The Tiddy Mun

The Tiddy Mun ... seems to be a fen spirit, who can control waters and mists and call up pestilence out of the bogs. A certain affection was felt for him, but he could be dangerous if angered. He sounds eerie enough in the description:

“He dwelt deep down in the green water holes, and came out at evenings when the mists rose. Then he came creeping out in the darklings, limppelty lobelty, like a dearie wee old granter, all matted and tangled, a long grey gown so that they could hardly see him in the dusk, but they could hear him whistling like the wind and laughing like a peewit. He was not wicked like the rest, but he was eerie enough, though the times were when he helped them. For on wet seasons when the water rose to their doorsteps, the whole family would go out together and shivering in the darkness they would call:

‘Tiddy Mun wi’out a name,
Tha watter thruff!’

“They would call it till they heard a cry like a peewit across the marsh, and they’d go home. And next morning the waters would be down.”

The story is that the draining of the Fens so angered the Tiddy Mun that he brought pestilence on the children and the cattle, until he was pacified with lustrations and prayers.

-- Originally in M.C. Balfour, Legends of the Cars in Folk-Lore, Vol II, 1891; cited in Briggs,





Limpelty lobelty the Tiddy Mun haunts the lost wetlands of my words, grey but not ghastly, a ghostly blue phosphor who perambles lands I will never know though I’m ever drawn there here in the next foray into water’s dread wood. He keeps the tide hard at the the shore, an ungoverned pulse of undrinkable blue which thralls my unslakable sense away from the implacably riven and sure.

Puer in his daring, pure senex in his abyss, each wave he sends here is both first and last, merrily hooded with foam and troughed in a black cold falling footless down through regions long dead. It is he that keeps reeling me just offshore of safe poems?

Our Milky Way drifts toward a mass known as the Great Attractor, a mysterium of gas and dark matter that’s scary enough; yet scientists have measured it and found it short of girth thick and feral enough to haul our galaxy so surely. Behind the Great Attractor, they found a group of galaxies they call the Shapeley Supercluster (oh how there’s always a woman involved!!), ten thousand times larger than our Milky Way, sizeable enough to reel us toward it like a fish.

The music of our spheres is throated toward that heaven or hell shimmering darkly behind its front mun, the Great Attractor. There’s something behind that shore where the Tiddy Mun walks, his keening out there like a mist which shrouds something far eerier further out, pure swell and sheer hell and impossible to resist.

He’s the omelet which the egg became, and there’s no going back to the egg though its flavor hangs over my every bite here. Origin haunts the lining of things, lending my voice an eeriness when it sings. Inexorably I write down the leagues of a gravity which is heavier and darker and older every next page that I fill. It has made of me a Tiddy Mun in my own sights, spectral in every way to what the day calls a poet, a warden of waters long drained from the fens, devout in the rout of the angels I tout, laughing high and spectral, almost a wheeze lost in the surf and the night’s hard sighings down from ancient skies. And I am just one broken high half of it, conscious and purposed to the detriment of the thrall which whirls down and round into a void where all numens flicker and fall, that home at last where my every song is reeled by the Tiddy Mun to his Maker, flapping and juicy on the dream’s next wild shore.