Habetrot

Habetrot is among the more unusual figures in British fairy tradition — entirely benevolent, utterly non-threatening, and physically described with a candour that suggests genuine folk memory rather than literary invention. She is old, with long pendulous lips distorted from a lifetime of pulling thread across them, and she lives underground in a hillside spinning-cave, surrounded by companions equally grotesque.

Her role is invariably helpful: a young woman threatened by an impossible spinning task — set by a mother or a future husband — is guided by a self-bored stone to Habetrot's cave, where the fairy completes the work overnight. The beneficiary is warned not to reveal who spun the thread, and when asked, Habetrot's companions give their names — names so ugly and comical that the questioning husband vows his wife will never spin again, freeing her from that particular domestic burden forever.

The Scottish Borders versions recorded by Robert Chambers and William Henderson in the nineteenth century are the fullest. Habetrot's domain is specifically located in the Selkirk hills; she is a genius loci as much as a fairy character, and the tale belongs to the same tradition as the English Tom Tit Tot and the German Rumpelstiltskin.