They lurk in sedgy shores.
The fairy Nokke, Neck, or Nickel, is said to have been a great musician who sat upon the water’s edge and played a golden harp, the harmony of which operated on all nature:[726] sometimes he is represented as a complete horse who could be made to work at the plough if a bridle of particular kind were used: he is also represented as half man and half horse, as an aged man with a long beard, as a handsome young man, and as a pretty little boy with golden hair and scarlet cap. That Big Nigge once haunted the Bagnigge Wells is implied by the attendant legend of Black Mary, Black Mary’s Hole being the entrance, or immediately adjacent, to one of the Bagnigge springs: similarly, as has been noted, Peg Powler, and Peg this or that, haunted the streams of Lancashire.
We have seen that Keightley surmised the word pixy to be the endearing diminutive sy added to Puck, whence, as in Nancy, Betsy, Dixie, and so forth, Nixy may similarly be considered as dear little Nick. In Suffolk, the fairies are known as farisees, seemingly, dear little fairies, and our ancestors seem to have possessed a pronounced partiality for similar diminutives: we find them alluding to the Blood of the Lambkin, an expression which Adamnan’s editors remark as “a bold instance of the Celtic diminutive of endearment so characteristic of Adamnan’s style”: they add: “Throughout Adamnan’s work, diminutives are constantly used, and these in most cases are used in a sense of endearment difficult to convey in English, perfectly natural as they are in the mouth of the kindly and warm-hearted Irish saint. In the present case Dr. Reeves thinks the diminutives may indicate the poorness of the animals from the little there was to feed them upon.”[727] As the traditions of Fairyland give no hint for the assumption of any rationing or food-shortage it seems hardly necessary to consider either the pixies, the farisees, or the nixies as either half-starved or even impoverished.
In Scandinavia and Germany the nixies are known as the nisses, and they there correspond to the brownies of Scotland: according to Grimm the word nisse is “Nicls, Niclsen, i.e., Nicolaus, Niclas, a common name in Germany and the North, which is also contracted to Klas, Claas”; but as k seems invariably to soften into ch, and again into s, it is a perfectly straight road from Nikke to Nisse, and the adjective nice is an eloquent testimonial to the Nisses’ character. Some Nisses were doubtless nice, others were obviously nasty, noxious, and nocturnal: the Nis of Jutland is in Friesland called Puk, and also Niss-Puk, Nise-Bok, and Niss-Kuk: the Kuk of this last mentioned may be connoted with the fact that the customary offering to St. Nicholas was a cock—the symbol of the Awakener—and as St. Nicholas was so intimately connected with Patara, the cock of St. Peter is no doubt related to the legend.
St. Nicholas, or Santa Claus, customarily travels by night: the nixies were black-eyed; Old Nick was always painted black; nox, or night, is the same word as nixy; and nigel, night, or nicht all imply blackness. According to Cæsar: “all the Gauls assert that they are descended from the god Dis, and say that this tradition has been handed down by the Druids. For that reason they compute the divisions of every season not by the number of days but by nights; they keep birthdays, and the beginnings of months and years in such an order that the day follows the night.”[728] The expressions fortnight, and sen’night thus not only perpetuate an idea of great antiquity but one which is philosophically sound: to our fore-runners Night was no wise evil, but the beneficent Mother of a Myriad Stars: the fairies revelled in the dark, and in eyes of old “the vast blue night was murmurous with peris wings”[729].
The place-name Knightsbridge is probably a mis-spelling of Neyte, one of the three manors into which Kensington was once divided: the other two were Hyde and Ebury, and it is not unlikely that these once constituted a trinity—Hyde being the Head, Ebury the Brightness, and Neyte—Night. The Egyptian represented Nut, Naut, or Neith as a Mother Goddess with two children in her arms, one white the other black: to her were assigned the words: “I am what has been, what is, and what will be,” and her worshippers declared: “She hath built up life from her own body”. In Scandinavia Nat was the Mother of all the gods: she was said to be an awe-inspiring, adorable, noble, and beneficent being, and to have her home on the lower slopes of the Nida mountains: nid is the French for nest, and with Neyte may be connoted nuit, the French for night. That St. Neot was le nuit is implied by the tradition that the Church of St. Neot in Cornwall was built not only by night, but entirely by Neot himself who drew the stones from a neighbouring quarry, aided only by the help of reindeer. These magic reindeer are obviously the animals of St. Nick, and it is evidently a memory of Little Nick that has survived in the tradition that St. Neot was a saint of very small stature—somewhere about 15 inches high.[730] With Mother Nat of Scandinavia, and Mother Naut or Neith of Egypt, may be connoted Nutria, a Virgin-Mother goddess of Etruria; a divine nurse with whose name may be connected nutrix (nurse) and nutriment.
St. Nicholas is the patron saint of seafarers and there are innumerable dedications to him at the seaside: that Nikke was Neptune is unquestionable, and connected with his name is doubtless nicchio the Italian for a shell. From nicchio comes our modern niche, which means a shell-like cavity or recess: in the British Eppi coin, illustrated on page 284, the marine monster may be described as a nikke, and the apparition of the nikke as a perfect horse might not ineptly be designated a nag.
I have elsewhere illustrated many representations of the Water-Mother, the Mary-Maid, the Mermaid, the Merrow-Maid, or as she is known in Brittany—Mary Morgan. The resident nymph or genius of the river Severn was named Sabrina; the Welsh for the Severn is Havren, and thus it is evident that the radical of this river name is brina, vren, or vern: the British Druids recognised certain governing powers named feraon: fern was already noted as an Iberian word meaning anything good, whence it is probable that in Havren or Severn the affix ha or se was either the Greek eu or the British and Sanscrit su, both alike meaning the soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious.
Sabrina fair,