The Dapper ImpCabaret Showman of the Vizlings.

Imp Lore

The real folklore — and where the fiction starts.

Honesty first: The Dapper Imp is an original Vizlings character, invented for the app. He is not a figure from folklore. This page covers the genuine folklore of imps — cited below — as context for the idea of an imp, and marks clearly where the real lore ends and the fiction begins.

The word

“Imp” enters English via Middle English impe, meaning a young shoot or graft of a plant — a “scion.” The Oxford English Dictionary records this botanical sense first; the sense of “small demon, mischievous sprite” develops later, by the 16th century, likely through the notion of a “child” or “offspring” of the devil. The word’s journey from sapling to sprite is, fittingly, a little mischievous itself.

Minor demons

In medieval and early modern demonology, imps were understood as lesser demons — small in stature and in malice compared to the great princes of Hell, but diligent. They appear in Germanic and British folk belief as servants and messengers: the errand-runners of the infernal bureaucracy. Where a demon damned, an imp annoyed — a distinction the folklore takes seriously.

Familiars and the witch trials

In 16th- and 17th-century England, the “familiar” — a small spirit that served a witch — was often described in impish terms: a small animal-like or sprite-like attendant. The 1566 Chelmsford witch trials record confessions involving such familiars, and Matthew Hopkins’ The Discovery of Witches (1647) catalogs familiar spirits with bureaucratic zeal. These were not cabaret emcees; they were evidence in capital trials, and the folklore here is genuinely dark. This site borrows only the smallness and the service — the Dapper Imp serves his audience, under contract.

The Lincoln Imp

The most famous imp in England is carved in stone: the Lincoln Imp, a small grotesque figure high in Lincoln Cathedral, dating to the 13th–14th century. Legend says the devil sent two imps to cause mischief in the cathedral; angels turned one to stone, where he sits frozen mid-grin above the Angel Choir. He became the symbol of the city of Lincoln. He is small, stone, and silent — the photographic negative of our Imp, who is small, crimson, and never silent.

The modern imp

Fantasy literature and games adopted the imp as the archetypal minor trickster — small, quick, and verbally slippery. (Readers of modern fantasy may also know “the Imp” as a famous nickname in A Song of Ice and Fire — a very different character, noted here only to avoid confusion.)

Where the fiction starts

Everything else on this site — the Gilded Footlight, the contracts, the Wink, the Applause Meter — is original fiction, invented for the Dapper Imp and labeled as such throughout. Real imps haunted cathedrals and trial records. This one haunts a cabaret, by appointment, with excellent lighting.

Source notes