Ever on the brave frontline of journalism, the Mail Online has in the last month run two stories revealing in shocking detail how innocuous, Photoshop-illiterate housewives have been minding their own business, photographing their Labradors on idyllic country walks, only to find upon closer inspection that A FAIRY is lurking in frame. ‘I was really shocked and freaked out at first’, said a Northamptonshire mother-of-two, whose inspiring story hit the headlines on May 7th. As well you might be: the thing she photographed was distinctly mosquito-sized while, as any fule kno, fairies are at least of a height with humans.
That’s right: fairies are more like the Dutch than the Daddy-Long-Legs.
Of course, they’d have to be, if changelings were to pass for human babies, which they seemed to fairly often in The Past. The Past itself was clear about this. Shakespeare may suggest that Robin Goodfellow has superhuman speed, but Mistress Page has no doubt that ‘urchins, ouphes and fairies, green and white’ are the size of human children, the Queen of the Fairies scaled up, bee-fashion, to the dimensions of a teenage girl. Martianus Capella’s Longaevi and Adam of Bremen’s Husi – probably one and the same – are of vaguely sylvan appearance, but without even a hint of titchiness. The Aes Sídhe of Irish myth read as human in appearance, inasmuch as they have any dimensions at all.
That’s not a fairy…
There are countless medieval representations of fairies, Lamias, Wild Hunts, and they all hinge on the same idea, fundamentally lacking in the Daily Mail’s otherwise heroic coverage of supernatural phenomena: nobody seems to have believed that they occupied the same earthly dimension as humans. Hence the various portals to their realms: barrow mounds, tree rings or caves; even dreams, as we see in the BBC’s stunning adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The Middle English reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend shows Dame Heurodys possessed by the stone-crowned Faerie King as she sleeps under a graft-tree at midday. She is spirited away (no/pun intended – delete as desired) under the nose of Sir Orfeo’s entire army, is found hunting by her husband after a decade in the wilderness, and followed through a rock.
When he was in þe roche y-go,
Wele þre mile, oþer mo,
He com in-to a fair cuntray,
As briȝt so sonne on somers day,
Smoþe & plain & al grene
Hille no dale nas þer non y-sene.
In this two-dimensional landscape, a castle stands, glowing day and night like the Heavenly Jerusalem, or Minas Morgul. And like the White Witch’s castle in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, its courtyard is full of corpses.
Sum stode wiþouten hade,
& sum non armes nade,
& sum þurth þe bodi hadde wounde,
& sum lay wode, y-bounde,
& sum armed on hors sete,
& sum astrangled as þai ete;
& sum were in water adreynt,
& sum wiþ fire al for-schreynt.
Far from pressing flowers and making organic porridge, these fairies pass their eternity in collecting the victims of violent deaths.
THAT’s a fairy.
Both Lewis and Tolkien lamented the association of volatile warrior-demigods with the imaginings of Cicely Mary Barker, and you could do worse than to read On Fairy-Stories or ‘The Longaevi’ in The Discarded Image. [I recommended Lewis’s chapter in particular to my students – and in grand old style, precisely one of them read it.]. Beings that are, in Lewis’s definition, ‘stronger, more reckless, less inhibited, more triumphantly and impenitently passionate’ than humans have become the patron saints of seed cake and elderflower cordial. As an analogy, I suppose it’s not unlike the use of pirates as learning aids. For those of us who prefer Black Sails to Captain Pugwash, this spiritual and physical shrinking stands as an emblem of sanitisation and creative decline.
Naturally, I blame Arthur Conan Doyle – or I would, if I weren’t so busy blaming the Daily Mail.
noon auctoritee 