Misers and Woodpeckers

Abstract

Mennear: 'Aw, he was a reg'lar split-fig, an' 'ud go where the devil can't, an' that's atween the oak an' the rind.' Shortly after the appearance of my essay, the Editor kindly drew my attention to tales of the Type Aa/Th 751A, The Peasant Woman is Changed into a Woodpecker. Dr Simpson pointed out that in some of these there is an interesting conjunction of the idea of miserliness and the bark-and-tree motif, and suggested that it might be worth investigating any link between this and the expression I discussed in my paper. A good example of a relevant variant of 751A can be found in Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse: When wandering on earth the Lord asks an old red-capped woman called Gertrude, whom He and Peter find baking, for a bannock to stay their hunger, but no matter how small the piece of dough she takes, it grows too big when she cooks it, and she turns down the request. For her niggardliness the Lord punishes her: 'You shall become a bird and seek your food between bark and bole, and never get a drop of drink save when it rains.' This is the origin of the Gjertrudsfugl or Black Woodpecker (Dryocopus martius), which gets its fiery crest from the old woman's cap, and its black plumage from the soot of the chimney through which she was forced to fly on being transformed.' Under Type 751A Baughman lists no British variants in which a Woodpecker plays a part,2 but in Trevelyan we find what seems to be an echo of the Scandinavian tradition in a conflation of North Welsh versions the author had collected from various oral sources. Here the old woman is told by Christ: 'Every day thou shalt feed of the stuff to be found between the wood and the bark of trees, and thou shalt only drink when it rains.' Thereupon she is turned into a bird, in which form she pecks at hollow trees for food, and pipes loudly before rain. What the bird looks like we are not told, but the reference here must be to the Green Woodpecker or Rain Bird (Picus viridis), since other native species hardly figure in folk tradition, and Dryocopus martius is a stranger to Britain. Trevelyan says that the story was likewise told in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire 'about fifty years ago,' that is, presumably, about the middle of the nineteenth century.3 Kirke Swann sees another reflex of the legend in a poem to the Woodpecker by James