Between The Holly Trees

making mischief with the hikey sprites

Pouring an offering of oat milk to keep the hikey sprites sweet :-)

Hyter Sprite: ‘A kind of fairy rather beneficent than otherwise’ - Walter Rye, 1872-3

‘If anything is done or happens of a beneficial kind it is put down by the observer to the work of the hyter sprites’ - Ernest Suffling, History and Legend of the Broad District, c. 1890

Hello my lovely Between the Moons friends, and welcome to a Bracken & Wrack Hikey Sprite special!

The topic for this letter to you was prompted by my memories of this time last year when I was busily working on my 2023 limited edition story-candle - which happened to be called Hikey Sprite.

‘Now dusk creeps up on us earlier than we expect, sparks leap from the fire without warning, we find ourselves splashed by a muddy puddle that definitely wasn’t in front of our feet a moment ago. The Fair Ones, amused by their observations of human trick-or-treating, have decided to make a little mischief themselves’ - 12 November 2023

Now, before we venture further down the path between the holly trees and into the dancing beams of sunlight where fairy folk giggle at us from behind swathes of honeysuckle vine, I need to explain the mismatch between the words ‘hyter’ and ‘hikey’ as they actually refer to the same beings.

Sliding down rainbow-hued sunbeams between the trees in Crow Wood

One of the Hikey Sprite candle vessels before it was filled. They are glazed with wood ash and the pottery stamp is based on an Anglo-Saxon one, which in turn resembles a flint arrowhead - ‘elf-shot’. There are seven symbols on each pot, and everyone knows that seven is a faery number ;-)

As is quite usual with fair-folk denizens, they are not content with one version of their name. Oh no. Just as East Anglian fairies may be Fairises, Fairisees, Frairies, Feriers or Ferishers, so Hikey Sprites answer equally readily to being called Hyter Sprites, Highly Sprites, Highty Sprites or even Hytey Spriteys.

I think it’s clear, though, that all these names refer to the same beings. And, as we shall soon see, it’s no wonder that they often feel especially close by as I wander through Crow Wood or Dragonfly Heath, gaze into the otter stream or venture into the alder carr. Although the folklorist Katherine Briggs, in her Dictionary of Fairies (1976) says that hikey sprites are ‘Lincolnshire or East Anglian fairies’, research in the field yielded a different and more specific definition, and one that is quite exciting if you’re a Norfolk girl like me.