ix: Foraging through Folklore
Upset stomachs and stone soup Ella Leith During the Christmas season, one’s eyes tend to be bigger than one’s stomach, and, come January, many of us will be feeling the effects of a certain amount of overindulgence. Folk medicine offers remedies in the form of ‘yarb [herb] beers’— bitter and ‘as black as black treacle’, containing as many as twenty-four different stomach-settling herbs (Addy, 1901:411) —and other, more obscure solutions, such as using Hazel (Corylus sp.) twigs to bind the legs of a horse that has overeaten (Drury, 1985:243). I’m not sure this latter would yield good results when applied to humans but, then, we always have the option to blame our woes on the supernatural. If you’re suffering from disrupted sleep and bad dreams, don’t blame the rich food you ingested; it’s probably just one of the nocturnal horses— literally, night mares —that are known to trample on a sleeper’s stomach ‘so that he could not breathe or speak... [and] expected to choke’ (Griffis, 1918). Or perhaps it’s a female goblin jumping up and down on your belly. To banish the latter, you must steal her red hat and use it to lure her outside at dawn; once the sun rises, the stomachtrampler will turn to stone (Ibid). Even if you did eat too much, it may have been the fairies that led you to it. In the Dutch fairy tale, The Boy Who Wanted More Cheese, young Klaas is described as having a stomach with no bottom— an affliction for which I have 38
great sympathy. One night, Klaas was woken by an enticing whisper: “There’s plenty of cheese. Come with us!” Who could resist? Following the voice into the woods, he found: dozens of pretty creatures, hardly as large as dolls, but as lively as crickets...as full of light, as if lamps had wings. Hand in hand, they flitted and danced around the ring of grass...He felt himself pulled by their dainty fingers. One of them, the loveliest of all, whispered in his ear: “Come, you must dance with us.” Then a dozen of the pretty creatures murmured in chorus: “Plenty of cheese here. Plenty of cheese here. Come, come!” (Griffis, 1918) Needless to say, dancing with the fairies is never a good plan. Once they had exhausted the child, the fairies brought him cheese after cheese and began to force feed him, until even the insatiable Klaas was full: His jaws were tired. His stomach seemed to be loaded with cannonballs. He gasped for breath. But the fairies would not let him stop, for Dutch fairies never get tired. Flying out of the sky— from the north, south, east and west —they came, bringing cheeses. These they dropped down around him, until the piles of the round masses threatened first to
