Trows of Spence’s Shetland Accounts

Overview

Spence calls the trows hillfolk and describes communities with marriages, appetites and a need for human fiddlers, midwives, nurses and other services. Their subterranean homes and occasional demands on ordinary households emerge through local stories rather than one standard body portrait. In an account from the Wart o’ Cleat in Whalsay, a midwife at Lunna Ness hesitates to cross a rough sound. The impatient messengers turn her and her two food-kits into three stones. Another account names Catherine Tammasdaughter of Fraam Gord: a spell keeps her husband asleep while she is taken rapidly by boat to a cavern at the Wick o’ Gröten in Fetlar. Ointment meant for a newborn touches her eye, allowing her to recognise a woman thought dead. A trow blinds that eye when she reveals what she has seen.

Their musical demands can alter human schedules. John Herculeson, expected early at a Whiteness wedding, appears only on the eve of its concluding day after two days spent playing in a trow dwelling at Wormidale. Spence also recalls an unnamed acquaintance who heard music in the rocks at Gulla Hammar on Valafell, learned it by ear and passed it to a fiddler as The Trowie Reel. The warning against accepting fairy food or payment accompanies these stories. Accounts blaming illness on hillfolk are recorded as historical beliefs, not medical diagnoses.

Household vessels connect the beings to material family traditions. A wooden milking kit near Gungsta is said to fill even from a cow without milk. In another telling a woman cannot move while watching a trow milk her cow; the departing visitor drops the kit. Henry Farquhar or Forker sees a trow anointing a child: a white cock’s crow does not disturb her, but a black cock’s crow forces her departure and releases his immobility. He takes the remaining small jar, later known as Forker’s Pig. Spence says its last possessor gave him the unglazed clay vessel. That claimed custody supports the history of an attributed object, while the supernatural origin remains the accompanying story.

Black and Thomas’s earlier-source compilation provides an Edmondston–Saxby household scene with two trow-wives and a child. A boy sleeping beside the hearth watches them arrive after the household has neglected its expected Saturday-night preparations. Their baby has a third eye in the middle of its forehead. Finding no clean water, they use and spoil the household’s stored liquid food, then dry the child’s clothing at the fire. His continuous watching prevents their departure until one approaches threateningly and makes him blink. The scene gives one infant’s particular body and a conflict over the hearth; the three eyes do not become anatomy assigned to every trow.

The same extracts name Marie Kirstan as a woman repeatedly taken to assist a trow household. She sees them preparing a substitute cow and secretly places her keys inside it; back home, the keys are found in what appears to be her dead cow. Another visit involves ointment for a child, accidentally giving her extraordinary sight. A trow later discovers which eye carries that advantage and blinds it. She refuses food despite their attempt to make it acceptable to her, because accepting it would allow them to keep her. A further episode transports her across the sea to another island and returns her, leaving her cold, tired and wet. Her husband’s greeting releases her ability to tell what happened. These are separate attributed visits, with differing mechanisms and outcomes, compared with Spence’s named midwife narratives rather than merged into one woman’s biography.

Origins & earliest records

John Spence, Shetland Folk-Lore (Lerwick: Johnson & Greig, 1899), Folk-Lore chapter, Trows and Witches.

Records & interpretation

Spence’s historical local collection supplies named participants, localities and attributed recollections; Black and Thomas add separately cited Edmondston–Saxby household and midwife variants. Child anatomy and changed-property episodes are narrative details of the selected witnesses.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

1. 01

   Shetland Folk-Lore: Trows and Witches

   John Spence, collector and narrator · 1899

   Title page and preface identify edition and nearly forty years of collecting; selected accounts, not a universal modern belief.

2. 02

   County Folk-Lore III: Examples of Printed Folk-Lore concerning the Orkney & Shetland Islands, Trow-wives and Marie Kirstan

   George Fraser Black, collector; Northcote W. Thomas, editor · 1903

   pp. 25–28; cites Edmondston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist (1888), pp. 209 and 211. Earlier edition quoted through compilation, not independently collated.

Family & connections

A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

1. Primary collected folklore accountsSpence 1899: Folk-Lore chapterResearch access: 2026-10-05
2. Primary edition metadataSpence 1899: original title page and prefaceResearch access: 2026-10-05
3. Primary printed compilationBlack–Thomas 1903, household trow child and Marie Kirstan, pp. 25–28Research access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.