Elfshot, Part 2

check that one out first. But basically elf shot is a what would you say, rob like, it's a complex of interlocking folk beliefs, not a single belief, but it's found especially in the British Isles and essentially centering on the idea of fairies or elves attacking mortal humans and especially their live stock with supernatural weapons. Would you say that's fair? Yeah? Yeah. There there's a lot going on

in it, as we discussed in the first episode. I mean, on one hand, there there's the interpretation of artifacts, artifacts that from various time periods, both ancient and relatively recent. Uh. There's also the attempt to understand mysterious ailments, mostly in in livestock, but sometimes in human beings as well, and then various folk traditions getting wrapped up into these scripts. And it's also it seems to be highly regional too. Uh so it's uh, it's not. There's not just one

elf aero script. We have multiple scripts. It ends up tying into folk medicine and so forth as well. Yeah, and that folk medicine aspect is is very interesting. I want to come back to that in just a minute.

So in the last episode we we did talk about some direct accounts of folk beliefs about elf shot, especially in Scotland, I think is where a lot of these accounts came from, and they included things like, okay, you have a story where a calf suddenly falls ill and dies with no apparent explanation, and then the farmer confirms that elf shot was the cause because he and his neighbor open up the cow's body and they find a hole in its heart, even though there was no hole

in the hide. So it must have been some kind of supernatural fairy weapon that can pierce through the hide without actually breaking it and strike only the internal organs. And then, of course, when it was believed that there was an injury of this kind caused by an elf for a fairy weapon, uh, there were plenty of magical remedies and rob can you characterize what some of the

main themes in these remedies were. Yeah, some of the main themes included, of course, being able to fetch either the elf arrow or or have an elf arrow that you found, or elf arrows that were in the possession of the town or local community, and using those in the treatment. Oftentimes this would take the form of of immersing them in water and then using that that water either as a drink for the afflicted or as something that is rubbed on the liquid, flickted or poured on

the site of the wounding, that sort of thing. But again, there are a number of different versions of this, and the various wrinkles get added depending on which tradition you're looking at which account. Yeah, other things were just like, hey, mix up some gunpowder with some eggs and stuff like that and then feed that to the cow. Right delicious. But anyway, I wanted to address a question that came

up while we were talking uh talking last time. I didn't have the answer to it at the time, so I decided to look it up before we recorded this episode. And the question is is there such a thing as

the placebo effect for non human animals? Of course, the placebo effect in humans is something that often comes up when we're talking about, well, you're talking about medicine in any context, but it's especially important when you're talking about like the history of pre scientific medicine, Like why did people think that soaking a stone arrowhead and water and then pressing it to their skin had actually healed them

of a disease? Like if you have a you know, any a tumor or a bacterial infection or something, we can be relatively confident that this intervention does not actually shrink the tumor or kill the bacteria. And yet people often thought interventions like this had healed them. So what made them think that? I think some of that can be chalked up to a concept that we did an episode about, I think last year. It was a statistical phenomenon called regression towards the mean or regression to the mean.

But you can also think of this concept as returning to the baseline. So UH as a quick explainer for that, imagine you suddenly get a pain in your foot and you've never had that pain before, and you're like, ah, it really hurts. I don't know what to do, but your friend says, well, I know what to do. You have to sing a Gregorian chant and then you have to lick the morning do from a spider's web. So

you try that out. You want your foot to stop hurting, and then what do you know, sometime after that, your foot does stop hurting. Now, in a situation like this, we we really all have a tendency to think something has been proved here, like, ah, the spider do did work, But actually, how do you know that your foot wouldn't have stopped hurting on its own, just as soon if you didn't do any of that stuff. In fact, the

whole point is that your foot doesn't usually hurt. The state of pain is an outlier, that's an anomalous condition, So things going back to normal on a certain time scale is a totally expected outcome, all things being equal, and regression to the mean is especially important in medicine because it tends to be specifically when we're in an anomalous condition, a condition that is not normal for us,

that we seek medical interventions. So if you want to know if a medical intervention actually works or not, you have to compare its efficacy against a say, placebo control group. Instead of just giving somebody a treatment and saying did you get better? If you do that, you don't know if they would have gotten better anyway. Having the comparison between the two groups gives you confidence in the efficacy.

But on top of just the regression to the mean as a as a baseline effect, you've also got psychological effects where if you actually compare people who receive an intervention like a medicine or a ritual or a doctor's visit versus people who don't receive any intervention, sometimes people who receive an intervention have better outcomes on average, even if there's no way that intervention is actually doing anything.

If it's like you know, pressing the arrowhead deer skin. Uh. This might be considered the pure placebo effect, improved outcomes associated with an intervention even though it's not doing anything mechanistically or chemically to solve the problem. And though the placebo effect shows up for a range of conditions and treatments, it seems to be especially powerful for conditions that are modulated by the brain, such as the perception of pain

and other types of discomfort. So, to bring it back to the question of of elf shot cattle, could it be possible that a non human animal benefits from the placebo effect of a magical cure in some way, even though they can't understand the concept of medicine or develop expectations that the magical cure would heal them. Uh. And the you know the thing I was wondering about what

this is. There's evidence that some placebo effects and humans are created not so much by the expectation that the treatment is efficacious, but by the reassurance felt in the presence of a doctor or nurse who has a good bedside manner. And I thought, well, maybe it's possible that animals could be calmed or soothed by certain kinds of human attention, even if they're not able to understand that

it is for the intended purpose of healing. So anyway, I went looking this up and I found an interesting article by Emily Antis, who is also the author of a book we've talked about on the show before called The Great Indoors that's all about the effects of living and spending time indoors. But this was an article published in the Atlantic in twenty nineteen called a Crucial blind Spot in Veterinary Medicine. So the top line answer here

is a clear yes. There is such a thing as the placebo effect in non human animals in veterinary medicine, but it probably works by different means than the human version of the placebo effect. So here's an example, and this begins by talking about a particular study of treatments for canine epilepsy epilepsy and dogs. This research was being carried out in the early two thousands. I think this was in the year two thousand three, and the citation

here is the Journal of Veterinary Medicine. The article was called Placebo Effect in Canine Epilepsy Trials and the authors were Munyana, Jong and Patterson, eventually published in two thousand ten. And the story is that the researchers were testing an ant convulsant drug called uh leave tarrassetam, and it was

intended to curtail epileptic seizures in dogs. So in the test group, the group that was actually getting the drug, eight six percent of dogs of their owners reported a reduction in seizure frequency, which bodes very well for the drug. But then the study also happened to have a placebo control group, which we're receiving a dummy treatment that was supposed to do nothing, and in that group, seventy nine percent also saw a reduction in reported seizures seventy nine

compared to eighty six. That's that's impressive, right, Well, it would tend to make you doubt that that the test group, that that it's actually the drug that is making the difference.

So at the time of this study, Anthes notes that the double blind placebo controlled trials were not all that common in veterinary medicine, which makes sense on one hand because again, like non human, animals are not thought to be able to develop expectations about a about a drug treatment or the efficacy of medicine, So how could you

expect a placebo effect to exist in dogs? But it's a good thing to study did use such a controlled design, because otherwise the medicine would have looked really good until you realize that fake medicine leads to results that look about the same or almost as good. I guess it's just the healing power of pill pockets, right, my god, you can never doubt the hand that those things stink so much and dogs love them. What do they put in those things? Do do you work in a pill

pocket factory? Tell? Maybe we don't want to know what goes into pill pocket. That would be that's Halloween content. I have not had a good run with with feline pill pockets. Um oh, I'm sorry, and I'm not to say they don't. You know, they work in some some cats, and some cats are not crazy about them. My cat will spit it out and then like dissected. And in some brands of pill pockets you just didn't want to want a piece off anyway, She's like, no, not eating that.

So do you ever use the trick this? This works for us in the past where if if the animal is skeptical of the pill pocket with the pill in it, you first have to give them an empty pill pocket that has no pill in it, so they get used to like, oh yeah, I can just eat this straight up. And then the second one or the third one you give them. I mean, that's a lot of pill pockets if you're stacking it up. But if you're desperate, you

can try the empty pill pocket first to lower their defenses. Well, you'd think that would work, but we ended up using the water syringe to just blast it into the back of her throat and that seems to work well again and that's a method that's not going to work for every cat either, So it's uh, it's tough getting the meds in these animals sometimes. Oh and I should also

know that. So the main study uh Anthes is talking about here in this article is in dogs, but she also cites studies that have reported placebo effects in cats and in horse is. Uh So, anyway, how on earth could this be? Like again, we're assuming that dogs themselves are not developing expectations that a drug will be effective. I think that's a very fair assumption. They don't understand what's going on. How on earth could such a strong

placebo effect manifest? And a number of ideas are discussed

in this article. One is, when we already talked about regression to the mean, right, people are more likely to enroll in a clinical trial for their dogs epilepsy if seizures have been especially bad lately, And conditions like epilepsy tend to sort of wax and wane on their own anyway, So you know, you could enroll the dog at a time when their seizures are bad, and then that would just tend to, by the law of averages, give way to a period where they return to the baseline and

have fewer seizures, So again, a good reason to have a placebo control group to compare your test group to. UH. Second thing that I thought was interesting, Anthes sites something called the hawthorne An effect, which is the idea that people often behave differently when they know they're being studied

or observed. I think the name of this effect comes from UH some anecdote about industrial productivity research which found all kinds of spurious effects for things like, oh, what would happen if we change the lighting in this room? Are workers more productive? Oh? It turns out they are. But then one ex post facto explanation for all these spurious results is just that when employees know that they're part of an experiment, they are more productive because they

know they're being closely scrutinized. Now, this would not apply so much to the dogs themselves, but probably to the owners. So in the case of the epilepsy studying dogs, Antis writes that UH that all of the dogs in the study were already on at least one other anti seizure medication, and the leaveder acetam was being studied as a supplemental drug.

So one possibility is that once enrolled in a study, pet owners may have been more consistent about making sure their dogs got all doses of their pre existing pretested epilepsy medication on time. Other possible explanations what about more

attentive veterinary care. It's possible that while enrolled in the study, the animals were we're getting special attention from from vets, and this would be partially in line with the explanation I was guessing about beforehand, something roughly parallel to the effect of a reassuring doctor or nurse. Uh. And I think it is a pre existing finding that sometimes gentle affectionate attention from humans can help animals like dogs and horses show fewer symptoms of discomfort or anxiety and things

like that. In some cases, you could actually have classical conditioning. Uh. Probably, it's hard to see how it would apply to this case, but Anti writes quote for example, rats that have regularly been getting insulin injections will still experience blood sugar changes if they suddenly start receiving saline injections instead. Again, I don't think this would apply directly to the epilepsy study,

but you can imagine it applying to other studies. But then the primary explanation favored by anthis in this article is something called the caregiver placebo effect or the placebo effect by proxy. And this one's pretty straightforward when you think about it. Animals can't report or explain their own symptoms.

Understanding the symptoms experienced by an animal, whether that's something like a seizure or whether it's something even more elusive like discomfort or pain, that requires human observation of some kind, usually reports by the pet owners, and the pet owner absolutely can form expectations about improvement based on believing that their pet is getting a treatment of some kind, even though their their pet might actually be in the placebo

arm of the study. They don't know that. If it's a good if it's a well designed study, uh so they think their pet might be receiving the actual drug. They form expectations that the pet will be getting better, and thus they they interpret everything they see in light of those expectations. Because again, seizure frequency in the study in question was measured by owner reports, and you might imagine, well, okay, you know, it's it's pretty clear whether a dog is

having a seizure or not. Well, you might assume that, but in fact, pet owners are not always there to see a seizure take place. Sometimes you have to interpret ambiguous evidence. So the example given in the article is, if there's a spot of saliva on the floor, is that a sign that the dog had a seizure unobserved and drooled on the floor or is that just nothing?

Did the dog just dripped? Rule? Because they just dripped? Rule. Uh. If if the owners believe their dogs are receiving a drug that will help reduce the seizures, does that actually make the owner less likely to interpret that evidence as evidence of a seizure. Yeah, Okay, I see what. I see what you're talking about here. Okay, Like I well, he's on the medicine, So I guess that's that's not

a seizure drule, that's just druel. Yeah. The article also cites a veterinary surgeon at the University of Minnesota named Michael Consimius who gives a really interesting example from a

different study. This was a study on anti inflammatory treatments for arthritis in dogs, and they did a trial that involved both subjective and objective measurements of how well this anti inflammatory was doing to reduce reduce arthritic pain in the limbs, and so the subjective measure was you would ask both pet owners and veterinarians to observe the dog and rate how much pain they seem to be in.

And then there were also objective measures, and this would be having the dog walk on a on a complicated setup of digital scales to determine how much weight the dogs were putting on each limb while walking, because if the dog, if one of the dog's limbs is in pain, they will tend to put less weight on that limb. And this study found conflicts between the subjective measures and

the objective measures. So in the placebo group, owners and vets who thought the dog might be receiving the drug but actually they were just getting a placebo, reported improvements, but the objective measure, the scales did not show improvements. So the in the placebo group they're getting a fake treatment. The owners and the veterinarians are like, yeah, we think the dog is doing better, but when you put them on the scales, they're still not putting weight on that limb.

So the dog itself is not affected by receiving the placebo,

but the human observers are interestingly even the veterinarians. This is interesting because when we first raised the question about BOTHO effected animals and then when you brought up dogs here, my first thought was, well, dogs are are highly social animals, so perhaps there is some sort of social by namic between the way that they're human is treating them, like maybe it has to do lee, and maybe it has to do with with pill pockets, like oh, I'm getting

more snacks or I'm getting more attention or something like that. And then that of course would be something that would not seem to readily translate into the livestock world. But what we're looking at here these are examples that, if I'm not mistaken, would translate rather readily into the world of caring for livestock. Yeah, because it's about the human observers, like the cow whatever is making it into these reports that are in like anthropological texts or you know, folklore

journals or whatever. The cow doesn't actually get to write that report that's made by humans, and it's usually going to be like the farmers saying, yeah, my cow got better or something like that. And they could well be affected by caregiver placebo effect. They form expectations of efficacy, and they interpret what they see through that lens. Another thing is that this article reports how sometimes animal pain

is observable to one human onlooker but not to another. Again, just based on expectations, like our emotional biases are very strong in this area. And and one example given would be a you know, a pet owner brings an animal into the vet and it was in pain before, and the vet observes that the animal does still appear to be in pain, but the owner says, no, no, no, he's not he's in he's much better now. I've been giving him these homeopathic treatments I found. And you know,

that's a mix of things. Like the pet owner, they love their pet, so they desire to believe that the beloved animal is doing better. And then on top of that, you could have like a choice supportive bias bias too, you know, where you interpret reality in a way that that supports the idea that what you have decided to do was the right decision. So the choice supportive bias

says your selected intervention is working. And that may be a magical treatment or a or a non science based intervention like homeopathy or something, and that can blind you too. Signs of distress that other unbiased onlookers could see. Yeah. Yeah, because because at least you feel like you're doing something in those cases, and or you're consultant. You may be consulting experts in the local community that are also assuring you like, yeah, this is the way to go, this

is what will will get results. Yeah. And I think the important thing to stress here is that this occurs. You don't have to be like an uncaring you know, companion to to your non human animal of whatever type. It is like you can care very much about their well being and have this kind of bias. It's not like a result of being cold and unfeeling and cruel. So just a couple of final notes on this article.

One is just a big takeaway is you should be careful when observing the symptoms of of a non human animal, of a pet or whatever, uh, not to let these kinds of biases prevent you from finding the most effective treatment or solution. You know, whenever possible, try to look for objective pieces of behavioral evidence that remove your subjective evaluation from things. And then the other thing is about

the standards of evidence within veterinary medicine. Unfortunately, the history of veterinary studies has included fewer double blind, placebo controlled trials than human medicine. Because again, for a long time, nobody really thought placebo effect would come into play in a major way in veterinary medicine. But it looks like, at least in some cases, it really does, especially when

that reported outcomes are based on owner's perceptions. And so this is changing and more more evidentiary standards like this are being introduced into veterinary medicine. But it may mean that the evaluation of the true efficacy of veterinary medicine has in some cases, especially when the basis is older, maybe on a lower standard of evidence than in human

drug trials. But fortunately that that is changing. But anyway, so I'm bringing all this back to thoughts about how this could relate to like a Scottish farmer in the seventeenth century who believes that his his cow is sick or his horse is sick because it has been elf shot, it has been you know, hit by a ferry arrow and summon someone to provide a magical cure that maybe involves neolithic flints or egg mixed with gunpowder and healing their cow I I wonder how it relates to that.

I mean, I would guess that the specifically that last when the caregiver placebo effect would would be a major factor here. Yeah, yeah, I think so that seems to be the That would seem to be the key. Though. It also makes me wonder about the idea of a of an inverse thing. This is not addressed in the article at all, but a a caregiver no sebo effect.

I mean, it makes me wonder how you could have anxieties or beliefs about danger, other kinds of things taking place purely within the mind of the animal caregiver that give rise to spurious diagnoses of of illness or symptoms in the animal. Like what if actually the cow was fine.

The farmer just gets freaked out about the idea that, oh, no, something bad is happening to my cow for some reason, and and that brings on the illusion of distress, which could then be treated by some kind of magical intervention, and then what do you know of the cow's fine afterwards? Yeah.

This is especially possible given some of the the linked or perceived to be linked activities to elf shot, the cases where humans did something they shouldn't have to attract the attention of the elves, be it, you know, trumping on sacred ground, cutting down of a sacred tree, um or or or so something of this nature, um or even just the finding of the elf ere like this was curious. I was out with my cattle and I found this artifact on the ground. It's clearly an artifact

of the elves. I better check on my cattle and see how they're doing. Oh, this one's not doing too well. Oh yeah, I didn't make that connection with the picking up of the flint, but yeah, that makes sense. Thank you, Thank you. Now, there was a paper we talked about a little bit in the previous episode that I wanted to come back to and just mention a couple of more interesting little stories from uh. It was that paper called elf Shot Cattle by Thomas Davidson that was published

in the journal Antiquity in nineteen fifty six. Remember, this is the one that was collecting a lot of those reports about elf shot. One of the things that caught my attention was the claim that a lot of times these injuries from elf shot are not inflicted directly by

fairies or elves themselves. Davidson cites an author named Luid writing that there's a belief among some that fairies have to use humans as intermediaries in order to inflict these injuries, since the fairies have little power to cause direct physical injury to animal bodies them selves. So sometimes these stories say humans are like sucked up into the air by fairies and then given fairy weapons and then forced to shoot at men or cattle. M So okay, so sort

of possession going on here. Yeah. One example of this is a story called the Tale of Black Donald of the Fairy Throng Uh. And this is a story where there's this guy named Donald and he's out plowing. He's plowing the land, he's working in the furrows, and this is on the Aisle of Tyree, which is off the coast of Scotland. And Donald's he's plowing and he gets uh sucked up by a fairy convoy and uh, and then they force him to drop an arrow from the

sky that kills a speckled cow. And this actually connects with some of the critical stuff I was reading about the elf shot tradition, which says that actually in a lot of these stories, it is being alleger that it's he whoman's who are doing the inflicting, like witches or something who are inflicting damage with these weapons rather than

elves directly. Interesting and in the end this it gets into a common trope in many cultures of the of sort of like the outsider within somebody within the community, either somebody from outside the community or somebody within the community that has been corrupted somehow. Yeah. Yeah, one thing

I had to mention just because it was funny. There there's a long section of this paper that talks about alleged cures for elf shot, and one is a recorded anecdote of a wise woman curing a cow in the Shetlands by asking the crofter, the farmer, to bring her a Bible, and he brings the Bible, and she rips pages out of the Bible and balls them up into a pellet and then crams the Bible page pellet into

a dimple in the cow's skin. Then there's another one I have to share because it involves crabs and and raises a mr for me that I cannot solve. So maybe the listeners have some input on this. So this is from a source Davidson sites called Shetland folklore. This is a book by Spence, and I'm going to read directly from Davidson summary here. Oh, I'm sorry, this is

still about traditions in the Shetlands. Quote. A variant prescription from the same area directs the wise woman to take tar, a needle, a bible, a fire brand, and some fairy crabs. Waving the burning brand, she walked three times witter shans round the cow. That means counterclockwise three times witter shans round the cow, jabbing the animal with the needle, waving a leaf of the Bible over its back, and muttering

an incantation. The firebrand was placed in a pot of tar and set at the cow's head so the fumes would make her cough. She was then given the fairy crabs to eat alive. The ashes of the fire brand were later mixed with the tar into three pills, which were administered to the animal on three successive mornings. What so involves eating the fairy crabs alive, it says she, And I'm sorry, I'm not sure if that means the

cow or the wise woman. I think that means the cow. Yeah, I remember reading this in the source during the initial research phase. And I could not figure out what fairy crabs where. I was like, yeah, it was I was trying, my mind was struggling to form. I was just imagining like a glowing blue crab. I was confused too, and I tried to look this up. There is an animal called a fairy crab, you can see it if you

google that phrase. But it's clearly not what this is referring to, because it's a species of squat lobster called the scientific name is Laurea gianni and it's native to the Pacific. It's found like off the coast of Australia and UH and Indonesia. I think, so this is clearly not what they're talking about in the Shetlands. And I was trying to find more information and I just could not.

So I wonder if this refers to I don't know, if this is a local Shetland name for a certain type of animal, like an actual crab or some type of insect or something. I really have no idea. Yeah, I can imagine it going in different directions, some sort of novel crab that's found on the shore or or turned up in nets, or or indeed something that is found uh. You know, in in streams, or is not a crab at all, but some sort of an insect

with some sort of folk medicine properties to it. Or I mean certainly we have examples in in plenty of cultures where something is named after an animal, but it's not itself an animal. It could be you know, you can imagine a situation where the fairy crab is actually some sort of a root, uh something into that effect. So there's so many different directions that could go in not not knowing exactly what this is referring to. Well, hey listeners, if you've got inside on this, you know

what the fairy crabs are, right in. One last subject that Davidson brings up with respect to elf shot is the idea of of curved plow furrows and ridges in order to quote Wander the fairy, which I found so interesting.

It's the idea that if you you go throughout Scotland and you look at some old cultivated fields, you'll find, you know, these places that are uh, they're they're dug with a what's known as like a ridge and furrow system, So you'll see a series of basically you know, lines where like you'd have a plowed area and then like a sort of ridge of of moved earth piled up

in between them. And an interesting thing about a lot of these is they are created with with so that the ridges and the furrows are not straight lines, but are curved or crooked or s shaped even. And it is believed by some that the purpose of this is to confuse or quote wander the ferry to uh, to maybe lead the ferry off course or lead the elf

off course. This is not the only system, by the way, that would use this, Like Davidson notes that a lot of amulets that are designed for protection against fairies have a rays of kind of spiral patterns or can you know, complex whirls within them, or labyrinths or something, and that this is designed to confuse the evil spirits, to kind of send them on a on a maze like journey that will lead them astray and keep them from harming you.

These If if you haven't seen these ridgin furrow features, definitely look them up to do an image search, because you can see lots of wonderful aerial photographs of this sort of thing. And yeah, you can sort of imagine the trail of the of the elf going astray here. Oh, some of the ones you're looking at are the curved ones, because some are just straight, but others some are just straight. But I was looking at one in particular here where you do see you kind of see a mix in

this particular one. You see the different areas of land and definite curves in some areas where and one kind of has like almost like a fern look because you have the line going down the middle and you have some like like different wavings on each side. So the magical understanding here again is that this, well, it could throw fairies off just generally because you know, you you

make twisting paths in order to confuse evil spirits. But the other thing would be it doesn't allow them to get a clear straight line shot at the cattle, like at the oxen that you're using to plow the field. Yeah, this is strange, Like this idea of the elf is kind of like this. Uh, you know, I guess you look at different folklore systems, it's like you want to

avoid doing things that draw attention to yourself. You know, we definitely see that with the elf and fairy folk traditions, and in this part of the world with the wearing of green, which we've discussed before. Don't wear the green that's the color of the elves or the fairies. They'll

come at you. You also see that with editions of the Evil Eye in the Middle East, where there are various things like you should not do because this invisible nefarious forces out there in the world, and you do not want it aware of your presence or your fortune. So you don't. Don't, don't get on its radar, don't have direct lines leading to you, be that line something like you know, you're shouting about how beautiful your child is.

Um you know, in the case of some of the Evil Eye traditions in particularly in Judaism, I remember hearing about reading about um or or in this case, like a physical line through the altered landscape. I think this type of belief is still present even in like modern day and Christianity. Like I remember when I was a kid hearing about the dangers of playing with a weigia board, and the idea was it attracts demonic attention. I mean, it's literally like the it's it's like when you play

with a wegia board. It's not so much something about the board as evil, but it. It's sort of like puts up a beacon to demons that says, hey, I'm available. Uh, you know, pay attention to me, and they will hone in on you because you have done that. Yeah. Oh. In quick note, I mentioned Judaism and the evil eye and so forth. The evil eyes not necessarily like a

part of Judaism. I don't want to imply that, but it is something that is sort of in the folklore traditions of various people in the Middle East, including you'll

see that in Judaic culture. Yeah. And certainly we see similar site case with with this here because we have people who are discussing that have taken you know, that have converted to Christianity, and that they're still they're still practicing beliefs, they're still engaging in belief of the elves, but they're also incorporating in some of these Christian traditions like well, maybe maybe you know, wat up a Bible page and stick it into that furrow in the cow

and that will help to this is this next thing is not really addressed in Davidson, but I was wondering about this, uh, because I was reading about the ridge and furrow system elsewhere after after reading this passage from Davidson, and it seems to me that sometime the strips that are plowed in this system are curved for totally mundane reasons that have nothing to do with magical beliefs. I think that they're they're often curved just because of Uh.

It was a sort of necessary consequence of the types of plow rigging and and oxen pulling teams that they used at the time. They would lead to a farrow or ridge being kind of like curved off at each end every time the team turned around to make a

new line. Uh. And that makes me wonder if something like twisting twisting in these rows could have originally been a totally mundane thing that somebody saw and then in trying to explain why it was like that without understanding it, they came up with this explanation about confusing the ferries and then afterwards did did it like that on purpose? It's like like somebody like that. The landowner whoever comes out to check on the work is like, Dale, what's

going on with these ridges and furrows? Look and look at it. It's just like I can tell it's crooked. And Dale was like, well, do you want the fairies coming straight at you. I didn't think, so You're welcome.

This of course also reminds me of on one hand this and this may have well be connected, uh, the the idea that vampires might be deterred by hanging some sort of a nodded item or or carefully woven item out for them, like a complex pattern that will draw their attention and they have to deal with and maybe get they'll either spend all their time doing that and leave you alone, or perhaps even get caught in the

sunlight the loose track of time. And then of course I can't help but think of crop circles as well, which again, as we've discussed I think we've discussed this in the show before. I mean crop crop circles are pretty much put to bed as a you know, is

the work of human actors. But thinking about like sort of the draw to do this to a field, like the human um intention to do this, and there's there are several factors that can play into that someone which may actually they come up in our next episode of such to blow your mind. But um, but the the idea of like just seeing that field, like I wonder if there's some sort of draw that like, no, the

lines are too too perfect. Everything is just too pristine, like this this this, this land has been too finely transformed. We gotta get some swirls in there. We gotta get some circles, you know. Yeah, that is a good comparison. I didn't think you were going to crop circles though. I thought you were going to mention the jung she being uh being warded off by spilling glutinous rice on the floor because they'll I think they'll be counting the grains, right. Oh, yeah,

that that also, that's a good point as well. I've forgot about that one, something about yeah, the the inhuman analytical mind of the of of non human beings and folklore, and that there they can be led astray by and by either random randomized patterns or things of of human creation that have some sort of eloquence to them, which is kind of ironic given that we're talking about situations where human beings may in some cases of just like

completely flipped their wig over finding an old flint arrow in the dirt. So I I guess it cuts both winds. Now, there's one more paper. I wanted to briefly mention that gets way more into the weeds about a particular text that is believed or has been believed to reference elf shot. But I thought this was interesting too. So this was a paper by a professor of English at the University of Leeds named Alaric Hall called Calling the Shots the Old English Remedy Gift Horse of Scotland CE and Anglo

Saxon elf Shot, published in two thousand five. So this paper is mainly an attempt to critically re examine an Anglo Saxon text called Gift Horse of Scotland c. Which is a passage from a medieval Anglo Saxon medical text that has been widely interpreted as being about elf shot. The title gift Horse of Scott and c. Translates to if a horse be and then the word is off scotten, And the question is what does of Scott mean? It's been traditionally translated as elf shot if a horse be

elf shot. Hall argues that it should not be understood that way, and yet there are still references to elf attacks within the passage. So this is Hall's translation of this text, which is interesting in itself. If a horse be off Scott take, then a dagger who's halft is of fallow Ox's horn, and in which there are three brass nails. And then there's a term that every time is rendered as right slash. Inscribe, I'm just gonna say, inscribe. Inscribe on the horse on the forehead, Christ's mark, so

it bleeds. Inscribe then Christ's mark on the spine, and on each of the limbs which you can grasp. This, shall you do take a staff strike on the act, then the horse will be well. And inscribe on the daggers handle. These words been a de cite omnia opera domini dominum, which means bless all the works of the Lord of lords. Should it be Alf's which is on it,

this will do as a remedy for it. And so Hall makes the argument in this paper that the primary condition being described in this text under the word off scotten should not be translated as elf shot, as it traditionally has been. But it's something like badly pained. It's more more mundane condition that is prompting this entire remedy. However, even if that's correct, the last line of the remedy does mention the idea of this word alf the a

E combined vowel and then l f e uh. Though this sentence is also kind of difficult to translate, the one that's got the alfh in it. I think that the understanding that makes the most senses, this whole remedy is for regular bad pain and horses, and then there's an additional remedy, the one that's riding on the daggers handle the words bless all the works of the Lord

of lords. Uh. That additional remedy is like a special extra dose of holiness that should be applied if the cause of the horses pain is injury by an elf. Though it doesn't explain how you tell the difference between normal bad pain and bad pain caused by an elf. You know, of course, the the elf injury being even more unholy and requiring more holiness or more piety in order to undo either way you shake it. From a modern perspective, it's a lot of uh cutting and striking

of a pain horse. Yeah, jeez, you feel bad for the horse now, as we uh, As we go to close out this look at elf shot, I did want to come back to some basic questions, some of which we've already got into, concerning the art theology of elf shot, who were the people who made these artifacts and how did they get to the regions where the artifacts were found? And then of course you know, interpreted and reinterpreted within

these folkloric traditions. Uh. This of course is a broad question because as we've we've mentioned already, we're talking about multiple areas. We're talking about locations throughout the British Isles and even outside of the British Isles. But just limiting the question to the British Isles, were still looking at close to a million years of occupation by various human species,

including Neanderthals. And as for the how they got there, the predominant theories involved land bridges between Europe and Britain that were president at the time. And regarding Ireland, I've seen hypotheses that involve boats, land bridges and also ice bridges. But just to give a few examples that really sort of drive home at the time we're talking about here, Uh,

there are stone tool and footprints in Norfolk. The date back and estibated nine hundred thousand years uh, and these would be the work and the and or the footprints of Homo antecessor. Notable here are the Happisburg footprints in Norfolk, and also a black flint hand axe was also found in this area. So Homo antecessor they were makers of simple stone tools, and it looks like many experts think

that they might not have had mastery of fire. By four thousand BC, e Neolithic culture was firmly established on the British Isles and lasted till roughly Uh, it's just you know, the rough time period of our histories, uh, two thousand, five hundred BC. And of course between three thousand BC and two thousand BC we see the construction of Stonehenge, one, of course the most famous, if not

the most famous testament to prehistoric Britain. And of course even Stonehenge gets wrapped up into various folklore, traditions and folkloric interpretations and reinterpretations that involved at times the wizard Merlin, but also the Christian devil, and even during the Roman period, which would have been a roughly forty three CE two

four tense, the Roman sky god Kalis. More realistically or more on this sort of you know, realistic interpretation and reinterpretation standpoint, it was at one point thought to be credited to the work of Druidic culture. But this culture didn't exist till three d b C, which would have been too late, so the stones were already ancient history to the Druids. Now, another example that I found really interesting of talking about found arrowheads uh in the British Isles.

In archaeologists from the University of Reading discovered a four thousand, five hundred year old flint arrowhead a few miles from Stonehenge, and according to David Dawson, director of the Wiltshire Museum, this particular arrowhead is not only finally preserved, but incredibly fragile, suggesting that it was never actually intended for use in war or hunting, but was rather ceremonial or decorative and or decorative um this was. You can look up images

of this. There was some news articles at the time. The arrowhead was unearthed in two parts, two different digs, five years apart, and it is quite elegent looking. It has like one it has barbs, but one really long barb and elongated barb on one side. So I don't know about you, but I find that really interesting because I think it's easy to think of folkloric interpretation of found objects to be a luxury of later civilizations on the British hiles to think supernaturally about about these about

these items. But certainly, and certainly there's a lot we don't know about concerning pre Roman and prehistoric Britain. But even of forty years ago, uh, this find would suggest that people here were already capable of sublime interpretations and uh and perhaps mystical meanings for their own created artifacts.

That you could have this this sacred arrow, uh that wasn't found, that was made, but some of the same energy that goes into the the the interpretation of these artifacts, you know, thousands of years later, was already present in the cultures that made their home here, right. And so we don't know what it would have been used for, but it's clear that it would not have been useful for actual shooting of an arrow. So you know, it could be decorative, it could be medicinal, some kind of amulet.

It could be magical or ceremonial. We don't know, but in any case, it would be a symbolic arrowhead rather than one used for the literal, direct mundane purpose. Yeah, and so you can imagine at some point in in history after this point, uh, if someone were to find an arrow had like this especially, I mean any arrow had obviously any kind of novel lump of stone um could find itself interpreted as an elf arrow and and

and incorporated into elf shot folklore. But imagine if you found this, you know, clearly and an arrow that that looks too fine to be shot. You know, that's almost ephemeral in its construction, Like who would make this? Why would they make this? Clearly this is the work of the elves. But also I think it's just yeah, it's just worth remembering the the deep history of of of people on the British Isles. You know, it might not

be as deep as uh as some other areas. I like, you know, you're looking at what on France, I think it's what one point fifty seven million years ago we have some of the earliest known evidence of human beings.

But still you have human species on the British Isles. Uh. You know that as early as almost a million years ago, different species, different cultures, different waves of technology and arrivals in the subsequent centuries and millennium millennia, and of course different waves of interpretation and reinterpretation of what came before. All Right, we're gonna go and close it out there, but obviously we'd love to hear from everyone out there.

We'd especially love to hear from folks listening to the show oh on the British Aisles, or folks who have spent time on the British Isles. Perhaps you have some tidbits some local lore to share with us. If so, we'd love to hear from you. Reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a primarily a science podcast that publishes on Tuesdays and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed but on Monday's we do a listener mail episode where we read various missives from our listeners.

On Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster fact. On Friday's we do Weird House Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff

to blow your mind. It's production I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio. This is the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.