Ashleigh Angus is a Higher Degree by Research student investigating the relationship between fairy belief, witchcraft, and women in seventeenth-century Orkney, Scotland. She is currently producing a novel that uses techniques of historiographic metafiction to explore how Orcadian women accused of witchcraft may have used fairy legends in their lives and trials to communicate their innermost desires and anxieties. 

‘Walliman’

Re-writing the trial of Jonet Rendall

In early modern Orkney it was widely believed that the hills and tumuli across the isles housed a temperamental race of fairies. This belief is documented throughout Orkney’s witch trial records, within which numerous accused witches claim a special relationship with the fairy folk. The way fairies are depicted in these trials suggests they could be used by women to cope with certain situations both in and out of the courtroom. One such instance took place on the Hill of Rendall. There, Jonet Rendall, tried in 1629, claims to have met a man in white clothes, with a white head, and grey beard, called ‘Walliman’; a description which aligns him more closely to a fairy or brownie than the Devil. Walliman gives Jonet, a beggar, an offer she can’t refuse: to teach her to win alms by healing the townsfolk, and to harm those who refuse to pay her for her services.

My short story ‘Walliman’ is a fictional depiction of Jonet Rendall’s trial and the events preceding it. This text utilises a creative practice as research methodology to explore how Jonet may have manipulated fairy folk belief in her life and trial to gain authority when she otherwise had none, thus demonstrating the uncanny power Orkney’s fairy hills held over those who lived beside them.