what's up with magic foot stuff?

For a while, I’ve been working on an edition of prophecies and romances connected with Thomas of Erceldoune, or Thomas the Rhymer. Tom was a real person who lived sometime in the 13th century and, according to a romance written in the following century, was carried off to the Otherworld by the queen of the faeries, as a result of which he aquired the gift of prophecy. Probably none of his original prophecies, if he ever actually uttered any, survive. Still, he remained a popular figure in (mostly) Scottish literature for a good few centuries after his lifespan, serving as a useful mouthpiece for stories about how the English would eventually get what was coming to them in the continual wars and border skirmishes between the two countries.

In one of the prophecies attributed to him (The Prophisies of Rymour, Beid, and Marlyng/The Prophecies of Rhymer, Bede, and Merlin), there’s a weird bit about feet. Thomas meets a stranger on the road. In other versions of this story he’s a dwarf who leads the prophet to some kind of faerie feast, but in Rymour he’s just a weird guy. Tom asks him if he has any news about the wars (between, naturally, England and Scotland). The stranger says he does. Then he invites Tom to touch feet with him and look over his shoulder. Tom does so, and sees a complicated vision of the future which takes up the rest of the text.

No one seems to know what’s going on with the foot bit. The previous editor of the text leaves it totally unremarked. Clearly, touching feet and looking over the stranger’s shoulder is what gives Thomas the ability to see the future, but what could possibly be up with that?

I found answers some in seventeenth century letters. At this point, men like John Aubrey — whose Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme is a great read if you’re into oddness — were making a semi-systematic effort to collect what we’d now call folklore from around Britain. Of particular interest was the Second Sight, which seems to have mostly been a Scottish thing, and which (reports these letters) could be transferred, at least temporarily, by a laying-on of feet. Here I quote myself quoting letter-writer James Garden:

Garden writes that whenthe seer sees “those strange Sights [i.e., visions of future or far-off events], they set their Footupon the Foot of another who hath not the Second-sight, that either will for that time see whatthey are seeing”.

So far, so good. The foot thing happens in Rhymer because there was a belief, attested later, that those endowed with the Second Sight could pass it off via feet. I published on this and called it a day.

But I could not leave the Foot Thing alone. I kept finding it in odd places, widely separated from each other in time. Wirt Sykes’ British Goblins, a collection of Welsh folklore from the 19th century, also reports the foot thing, two full centuries after the letters I uncovered above. This time it’s slightly different: instead of the future, one guy who can see faeries touches feet with other people so that they can too can see the faeries. Robert Kirk, in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Faeries, describes a protocol almost identical to the one in Rymour, except that again it’s faeries and not the future:

The usual method for a curious person to get a transient sight of [the faeries] […] is to put this foot on the seer’s foot, and the seer’s hand is put on the inquirer’s head, who is to look over the wizard’s right shoulder

So far we have a few datapoints clustered around the 17th century (Kirk and the two lettes), one a bit earlier (Rymour), and one 19th century outlier. But the next bit, which I was directed to by Andrew Kraebel of Trinity University after Steven Rozenski put us in touch, is much older — the 12th or 13th century, ironically not far out from Thomas of Erceldoune’s own lifetime. This is the life of St. Bartholomew of Farne. Bartholomew is travelling with a young man, who can see an evil spirit. He tells the saint to stand on his feet and he will (permamently, this time) gain the ability to see the spirits.

There is no conclusion to this article. I have no idea what’s up with the Foot Thing. It is broadly localized to Scotland and the North of England, except when it’s in Wales, and it’s mostly appears in the 17th century, but also in the 12th and 19th — really a pretty long time. It’s remarkably conservative for that timespan, too, not changing much between its first and final appearance. It’s particularly connected with both the faeries and the ability to see the future, which seems signficant given that Thomas’ precognition was given to him by faeries in the first place.

It is likely that there are more instances of the Foot Thing that I have yet to find. Aside from The Secret Commonwealth, which is a pretty standard book of faerie-lore, most of these appearances are in out-of-the-way texts that aren’t much read (the Bartholomew hagiography hasn’t even been translated out of Latin).

Please, tell me if you know what’s up with the Foot Thing.