Fairy-locks

What it is

Fairy-locks are knots that appear overnight for no reason anyone can give, in a child's hair or in a horse's mane. Folklore assigns them makers: fairies, said to play among the strands while their owners sleep. The word also covers any matted patch in human hair whose cause is unclear. One rule attaches to the tangle in the earliest English telling: leave it alone, since undoing it invites trouble. The idea belongs to household lore rather than to ritual. It offers an everyday answer to an everyday puzzle, a knot found at morning, and it travels under many names, because each country blames whichever small night being it knows best.

Where it comes from

The first appearance in English print comes in Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio, cataloguing the tricks of Queen Mab, the fairies' midwife, tells how she plaits horses' manes at night and works elflocks into tangled hair. Shakespeare returns to the image in King Lear, where Edgar, playing a madman, knots his own hair with elf-locks. Charlotte Bronte later gives Jane Eyre a glimpse of elflocks under a white band when Rochester disguises himself as a gypsy. On the continent, Jacob Grimm gathered the German names in his study of Teutonic mythology. The word elf itself sank into rural dialect over the centuries, then returned through translated fairy tales and, later, twentieth-century fantasy writing.

How it is done

No ceremony attaches to the belief, only a habit of reading. A parent or groom who finds a plait or mat that nobody made looks to the night visitors, since fairies are said to thread in and out of hair as they play. The old warning shapes the response: in Mercutio's account the tangle turns unlucky when combed out, so the knot found at dawn was left where it lay. Anything knotted without explanation can carry the name.

What it is for

The belief serves as explanation and omen at once. It accounts for a knot that neither parent nor stable-hand can account for, and it carries a caution about what to do with one: the earliest English version holds that misfortune follows once the tangle is undone. Nobody summons the fairies or works against them here; the lock simply arrives. Its use is to name a small morning nuisance and to mark it as belonging to another world, for the households and horse keepers who meet it.

Peoples and places

Each country names its own culprit. England blames the fairies, with Queen Mab as their midwife and agent. Germany keeps a whole shelf of terms, among them Alpzopf, Drutenzopf, Wichtelzopf, Weichelzopf, Mahrenlocke and Elfklatte, each pointing to a different being: the alp, the drude, the mare or the wight. French tradition hands the knot-work to the lutin, a house sprite. In Poland and the lands around it, witches and hostile spirits take the blame, attached to the matted condition called Polish plait. The English, German, French and Polish versions share one shape: night beings at work on hair.

What people believe

The world behind the belief is one of small night beings with a taste for mischief rather than malice. Fairies visit sleepers after dark and busy themselves with hair, plaiting manes and twisting knots. Grimm noticed a kinship with Frau Holle, a German figure who tangles other people's hair and wears her own matted. The German names keep the pattern: whatever being tangles the hair lends the lock its name, whether alp, drude, mare or wight. In the Polish version the agents turn darker, witches and evil spirits rather than playful sprites.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Jacob Grimm, the nineteenth-century student of Teutonic mythology, collected the German terms and compared them, drawing the link to Frau Holle. His list shows one idea spreading across a family of languages with the culprit's name changing from place to place. The Polish plait, though laid at the door of witches and spirits, may in fact be a serious medical condition, or a style chosen on purpose. The history of the word elf, which faded into rural dialect before fairy tales and fantasy brought it back, has also been traced.

Compare and confuse

The English fairy-lock has close cousins under other names: the German Alpzopf family of words, the French lutin's knot-work, and Polish plait, which witches and evil spirits were said to make. Polish plait is the oddest relative, since it can be a real illness or an intended hairdo rather than a fairy's game. Frau Holle, both a tangle-maker and matted herself, stands near the same circle.

Today

The belief lives on chiefly in books. In English the word elf wore down into countryside speech before two revivals lifted it again: fairy tales translated for readers in the 1800s, and the fantasy novels of the following century. Readers still meet elflocks where Shakespeare and Charlotte Bronte put them, in Mercutio's catalogue of Queen Mab's doings, in Edgar's feigned madness, and in the gypsy disguise of Rochester.

Questions people ask about Fairy-locks

Good reading and sources

• Fairy-lock on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data