Piskies

Pixie

Pixies playing on the skeleton of a cow, drawn by John D. Batten c.1894
Grouping	Legendary creature Fairy Sprite
Country	United Kingdom
Region	Cornwall, Devon
Habitat	Moor, Forest, Cave, Garden

Pixies (also pixy, pixi, pizkie, piskies and pigsies as they are sometimes known in Cornwall) are mythical creatures of folklore, considered to be particularly concentrated in the high moorland areas around Devon and Cornwall, suggesting some Celtic origin for the belief and name.

Akin to the Irish and Scottish Aos Sí, pixies are believed to inhabit ancient underground ancestor sites such as stone circles, barrows, dolmens, ringforts or menhirs.

In traditional regional lore, pixies are generally benign, mischievous, short of stature and attractively childlike; they are fond of dancing and gather outdoors in huge numbers to dance or sometimes wrestle, through the night, demonstrating parallels with the Cornish plen-an-gwary and Breton Fest Noz (Cornish: troyl) folk celebrations originating in the medieval period. In modern times they are usually depicted with pointed ears, and often wearing a green outfit and pointed hat although traditional stories describe them wearing dirty ragged bundles of rags which they happily discard for gifts of new clothes. Sometimes their eyes are described as being pointed upwards at the temple ends. These, however, are Victorian era conventions and not part of the older mythology.

In modern use, the term can be synonymous with fairies or sprites. However, in folklore there is a traditional enmity, even war, between the two races.

The origin of the name pixie is uncertain. Some have speculated that it comes from the Swedish dialectal pyske meaning wee little fairy. Others have disputed this, given there is no plausible case for Nordic dialectical survivals in southwest Britain, claiming instead, in view of the Cornish origin of the piskie, that the term is more probably Celtic in origin, though no clear ancestor of the word is known. The term Pobel Vian ('Little People') is often used to refer to them collectively. Very similar analogues exist in closely related Irish (Aos Si), Manx (Mooinjey Veggey) and Breton (korrigan) culture, although their common names are unrelated, even within areas of language survival there is a very high degree of local variation of names. In west Penwith, the area of late survival of the Cornish language, spriggans are distinguished from pixies by their malevolent nature. Closely associated with tin mining in Cornwall are the subterranean ancestral knockers.