it just means what it means, bean an tí, woman of the house. The fact that the author translates suidheachan (modern Irish suíochán) not as chair or seat but as 'housekeeper's little seat' makes me extremely skeptical that they had any Irish themselves; if they did it shows they were being extremely loose and creative with their translations. This is the sum total of the 1911 source and I am aware of no other references in books on Irish folklore or fairies.
In Edain McCoy's 1994 book A Witch's Guide to Faery Folk the author includes an entry on the 'Bean-Tighe' fairy which describes this being as a small elderly woman with a kind face who looks for a friendly human house to care for, and emphasizes that they will care for children and pets as well as handle chores left undone by tired mothers. All of this in exchange for a bowl of strawberries and cream left out on occasion. McCoy claims the Bean-Tighe are exclusively Irish fairies but compares them to the Scottish Brownie. She also claims that this fairy was very well known to Irish mothers across the centuries, and that they were common companions to Irish wise women who had to be careful to keep their houses just a bit messy lest they be accused of consorting with fairies and being witches. Suffice to say that is all McCoy's invention but clarifies where the majority of modern ideas about this 'fairy' came from, as we shall see.
In 2002 Ann Franklin included the Bean Tighe in her illustrated Dictionary of Fairies, largely relying on Evans-Wentz's account but also adding that the Bean Tighe was an "Irish House faerie" who looked like a nice old woman and helped around a home in exchange for a bowl of cream, clearly drawing on McCoy. In 2006 a website and book 'Creatures of the Celtic Otherworld' by the author Andrew Paciorek shows up with an entry on the Bean Tighe. both Franklin and Paciorek used the same spelling as Evans-Wentz which is different from the modern Irish making it notable and both dropped the dash McCoy used to separate the words, going from Bean-Tighe to Bean Tighe. Subsequent articles about this fairy would preserve the archaic spelling.
Paciorek's Bean Tighe was different from the 1911 version in almost every detail and made no mention of Evans-Wentz's account, apparently relying largely on McCoy's writing. Whereas Evans-Wentz's Bean-Tighe was like the Bean Sidhe found elsewhere, Paciorek's Bean Tighe was a cross between a Brownie and a live-in nanny. He described an exclusively female fairy that cleaned up houses at night, watched after children, and cared for pets; he compared her to a fairy godmother. He also claimed that during the witch hunts the Bean Tighe's work was so good that women would intentionally disrupt it lest they be thought to be witches trucking with spirits. He specifically mentions that the Bean Tighe loved strawberries with cream. All of these details come from McCoy's 1994 book and would go on in the following decade and a half to be repeated and in some places added to; the repetition of key details again makes it easy to see that this is the root source even on articles that don't cite any references.
I just want to digress for a minute to address the particular claim that the Bean tighe fairy is especially fond of strawberries and cream. I'm really not going to get into whether or not this may be true, if the being exists now due to common belief or not, but I do want to point out that the claim that this food as a preference is another sign of the fairies modern origin. The strawberry as we know it today only dates back to the 18th century and until the early 20th was largely an import to Ireland from the continent. There is a native strawberry in Ireland, Sú talún fiáin, but it is very different in appearance from the domesticated version most people are used to today. In traditional practices relating to house fairies and spirits offerings normally include porridge, cream, milk, or small cakes. The idea that this fairy comes from older Irish folklore should immediately be questioned just for this one detail.
So, that is the actual history of the Bean Tighe such as I have found it. The fairy is decidedly not from Irish folklore - the first several authors writing about the Bean Tighe as a fairy were in England and offered no sources for their claims that this being was found in Irish folklore. Franklin's only clear source was Evans-Wentz who as we can see did not describe the fairy housekeeper's appearance and made no mention at all of her being helpful or even attached to human households; he said only that she was the housekeeper in a fairy "castle". The later details that have been added seem to blend existing folklore around Brownies with a more modern view of fairies in general and use little more than the name from Evans-Wentz's account.
How does appropriation and colonialism come into play? Simply put when people outside Irish culture are creating - even from misunderstanding a source - a fairy then adding many details not even found in the one questionable original source and calling it all Irish and Irish folklore. This is rooted in people taking a term from Irish, the bean an tí or more archically Bean tighe, misunderstanding it because they themselves had no Irish and no cultural context for the term and creating something new that they erroneously claimed was from Irish folklore. And to be blunt, people outside the culture do not get to treat the language or folklore like a fancy dress costume or a quick way to legitimize a new story. I realize people make such claims in folklore sometimes because a story has been passed down that way to them, and that's not what I'm talking about here. Here I'm talking about a modern author or authors who chose to create something new and intentionally play off its alleged Irishness, or perhaps created it to fill what they perceived to be a gap in Irish folklore which needed such a helpful home fairy.
New folklore and new fairies are created - gremlins are one example of such - but no one outside a culture, any culture, should get to control that culture's folklore or redefine it to suit a foreign audience. The growth and evolution of fairy belief should be organic within a culture, and if a new fairy does come to be, as this one perhaps has, it should be treated honestly and not given a false origin story that borrows from a culture that has and is dealing with the long term effects of colonization, anglicization, and romanticization.
*this is in itself also a gross misunderstanding of what Brownies are and what they do, but that's a bit of a digression
**honestly this is so patently ridiculous I don't even know where to start debunking it. I'll just say that no self respecting house wife or woman of the house would dirty a clean home because it was 'too clean', clean houses were not a sign that witch hunters looked for, and the witch hunts in Ireland were utterly different than elsewhere.
References
Evans-Wentz, W., (1911) The Fairy Faith In Celtic Countries
Paciorek, A., (2006) Domestic Spirits
Franklin, A., (2002) Illustrated Dictionary of Fairies
McCoy, E., (1994) A Witch's Guide to Faery Folk
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