Tintilini

The Düringsfelds collected them in the 1870s and gave them an address. Above the river Ombla, on a hillside the Ragusans called Sljebi, there is a spring that runs out from under a stand of alder trees. Beside the spring stands a great flat stone the locals called the table. On certain nights, the Düringsfelds were told, the dwarf spirits called tintiline in Dubrovnik and tintinelli in the Bosnian villages came out from under the alders and danced on the stone in their red caps.

The Düringsfelds were not collecting fairy decoration. The Tintilini had a function and a back story.

What They Are

The Tintilini are the souls of children who died unbaptized. In nineteenth-century Catholic Dalmatia, an infant who died before the baptismal water reached the head was barred from consecrated ground and barred from the official afterlife. The church had a doctrinal answer for the unbaptized infant, the limbo of the children, but the village had its own. The unbaptized child’s soul did not go to limbo. It went to the hillside above the Ombla, put on a red cap, and joined the others.

The cap is the species mark. They are a dwarf-sized people, no taller than the children they had been at death, dressed in the red they would have been baptized in had anyone reached them in time. The red is the colour of the unspilled baptism and the colour of the caul that, on a living infant, would have made a witch or a Mora. In death the same colour identified them as a third class of being that the village was prepared to deal with.

Habits

They dance on the stone table. They play around the spring. They keep close to the alders, which in South Slavic plant lore are trees of the threshold, growing where land turns to water and the dead turn to the living. The Tintilini are ground-bound. Unlike the Vještica and the Mora, who fly, they belong to the earth. They do not enter houses. They do not attack sleepers. They do their work on the hillside where they live.

They are not, in the Düringsfeld account, harmful in any direct way. A traveller who came on them at the spring after dusk would see a circle of small red figures dancing on the stone, and the standard reaction was to back away quietly and go home. The danger was not in being hurt by them. The danger was in being held responsible for them.

The Cap Trade

The most particular detail the Düringsfelds preserved is the contract. If a person managed to grab one of their red caps and promised to return it, the Tintilino who lost the cap was bound to do whatever the captor asked, until the cap was given back. The mechanism is the standard hat-theft motif of European fairy lore. The same trick works with the kobold, with the Welsh tylwyth teg, with the Cornish piskies, with the Italian folletto, with the German Wichtelmännchen. The Dalmatian variant is unusual only in the source. A cap stolen from a kobold is stolen from a hearth spirit. A cap stolen from a Tintilino is stolen from a dead infant. The thief is using the soul of an unbaptized child as a household servant.

The Düringsfelds did not record what specifically the Tintilini were asked to do. The pattern in the wider European cap-theft tradition is that the captured spirit fetches gold, herds animals through the night, finds lost objects, or teaches the captor a useful piece of knowledge in exchange for the cap. The promise of return was binding. To keep the cap permanently was to enslave the spirit, and the older European versions of the motif punish the thief who refuses to give back, often through the spirit’s slow revenge or through the sudden withdrawal of every favour the thief had received.

The Sljebi Address

The Düringsfelds were unusual among nineteenth-century collectors because they recorded the geography. The spring above the Ombla under the alders, with the great stone table beside it, was a place a Ragusan reader of the 1879 book could in principle have visited. The Ombla river runs out of a karst spring east of Dubrovnik and reaches the Adriatic in a short, deep estuary. The hillsides above the river are still alder country in some patches. The Tintilini were not a generic fairy abstraction. They had an address, and the address was the kind of place every Mediterranean folk culture associates with the threshold: a spring at the foot of a hill, a stand of trees that prefer wet ground, a flat stone of the kind that occurs naturally on karst.

The same configuration, spring and trees and stone, marks the meeting places of the Vila in Bosnia and Serbia, the neraida in Greece, and the fata in Italy. The Tintilini are the local Catholic version with the local theological problem worked into their origin story.

Cross-Cultural Connections

The dead infant is one of the oldest categories of dangerous and pitiable spirit in European folk religion. In Greece the aoroi, the untimely dead, included infants and were the most active class of restless soul. In Roman religion the lemures and the larvae were drawn from the same population. In Germanic folklore the Heimchen were the souls of dead children who followed the goddess Holda and required offerings of milk and bread on the windowsill. The Romanian moroi were sometimes the souls of dead children who returned as small vampires. The Albanian zana and the Catalan encantades preserved the same kind of figure under the form of a dwarf-sized woman in coloured clothing.

The Tintilini sit at the gentlest end of the spectrum. They are neither vengeful nor vampiric, they do not drink blood, and they do not press the chests of sleepers. They dance on a hillside they did not choose, in a colour that was meant for them and never reached them, and they will work for any human who steals their cap and promises to give it back. The folk theology is at the same time mournful and practical. Where the church had failed the unbaptized child, the village stepped in. The hillside above the Ombla received them and gave them a job and a place to dance, and the people of Ragusa knew where they were and left them alone except when they wanted something done.

The Düringsfelds were the only collectors who recorded them in any detail. The villages around the Ombla still know the spring. Whether anyone still calls the dancers tintilini, or whether they were lost between the world wars and the second half of the twentieth century, is a question for a fieldworker who has not yet gone looking. The 1879 record is the one we have.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Otto Freiherr von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld and Ida von Düringsfeld, Ethnographische Curiositäten (1879), chapter Aberglauben der Küsten- und Inselbewohner Dalmatiens