Pyrite Tannin

Pyrite Tannin

Menace of the Seven Seas (formerly), Monster Twelve.

A fat-bellied man wearing a brown three-cornered hat, a light and dark blue banded jersey, dark blue and black pinstriped trousers and yellow wellington boots. He also sports a long grey beard and has a false front tooth made of iron pyrite. Often depicted with a cup and teapot, his colours consist of the cup-and-crossed-spoons and Tannin is the subject of the tale ‘The Treasure Hunt of Pyrite Tannin’ by Nonny Warn.

Formerly a ‘Ruffian of the Sea’ with designs on the entire planets tea supply, Tannin is now a reformed character who seeks thirsty travellers on the ocean and invites them to share his brew, returning to land (and his visitors to their boats) only when he has exhausted his supplies of drinking water. He is usually to be found on the waves, and only lingers on land when depressed or dejected.

See Also: Nonny Warn, The Thirteen Monsters, Poppet Simians (Ol’ CM)

An old cautionary tale

I recently received an email from a lady who lives in Scotland, about an old family saying :

“When I was a girl my mother would say that if I told tales too often then ‘Nonny’ would come and take them away. I’d completely forgotten about it until I saw your call for odd stories and I remembered an old sampler my great-aunt embroidered as a girl – this would have been in about 1910. The one thing you could say about her is that she had no imagination, but apparently told wild tales when she was little. Then one day she just stopped.

I’m going to try to find the sampler out – I think it got passed down to my mum, so it’ll be in a box somewhere. It was always on the wall when I’d visit my aunt, and scared me a bit! it read:

Little boys race and little girls run
For if you tell tales then Nonny may come

She hunts down the stories and tables the words
And carefully notes down each name that occurs

She finds the tale-teller and opens their head
Leafs through the mind like a book being read

Pulls out the fables and winds in the yarns
Then shuts the mind tight using one of her charms

And once all the fancies are stripped from the brain
They’ll never tell tall tales or stories again

There was also some figures, one of which looked a bit like one of those fairy photos those girls took, dressed in green with curly hair (but no wings)”

Hopefully I’ll get a copy of the original sampler (if it still exists), but has anybody else heard of this particular folk tale?