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Rawhead and Bloodybones: The Boogeyman in Cautionary Tales

© Sarah Davis

As any parent can tell you, children are both naturally curious and hungry for parental attention. It therefore follows that, at some stage of early life, every child's favourite word is "why". The fact that young children ask "why?" constantly, while their actual comprehension of cause and effect may be somewhat limited, sometimes leads to frustrated inventiveness on the part of caregivers.

Rather than launching into a theological debate with a youngster who will not say his prayers or delivering a lecture on the potential toxicology of mushrooms or apple seeds to a curious two-year-old, many a parent, in an attempt to save time or sanity, has employed an inventive threat beginning with the phrase, "If you don't be good.."

" Little boys who don't say their prayers wet the bed.", the child might be told, or, " If you eat the seeds, a tree might grow in your stomach.", or even, "Little girls who pick toadstools are carried off by the fairies."

I am not arguing that the use of this sort of cautionary tale denotes good parenting. In fact the trauma of some of these parental pronouncements may affect children long after their original queries are forgotten. However, it is interesting to note that generations of such cautionary tales, combined with the potent childhood imagination itself have populated many folkloric traditions with a diverse collection of boogeymen.

In the British North American tradition, perhaps the most familiar cautionary tale of this type appears in the refrain of James Whitcomb Riley's "Little Orphant Annie", in which a domestic servant advises children that, "the Gobble-uns 'll git you/Ef you don't watch out! " The main activity of Riley's goblins seems to be the abduction of 'naughty' children, the classic occupation of boogeymen everywhere.

In the British Isles, the term "goblin" was commonly used to describe both friendly house- or forest- spirits, such as brownies and hobgoblins, and fearsome traditional boogeymen or bugbears. Examples of malevolent British goblins include Rawhead and Bloodybones, an English 'closet monster' who lurks in the dark corners of houses, and the Scottish Redcap, a bloodthirsty goblin who makes his lair in ruins or piles of stones along lonely roadsides, waiting to assault those who carelessly wander too far from home. Both of these boogeymen abhor religions of all sorts, and are repelled by prayers and liturgical recitations.

In North America, Puritan tradition cast all goblin types as evil spirits, and the words "goblin" and "hobgoblin" retained no positive connotations. Threats of abduction by goblins have been applied by parents in both the European and North American traditions. Examples of the threat of goblin abduction as a cautionary tale appear in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and Maurice Sendak's "Outside, Over There" .

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