Britain is supposed to be a nation of animal lovers, especially when it comes to pet dogs. According to the PDSA, 29% of UK adults own a dog, which gives an estimated population of 10.6 million pet dogs. By comparison, 24% of UK adults have a cat, but because cat owners often have more than one, the population of cats is a little higher, at 10.8 million (2024).
While 29% isn’t a majority, the number of pet dogs in the country has increased over the last few years. So it seems only fair to see how this popular animal appears in folklore. After all, I’ve already covered their eternal nemesis, the cat!
In folklore, they sometimes appear as death omens. Dogs persistently howling meant death was imminent (Hole 1955: 324). And they also appear in mythology, with Cerberus the three-headed dog guarding the Greek Underworld, and Anubis, the jackal-headed god presiding over the weighing of the heart ceremony in ancient Egypt. Let’s not forget Sirius, in the Canis Major constellation, literally known as the dog star.
They take the form of spectral hounds, loyal companions, witches’ familiars, and even give their name to a hangover cure. So let’s explore the folklore of dogs in this article!
Cŵn Annwn
Spectral dogs in folklore often take the form of black hounds. Yet the Welsh Cŵn Annwn are white dogs with red ears. Other descriptions note they are black with red spots, or red with black patches. They can also be blood-red or dripping with gore (Trevelyan 1909: 47). The spectral dogs of Annwn, they’re linked with the Otherworld and appear in the Mabinogi and folklore alike. They’re very much not dogs owned by fairies, but rather fairy dogs in their own right. They belong to Arawn, King of the Underworld.
Hearing them bark is a death omen, especially if you only heard one. Surprisingly, their barks and growls get softer the closer they get. People even reported hearing them near Aberystwyth, and in the Presli Hills, as late as 1897 (Kruse 2024). In some legends, they’re heard most often on “[t]he eves of St. John, St. Martin, St. Michael, All Saints, Christmas, the New Year, St. Agnes, St. David, and Good Friday” (Trevelyan 1909: 47). While in other folklore, they’re most active on stormy nights.
There appear to be several variations in what they did, how often, and where. In some legends, they would pursue those doomed to die within a year of one of their processional nights. Elsewhere, people who weren’t bad enough for Hell but not good enough for Heaven might have to follow the Cŵn Annwn for eternity (Trevelyan 1909: 49).
They’re often referred to as ‘hell hounds’. But, as the incomparable Mhara Starling points out, that’s just because they’ve been demonised by the Christian church (2022: 71).
Beddgelert
And speaking of hounds in Welsh folklore, if you visit the village of Beddgelert in Wales, you can see the grave for Gelert, the faithful dog. According to legend, he was the favourite hound of Llywelyn the Great, a 13th century prince.
The prince and the hound were inseparable, until one day, the prince did what princes do, and married a princess. Llywelyn and his wife had a baby, and Llywelyn started leaving Gelert at home when he went hunting with his wife, trusting only the hound to watch over his son.
One day, they returned from their hunting expedition and found the baby’s room in disarray. The cradle lay on its side, crumpled tapestries fell from the walls, and there were clear signs of a struggle. Worse still, the baby was missing. Seeing the blood on Gelert’s muzzle, Llywelyn assumed the worst and killed the dog with his sword.
As poor Gelert died, a tiny cry came from the shadows in the corner. Llywelyn rushed to find his baby safe and well, but beside the corpse of a huge wolf. The prince realised Gelert had killed the wolf, not his son. Llywelyn gave Gelert a hero’s funeral, and his name went on to name the village, Beddgelert, or Gelert’s Grave.
But!
If you’re as saddened by that story as I was when I first heard it, then fear not! It’s not true! Llywelyn was a real prince, yes. But it’s actually a marketing gimmick, possibly based on much older legends, which potentially come from Asia. It seems pub landlord David Pritchard started telling the story to drum up business. The Victorian audiences lapped it up. Even now, you can buy Gelert memorabilia! It’s more likely the village name was Beddcelert, and may have referred to a warrior or Irish saint (Hankins 2001).
Loyal Dogs
Since we’re on the topic of loyal hounds, we couldn’t talk about dogs in folklore and not talk about Greyfriar’s Bobby. If you’ve never heard the legend, Bobby was a Skye Terrier whose owner, John Gray, was a nightwatchman. Bobby accompanied his owner to work, and when John died in 1858, Bobby refused to leave his grave in Greyfriars’ Kirkyard.
People were touched by Bobby’s dedication, including the kirkyard keeper who built him a shelter. Locals left donations for Bobby and Edinburgh’s Lord Provost gave him a collar in 1867, meaning the new law to destroy unlicensed dogs wouldn’t apply to Bobby. When he died in 1872, he was buried near his master. A statue was erected in his memory near the entrance to the kirkyard on Candlemaker Row. So many people have touched Bobby’s nose that it glows bronze amid the black.
There are some suggestions that the legend isn’t actually true.
Historian Dr Jan Bonderson examined the legend and found plenty of holes. According to the evidence he found, a gardener at George Heriot’s Hospital got tired of a stray mongrel hanging around the hospital, and dumped him in the kirkyard (BBC 2011). The kirkyard keeper, James Brown, adopted him. People would ask about the dog in the kirkyard, and Brown told them. Brown directed tourists asking about Bobby to a local restaurant, owned by John Traill, who in turn gave Brown and Bobby free food. When this dog died, Traill replaced him so they could keep the ploy going. This second Bobby was a Skye Terrier, and he lived until 1872.
I actually found an article in the Sheffield Independent from 1871 that explains how Brown adopted the stray, and Brown concocted a more sympathetic backstory for him for the benefit of visitors. In this article, the author stresses that Brown did so for a joke. After people began to dote on Bobby in droves, it became harder for Brown to come clean. So while the legend of Greyfriar’s Bobby is a lovely story, and in either version Bobby is a loyal dog to his master, it could well be that Bobby’s master to whom he was so loyal was actually still alive at the time…
The Ghostly Newfoundland
Yet Greyfriar’s isn’t the only burial place to boast a legend of a loyal dog that wouldn’t leave his master’s grave. St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin likewise has a tale of such a dog – in this case, a Newfoundland. He was the beloved dog of John McNeill Boyd, captain of the HMS Ajax. Boyd drowned on 9 February 1861 while trying to rescue the crew of the Neptune during a storm.
According to legend, his Newfoundland dog was in the rescue boat that tried to find him. Sadly, no one found his body for weeks, though he was eventually brought back to St Patrick’s Cathedral. The dog refused to leave his grave until it eventually starved. There are reports of the spectral Newfoundland in the graveyard, while the former Dean David Wilson also saw the dog inside the cathedral, by a statue of Boyd (Walsh 2008: 52).
Dog Familiars
So given all this discussion of loyal canine companions, would it surprise you to learn some thought dogs were witches’ familiars? Not only did witches confess to meeting the Devil in dog form, during the Pendle trials, Alizon Device claimed her familiar took the form of a black hound.
During the English Civil War, the Parliamentarians grew convinced that the Royalist Prince Rupert’s dog, Boy, had supernatural powers. According to propaganda, the invincible Boy could find treasure, catch bullets in his mouth, and issue prophecies (Purkiss 2007: 377). Someone shot the poodle at the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644.
In the north east of England, as far as we currently know, the only direct mention of a familiar was a black greyhound (Bath 2002: 19). There are tales of witches turning into cats, but it seems familiars were less of a concept for them.
This is surprising, since the dog was one of the most common animal familiar forms (Wilby 2000: 287). Still, given how many people may have kept dogs to control rodent numbers, to guard livestock, or simply to provide company, it’s unsurprising that dogs might be seen to be familiars. The fact they’re more obedient than cats probably helps!
Hair of the Dog
The phrase ‘hair of the dog’ refers to a folk belief that you could cure a dog bite wound by putting a hair from the dog that caused the bite in the wound. This single hair usually came from the tail. This reflects sympathetic magic, in which the thing that injured you can also be the thing that cured you. Look at the use of ‘elf-shot’ (prehistoric flint arrowheads) to ward off witchcraft, given they were believed to be used by witches to cause illness.
This phrase has had an interesting afterlife in its alternative meaning, in that another drink would cure a hangover. Frank M. Paulsen even researched this and found specific versions of the belief (1961: 161). For example, some stated that you needed to drink Scotch if you’d been drinking Scotch the night before. This is the literal translation of ‘the hair of the dog that bit you’ into hangover cures.
Fairy Dogs
Finally, I didn’t want to dwell on fairy dogs too much since we’ve already covered the Cŵn Annwn and I already have quite an extensive post on the barguest, often described as a goblin dog.
But there was a tale of witchcraft in Lewis from 1899 involving the tooth of a fairy dog that caught my eye. In the description of the court proceedings, Kate MacCaskill offered a ‘not guilty’ plea after accusations by Mrs Mackay that she owned a tooth with “peculiar properties”, including the ability to kill people, or to heal sick men or animals.
The Accusation
According to Mrs Mackay, Mrs MacCaskill needed to put this tooth down her chimney, which would cause a house fire. She admitted she didn’t think it could actually do so, and also didn’t know where the tooth was at the time of the trial. Another witness, Alexander Stewart, even described the tooth, as “larger than a man’s tooth, one end of it red, and the other commencing to decay” (1899: 3). Stewart was the witness that named it as being a fairy dog’s tooth. A third witness reported an incident in which an old woman dipped the tooth in water and then made sick cattle drink said water, which apparently cured them.
Mrs MacCaskill herself denied having the fairy dog’s tooth, but admitted saying that if she had, Mrs Mackay would have been her first victim. When asked where it originally came from, she claimed her great-grandfather acquired it when coming home from Stornoway one night. She conceded it may have come from a fairy.
Ultimately, the Sheriff couldn’t reconcile its ability to both cause house fires and cure people by dipping it in water. He saw the issue as a civil dispute, notably caused since Mrs Mackay was a relative newcomer to the area, and decided that the true root of the problem was a lack of civil welcome to one another. I think that was probably the right call! It’s difficult to reconcile the tooth’s ability to cause fires and cure the sick, though its source in a fairy dog is something that could bear further investigation.
What do we make of dogs in folklore?
There’s a clear theme of the loyal hound within some of these stories, particularly around the tales of Gelert or Greyfriars’ Bobby—or even the Newfoundland in St Patrick’s Cathedral. Those dogs that are believed to have been genuine dogs definitely have that loyalty association.
We then see the pack element that you get with dogs as being central to the Cŵn Annwn. Although in some stories they do go off on their own and wreak havoc as lone dogs, they’re not thought of in the same way that something like the barguest or Black Shuck is. The Cŵn Annwn definitely work better in a group.
With a lot of these stories, they don’t even need to be real to be believed. With both Gelert and Greyfriars’ Bobby, both stories sound plausible given what we know of canine nature. People find them easy to believe because they can believe a dog behaving like that.
That degree of obedience and loyalty is probably what led to them becoming accused as being witches’ familiars. Bear in mind, people thought other animals were familiars as well, including hedgehogs. So the idea of familiars has interesting connotations. While in many of the witch confessions, the familiar is a spirit that takes the form of an animal, the idea of a spirit going out and doing things on your behalf makes more sense if the spirit is a dog.
Which of these tales of dogs had you heard?
References
Bath, Jo (2002), Dancing with the Devil and other True Tales of Northern Witchcraft, Newcastle upon Tyne: Tyne Bridge Publishing.
BBC (2011), ‘Greyfriars Bobby tale is wrong claims Cardiff historian’, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-14424513. Accessed 11 November 2024.
Falkirk Herald (1899), ‘Witchcraft in Lewis: A “Fairy Dog’s Tooth”‘, Falkirk Herald, 5 August, p. 3.
Hankins, Justine (2001), ‘A twist in the tail’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2001/jun/23/weekend.justinehankins. Accessed 11 November 2024.
Hole, Christina (1955), ‘Popular Modern Ideas on Folklore’. Folklore, 66 (3), pp. 321–329.
Kruse, John (2024), ‘‘They called them the demon dogs’- the Cwn Annwn, Welsh Hounds of Hell’, British Fairies, https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/2024/11/03/they-called-them-the-demon-dogs-the-cwn-annwn-welsh-hounds-of-hell/. Accessed 11 November 2024.
Paulsen, Frank M. (1961). ‘A Hair of the Dog and Some Other Hangover Cures from Popular Tradition’. The Journal of American Folklore, 74 (292), pp. 152–168.
PDSA (2024), ‘How many pets are there in the UK?’, PDSA, https://www.pdsa.org.uk/what-we-do/pdsa-animal-wellbeing-report/uk-pet-populations-of-dogs-cats-and-rabbits. Accessed 11 November 2024.
Purkiss, Diane (2007), The English Civil War: A People’s History, London: Harper.
Sheffield Independent (1871), ‘The Origin of a Pleasant Fiction’, Sheffield Independent, 28 November, p. 6.
Starling, Mhara (2022), Welsh Witchcraft: A Guide to the Spirits, Lore, and Magic of Wales, Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn (affiliate link).
Trevelyan, Marie (1909), Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales, London: Elliot Stock.
Walsh, Dave (2008), Haunted Dublin, Dublin: The History Press Local.
Wilby, Emma (2000), ‘The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England and Scotland’. Folklore, 111 (2), pp. 283-305.
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“Hair of the dog” reminds me of something about cats (sorry I missed your cat post.) Many older people will remember a comic strip in the “Sunday funnies” called The Katzenjammer Kids, which poked fun at German people, imitating their accents and speech patterns. It was not considered to be in any way offensive, and the German Americans I knew loved it. It was really pretty funny. My father, whose first language was German, told me that katzenjammer meant cat’s misery, slang for a hangover.