Boggart, The

DESCRIPTION: "Come listen to this merry tale of honest Farmer Bell, Who lived within an old farmhouse at the top of Moston Dell." A boggart haunts his home and farm. Farmer Bell decides to move out to escape it. But the boggart follows, so Farmer Bell returns home
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1980 (Harding-FolkSongsOfLancashire)
KEYWORDS: farming hardtimes travel ghost return | boggart
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Harding-FolkSongsOfLancashire, p. 12, "The Boggart" (1 text, 1 modern tune)
NOTES [566 words]: These days, most people will know boggarts from the Harry Potter books, but they are older.
Harding says that someone slipped him the words for this, and he set the tune. I doubt the text is actually traditional, because it is simply a version of the most common of all boggart stories, converted to verse.
This description of the Boggart is based on my own research in On Myth and Magic, but I've trimmed it to omit the more Potter-ish parts.
"A mischievous Brownie, almost exactly like a poltergeist in his habits" (Briggs, p. 129). They are primarily known in northern England. "'Boggart,' by some writers is regarded as the Lancashire cognomen for 'Puck' or 'Robin Goodfellow.' Certainly there are, or were, many boggarts whose mischievous propensities and rude practical jokings remind us very forcibly of the eccentric and erratic goblin page to the fairy king" (Hardwick, p. 170).
In a way, boggarts are a sort of a reverse brownie: A figure usually associated with a particular place, and usually engaged in nastiness -- but occasionally known to do a good turn for the home's owners. Sometimes, however, they preferred to harass a particular family rather than a place. This song tells a variant of a Yorkshire tale in which a boggart so tormented a family that they decided to move out. They packed up their possessions and left their empty house -- and a voice from a milk jug declared that the boggart was still with them. So they turned around and headed back to their home -- better to be tormented at home than on the road (Alexander, p. 27; Simpson/Roud, p. 29).
Boggarts could also live outdoors, haunting, for instance, a pit or well or lane.
It is generally believed that the bogle (Scottish for "ghost") and "bogey/bogy" are variants on the boggart (Simpson/Roud, p. 29) as is the "bugaboo."
There are also English legends of the brownies/hobgoblins which are relevant. "Brownie is the name now used in Herefordshire for Robin Goodfellow, the Puck of the Midsummer Night's Dream. We have the Welsh form of the name in the 'Pwcha' farm, at Michaelchurch Eskley. Brownie, now all but forgotten, was a domestic elf, sometimes useful and hard-working, helping the maids with household tasks, more often mischievous, even evil and malicious. As elsewhere, the Brownie and the Bogie reduce themselves to different humours of the same uncanny thing" (Leather, pp. 47-48). Leather goes on to tell of a man who set aside a legacy to keep a bell ringing forever to placate or drive off a brownie who had tormented him.
"'What is a Boggart? A sort of ghost or sprite. But what is the meaning of the word Boggart? Brand says that 'in the northern parts of England, ghost is pronounced gheist and guest. Hence bar-guest, or bar-gheist....' Brand might have added that bar is a term for gate in the north, and that all the gates of York are named 'bars,' so that a bar-gheist is literally a gate-ghost" (Harland/Wilkinson, pp. 49-50).
Another claim, which I have been unable to trace, is that the name may be derived from the Middle English word "bogge," meaning "ghost" or perhaps "terror." But this is a rare word in Middle English, perhaps better known in early Modern English. Another link might be to the verb bigge, "to take up one's residence" (Sisam, in the Glossary by J.R.R. Tolkien, entry "Big, Bigge") hence "to haunt"; relatives of this word are still used in Broad Scots.
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