William Henderson in Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties (p.262) cites the authority of the Wilkie manuscript for an instrument of fate called 'the thrumpin' who attended on every man like a dark guardian angel with the power to take away his life. This belief is found on the Scottish Border.

See Gabriel Hounds; Gabriel Ratchets.

One of the Scottish and Irish euphemistic names for the fairies. We find it in Allingham's poem 'The Fairies': 'Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together'.

The Manx equivalent is 'The Lil' Fellas'.

[Motif: C433]

Rather a debatable fairy. The Oxford Dictionary gives the word as meaning a dwarf or something small, a baby eel, a cricket. There is, however, a fairly widespread idea that the proverbial expression 'As merry as a grig' relates to fairies, and in Somerset 'griggling apples' are the small apples left on the trees for the fairies. Ruth Tongue heard a story, 'The Grig's Red Cap', from a groom at Stanmore, Harry White, in 1936, and an earlier version of it from the Welsh Marches in 1912. According to both of these, the grigs were small, merry fairies dressed in green, with red stocking caps, a costume which could indeed apply to fairies in a good many places, as, for example, the wee folk in Ireland. It is possible that the idea of smallness and the expression 'merry as a grig' built up a kind of pseudo-fairy about the word 'grig'.

[Motifs: F236.1.6; F236.3.2]