Duwende

A Spanish word over a Philippine idea

The name gives away the history. Duwende is the Spanish duende — the household goblin of Iberian folklore — brought to the islands with three centuries of colonial administration and settled over beings that were already there.

The older descriptive term is more revealing: lamanlupa, those of the earth.

The same process produced santelmo, where a Spanish sailors' word for an electrical discharge came ashore and took over whatever the islands had been calling the lights over the fields. A colonial language does not only add insults and saints' names. It supplies ordinary nouns, and the ordinary nouns quietly replace what was there.

What survives underneath is the practice, and the practice is not Iberian at all.

What the accounts describe

Small, and the accounts agree on that before they agree on anything else. Ramos (1971) classifies the duwende among the diminutive earth-dwellers, and the collected material is consistent on size — the height of a small child, often described as an old man in a child's body — and on the white and black division, which the sources treat as a difference of temperament rather than of species.

Where faces are described, they are described as odd rather than as human in miniature: outsized features, and in some regional tellings a single eye or a single nostril. The related kibaan is given a long nose, slanted eyes and hair reaching the feet. But the descriptions are regional and they do not agree, and far more accounts report that a duwende was heard or felt than seen: footsteps overhead or underneath, objects moved, a voice in the yard, illness or swelling that arrives after a mound is disturbed. Invisibility is treated as the normal condition, and being seen as the unusual event.

The beard, the pointed red hat, the belt and buckle belong to the Iberian duende and to later illustration, not to the Philippine accounts. Where a hat does appear in Philippine tellings it is a wide local one, and it is rarer than the picture books suggest.

What the record gives reliably, then, is a size, a colour and a set of effects in the house and the ground. The face varies by province, and no single description of it carries across the collections.

The room under the house

Philippine houses are raised on posts, and the space beneath is a real architectural feature: shaded, swept, used for storage and for animals, and otherwise empty.

It is also, in the belief, occupied.

That is a neat fit between a building and an idea. A household that lives above a dark space nobody sleeps in will develop rules about that space, and the rules will be taught to children first. Do not play down there at dusk. Do not pour water through the slats. Say something before you go under.

The Finnish maahiset produce the same rules from a different architecture: there the floor is the ground, and the occupied space is directly beneath it.

White and black

The most distinctive feature of the Philippine material is the colour split: white duwende who are benign or helpful, black duwende who harm.

Two things are worth saying about it.

It is a sorting device, not a description. The question a household actually faces is not what colour the being is but whether this year has gone well, and the pair supplies an explanation for either outcome without requiring anyone to have seen anything.

And the pairing is widespread — the Central American cadejo has exactly the same structure, one white and one black, with the same instability about which is which. Two opposed beings covering good and bad fortune is a structure that keeps being reinvented.

The mound that stays

The clearest evidence that this belief is still operative is in the ground.

In yards and fields across the islands there are mounds — termite structures, old earth — that have simply been left. The grass is cut around them. Nothing is built on that spot. Construction routes around them, sometimes at real cost.

A belief you can see in a survey map is a belief that is being acted on. In the nuno sa punso material the same point is carried by a phrase people still say out loud; in the duwende material it is carried by ground nobody has dug.

What the rules are protecting

The honest practical reading, the same one the nuno sa punso rules invite, is about ground and what is in it.

Under the house: animals, insects, rats, standing water, sharp stored objects, poor light. In the yard: termite mounds full of insects, snakes in the grass around them, unstable ground.

A rule that says announce yourself, keep children out, leave that spot alone is good advice independent of who is living down there — which is why it outlives the belief and is still taught by people who would not defend it.

Sources

Ramos (1971) for the classification; Eugenio (2002) for the collected legends and their variation; Plasencia (1589) for the colonial starting point of the written record. The etymology of duwende from Spanish duende is standard.

• Maximo D. Ramos, Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971). University of the Philippines PressThe standard classification of Philippine lower mythology, in which the small earth-dwelling beings form a group with the nuno and related figures.
• Damiana L. Eugenio, Philippine Folk Literature: The Legends (2002). University of the Philippines PressCollected legends, including the regional variation in how these beings are described and dealt with.
• Fray Juan de Plasencia, Customs of the Tagalogs (1589)The earliest friar description of Tagalog belief. Useful for establishing what the Spanish found and what vocabulary they brought.