There are about five ways of spelHng the name of this, which is generally described as the Manx brownie. Indeed, he fulfils all the functions of a brownie, though he is more like lob-lie-by-t he-fire, whom Milton calls 'the lubbard fiend'.

He is large, hairy and ugly, but of enormous strength. There is a story, told by Sophia Morrison in Manx Fairy Tales, that when the Fenoderee was working in Gordon he happened to meet the blacksmith one night and offered to shake hands with him. The blacksmith prudently held out the sock of a plough which he was carrying, and Fenoderee twisted it almost out of shape, and said with satisfaction: 'There's some strong Manxmen in the world yet.' Similar tales are told about Ossian in his old age and about the last of the pechs.

Curiously enough, this uncouth creature is said to have been once one of the ferrishyn, banished from Fairyland. He had fallen in love with a mortal girl who lived in Glen Aldyn, and had absented himself from the Autumn Festival to dance with her in the Glen of Rushen. For this he had been transformed into a hairy shape and banished until Doomsday. He still kept a kindly feeling for humanity, however, and willingly performed all sorts of tasks when his help was needed.

Every collection of Manx fairy tales contains some anecdotes about the Fenoderee. It seems he was an individual, not a class, but he was sometimes confused with the glashan, a Manx hobgoblin whose memory has faded and who is now blended with the glastyn, a very different kind of creature. He seems to be multiple because he went from place to place, either having been offended or banished by the offer of clothes.

Keightley quotes several anecdotes, told by Train in his Account of Man (vol.II, p.148). It is he that tells of Fenoderee's banishment. He also tells of how the Fenoderee was offended because a farmer criticized his grass cutting, saying that it was not close enough. After this he gave up helping the farmer, but followed him, grubbing up the roots so fiercely that the farmer's legs were endangered. Train also gives one account of the gift of clothes. A gentleman was building a large house at Sholt-e-Will at the foot of Snafield Mountain. All the stones were lying ready quarried on the beach, among them a large and beautiful block of white marble which was too heavy for all the masons together to lift. However, Fenoderee carried it and all the rest up from the shore to the site in one single night. The gentleman, wishing to reward him, ordered a fine suit of clothes to be made for him. Fenoderee picked them up one by one, saying:

‘Cap for the head, alas, poor head!

Coat for the back, alas, poor back!

Breeches for the breech, alas, poor breech!

If these be all thine, thine cannot be the merry glen of Rushen.'

And with that he went wailing away.

Sophia Morrison tells a rather different version of the story in which Fenoderee was working for the RadclifFes of Gordon. During his time there he was dissatisfied with Big Gordon, the farmer, because he blew hot and cold with the same breath, blowing on his fingers to warm them and his porridge to cool it. But he left Gordon in the end because of a gift of clothes, and with a very similar rhyme. In his next place he put himself to great trouble to round up a hare with the sheep, as so many hobs have done. In Sophia Morrison's tale he seems rather more of a bogie, for he once terrified the miller's wife in Glen Garragh Mill, and was set by her to draw water with a sieve so that she could bake him a cake. According to Miss Morrison, too, the Fenoderee has a wife with whom he quarrels like an ordinary stone-throwing giant. There seems to be some confusion here.

Walter Gill, in A Second Manx Scrapbook (p.326), translates 'Yn Folder Gastey', 'The Nimble Mower', a delightful song about the
Fenoderee:

Finoderee stole at dawn to the Round-field

      And skimmed the dew like cream for a bowl;

The maiden's herb and the herb of the cattle,

      He was treading them under his naked sole.

He was swinging wide on the floor of the meadow,

      Letting the thick swath leftward fall;

We thought his mowing was wonderful last year,

      But the bree of him this year passes all!

He was lopping the blooms of the level meadow,

      He was laying the long grass ready to rake;

The bog-bean out on the rushy curragh,

      As he stroked and mowed it was fair ashake!

The scythe that was at him went whizzing through all things,

      Shaving the Round-field bare to the sod,

And whenever he spotted a blade left standing

      He stamped it down with his heel unshod!

Later he says:

Finoderee's handling of his yiarn mooar was ... masterly, as might have been expected from one of his superb physique. Moreover, in that age of gold, before he suffered his rebuff* from the thankless farmer near St Trinian's, he was more willing and more energetic than ever since. He was more numerous, or more ubiquitous, too, and most of the larger farms were lucky enough to possess one of him. As we may gather from the song, he was then not too shy to start work at daybreak and let himself be seen and admired in the grey light by the respectful villagers, while they peeped over each other's shoulders through the sallies and alders that screened the little verdant meadows of the Curragh Glass. In the days ere he lost confidence in Manxmen he not only mowed for them, he raked and carried for them, reaped, made bands, tied sheaves and built the stack for them, threshed it and stacked the straw again, herded sheep and cattle, and whisked horseloads of wrack and stone about the land like the little giant he was. He attacked his jobs like a convulsion of nature, making the hard ground soft and the soft ground water — hence the Curraghs. When he mowed he flung the grass to the morning star or the paling moon without heed to the cock's kindly word of warning from the near-by farmyard. He could clear a daymath in an hour and want nothing better than a crockful of bithag afterwards. The concentrated fury of his threshing resembled a whirlwind, an earthquake. Doomsday; his soost was a blur and the air went dark with the flying husks. In the zeal and zest of his shepherding he sometimes drove an odd animal over the cliffs, allowing, but he made up for that by folding in wild goats, purrs and hares along with the sheep. For he was a doer, not a thinker, mightier in thew than in brain, and when he should have been cultivating his intelligence at the village school between his nights of labour he was curled up asleep in some hiding-place he had at the top of the glen.

It will be seen in this passage that Gill thinks it possible that the Finoderee was plural, not singular, but this would discount the story of his banishment.

Dora Broome, in Fairy Talesfrom the Isle of Man, has a rather different story, in which Fenoderee is invoked by a foolish man to cure his little red cow. Fenoderee appears and cures the cow but carries it off'in the end. It is interesting to see how many of the widely-spread anecdotes, some of them international tale types, have attached themselves to the Fenoderee.

[Motifs: F252.4; F381.3; F405.11]