Where might Kittlerumpit be?
The post for August is about the fictitious village of Kittlerumpit (probably supposed to be in in Dumfrieshire). It is linked the my story of the Green Woman of Kittlermpit which I shall put online shortly.
Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx by John Rhys (1911) is the main source on the internet for the well-known tale of Whuppity Stourie and the Goodwife of Kittlerumpit, a fairy story set in Lowland Scotland. His version is taken from Robert Chambers’ Popular Rhymes of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1858).
Rhys, who includes the story in his rather ponderous discussion of the Rumpelstiltskin motif within a section called Difficulties of the Folklorist, has ’southronized’ Chambers’ Scots to some degree, but the language is still very fine, especially the likes of ‘don’t be Contramawicious, ya huzzy’ from the Fairy Lady in Green who is a very charismatic character in all versions. Chamber’s version, in the original broad Scots of the narrator (his childhood Nurse, Jenny), is online at Google Book Search here.
Chambers does not say where the village of Kittlerumpit is, only that is is somewhere in the ‘Debatable Ground’, meaning the Borders region of Scotland. No such place as Kittlerumpit really existed, but the name is an interesting one, and when I was writing my own version of the tale, I wondered at the sort of place Chambers (or his Nurse) had in mind when ‘Kittlerumpit’ was invented, or if perhaps it was long-standing name for a fictitious place.
Kittle is a variant of the Scots name Kettel, originally a Norse name, originating in Perthshire and common in Scotland. The variants Kettel and Kettle appear in place-names in Perthsire such as Kettlebridge and Kingskettle. There is also a Kittle in Carmarthenshire in Wales.
However, Scots ‘kittle’ also means to tickle or titillate, and it is used in this sense in the well known 18th century song Cam Ye Oe’r Frae France, written to invoke outrage at the lax morals of the English, in which the ‘Kittle Housie’ is a brothel supposedly frequented by King George – or perhaps it suggests that he has turned the royal household into a brothel by bringing over courtsans from Germany. There is a full analysis of the use of the word ‘kittle’ in this context here.
‘Rumpit’, on its own, has no meaning I can discern, and ‘Rump’ as a geographical term is uncommon in Scots and English although Gaelic ton (‘rump’) does occur in place names like Tandbanerse and appears to mean something similar to Drum, i.e. the back of a hill or ridge.
The real place name that is closest to Kittlerumpit is Giltarump, which is a small island in the Shetlands. The name is argued by one writer (David Christison), to derive from Gaelic gill (cavern, narrow glen), with an unknown ending, but in a much more recent article, Richard Coates has it that the name derives from the Scots word Gyltarump, meaning the backside of a sow, gylta being the Norse word for a sow.
As the Goodwife is a pig-farmer, I think we have a winner here. I will suggest that to an adult listener, the name ‘Kittlerumpit’ would have brought to mind both a brothel and the arse-end of a pig, which are quite fitting images given the nature and character of the goodwife. Of course, it might also have put a listener in mind of Rumpelstiltskin if they were already familiar with that name.
So, where might it have been, in the mind’s eye? I’ve put my own version of the town close to the Dale of Nith in Dumfrieshire, because various other Green Lady Fairy tales which I am using as back-up source material are also set there, and generally the Green Lady Fairy seems to have been a more prominent figure in the Western Lowlands than in other parts of the country.
Links to sample source stories about the Green Lady Fairy (mostly in in Dumfries and Galloway, although one from the North East) are found below, linking to the sources at Sacred-Texts.com.
I should distinguish this character from the Green Lady Ghost or the Glaistig, which are quite different in nature and will be the object of other posts and stories. The Green Lady Fairy is generally described as attractive, although also elderly in some cases, and dressed finely in green, with with a very stately bearing. In the Whuppity Stourie version she wears a beaver fur hat.
Extra sources
A Vision of the Dead (Nithsdale)
Green Lady Fairies and Borrowed Grain (North East)
The Tailor of Kirkudbright (Dumfries and Galloway)
By the way, I’m not the only person to have written a new version of this tale. John Warren Stewig has done a version for older children called Whuppity Stourie, and there’s a musical version too, by Lifescapes and Jeff Victor.
Next month: The Red Cap of Nine Stone Rigg
