The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

  The second Miltonic passage introduces us to a different conception of the Fairies. It is more familiar to us because Shakespeare, Drayton, and William Browne made a literary use of it; from their use descend the minute and almost insectal fairies of the debased modern convention with their antennae and gauzy wings. Milton’s ‘Faery Elves’ are compared to the ‘Pigmean Race’. So in the ballad of The Wee Wee Man,

  When we came to the stair foot

  Ladies were dancing jimp and sma.

  Richard Bovet in his Pandaemonium (1684) speaks of the fairies ‘appearing like men and women of a stature generally near the smaller size of man’. Burton mentions ‘places in Germany where they do usually walk in little coats, some two feet long’.7 A housemaid we had when I was a boy, who had seen them near Dundrum in County Down, described them as ‘the size of children’ (age unspecified).

  But when we have said ‘smaller than men’ we can define the size of these Fairies no further. Solemn discussions as to whether they are merely dwarfish, or Lilliputian, or even insectal, are quite out of place; and that for a reason which crossed our path before.8 As I then said, the visual imagination of medieval and earlier writers never for long worked to scale. Indeed I cannot think of any book before Gulliver that makes any serious attempt to do so. What are the relative sizes of Thor and the Giants in the Prose Edda? There is no answer. In cap. XLV a giant’s glove seems to the three gods a great hall, and the thumb of it a side-chamber which two of them use as a bedroom. This would make a god to a giant as a small fly to a man. But in the very next chapter Thor is dining with the giants and can lift up—though for a special reason he cannot drain—the drinking horn they hand him. When it was possible to write like that we can expect no coherent account of the elves’ stature. And it remained possible for centuries. Even in passages whose main point, such as it is, consists of scaling things down, the wildest confusion prevails. Drayton in Nimphidia makes Oberon big enough to catch a wasp in his arms at line 201 and small enough to ride on an ant at line 242; he might as well have made him able both to lift an elephant and to ride a fox-terrier. I do not suggest that such an artificial work could in any case be expected to give reliable evidence about popular belief. The point is rather that no work written in a period when such inconsistencies were acceptable will provide such evidence; and that popular belief was probably itself as incurably vague and incoherent as the literature.

  In this kind of Fairy the (unspecified) small size is less important than some other features. Milton’s ‘Faery Elves’ are ‘on thir mirth and dance Intent’ (I, 786). The peasant has blundered upon them by chance. They have nothing to do with him nor he with them. The previous kind, the ‘swart Faery of the Mine’, might meet you intentionally, and, if so, his intentions would certainly be sinister; this kind not. They appear—often with no suggestion that they are smaller than men—in places where they might have expected no mortal to see them:

  And ofte in forme of womman in moni deorne9 weie

  Me sicth10 of hom gret companie bothe hoppe and pleie.11

  In the Wife of Bath’s Tale we have the dance again, and it vanishes at the approach of a human spectator (D 991 sq.). Spenser takes over the motif and makes his dancing graces vanish when Calidore intrudes upon their revels (F.Q. VI, x). Thomson in The Castle of Indolence (I, xxx) knows about the vanishing.

  It is needless to stress the difference between such Fairies and those mentioned in Comus or Reginald Scot’s Discouerie. It is true that even the second sort may be slightly alarming; the heart of Milton’s peasant beats ‘at once with joy and fear’. The vision startles by its otherness. But there is no horror or aversion on the human side. These creatures flee from man, not man from them; and the mortal who observes them (only so long as he remains unobserved himself) feels that he has committed a sort of trespass. His delight is that of seeing fortuitously—in a momentary glimpse—a gaiety and daintiness to which our own laborious life is simply irrelevant.

  This kind was taken over, very dully by Drayton, brilliantly by Shakespeare, and worked up into a comic device which, from the first, has lost nearly all the flavour of popular belief. From Shakespeare, modified (I think) by Pope’s sylphs, they descend with increasing prettification and triviality, till we reach the fairies whom children are supposed to enjoy; so far as my experience goes, erroneously.

  With the ‘Fairy Damsels’ of our third Miltonic passage we reach a kind of Fairy who is more important for the reader of medieval literature and less familiar to modern imagination. And it demands from us the most difficult response.

  The Fairy Damsels are ‘met in forest wide’. Met is the important word. The encounter is not accidental. They have come to find us, and their intentions are usually (not always) amorous. They are the fées of French romance, the fays of our own, the fate of the Italians. Launfal’s mistress, the lady who carried off Thomas the Rymer, the fairies in Orfeo, Bercilak in Gawain (who is called ‘an alvish man’ at line 681), are of this kind. Morgan le Fay in Malory has been humanised; her Italian equivalent Fata Morgana is a full Fairy. Merlin—only half human by blood and never shown practising magic as an art—almost belongs to this order. They are usually of at least fully human stature. The exception is Oberon in Huon of Bordeaux who is dwarfish, but in virtue of his beauty, gravity, and almost numinous character, must be classified among (let us call them) the High Fairies.

  These High Fairies display a combination of characteristics which we do not easily digest.

  On the one hand, whenever they are described we are struck by their hard, bright, and vividly material splendour. We may begin, not with a real Fairy, but with one who merely looked as though he came ‘of faerie’, from the fairy realm. This is the young lady-killer in Gower (V, 7073). He is curled and combed and crowned with a garland of green leaves; in a word, ‘very well turned out’. But the High Fairies themselves are very much more so. Where a modern might expect the mysterious and the shadowy he meets a blaze of wealth and luxury. The Fairy King in Sir Orfeo comes with over a hundred knights and a hundred ladies, on white horses. His crown consists of a single huge gem as bright as the sun (142–52). When we follow him to his own country we find there nothing shadowy or unsubstantial; we find a castle that shines like crystal, a hundred towers, a good moat, buttresses of gold, rich carvings (355 sq.). In Thomas the Rymer the Fairy wears green silk and a velvet mantle, and her horse’s mane jingles with fifty-nine silver bells. Bercilak’s costly clothes and equipment are described with almost fulsome detail in Gawain (151–220). The Fairy in Sir Launfal has dressed her waiting women in ‘Inde sandel’, green velvet embroidered with gold, and coronets each containing more than sixty precious stones (232–9). Her pavilion is of Saracenic work, the knobs on the tent-poles are of crystal, and the whole is surmounted by a golden eagle so enriched with enamel and carbuncles that neither Alexander nor Arthur had anything so precious (266–76).

  In all this one may suspect a certain vulgarity of imagination—as if to be a High Fairy were much the same as being a millionaire. Nor does it obviously mend matters to remind ourselves that Heaven and the saints were often pictured in very similar terms. Undoubtedly it is naïf; but the charge of vulgarity perhaps involves a misapprehension. Luxury and material splendour in the modern world need be connected with nothing but money and are also, more often than not, very ugly. But what a medieval man saw in royal or feudal courts and imagined as being outstripped in ‘faerie’ and far outstripped in Heaven, was not so. The architecture, arms, crowns, clothes, horses, and music were nearly all beautiful. They were all symbolical or significant—of sanctity, authority, valour, noble lineage or, at the very worst, of power. They were associated, as modern luxury is not, with graciousness and courtesy. They could therefore be ingenuously admired without degradation for the admirer.

  Such, then, is one characteristic of the High Fairies. But despite this material splendour, shown to us in full light and almost photographically detailed, they can at any moment be as elu
sive as those ‘Faery Elves’ who are glimpsed dancing ‘by a forest side or fountain’. Orfeo awaits the Fairy King with a guard of a thousand knights, but it is all no use. His wife is carried off, no one sees how—‘with fairi forth ynome’ and ‘men wist never wher she was bicome’ (193–4). Before we see the Fairies again, in their own realm, they have faded to a ‘dim cri and blowing’ heard far off in the woods. Launfal’s mistress can be met only in secret, in ‘derne stede’; there she will come to him, but no one will see her coming (353 sq.).

  But she is very palpable flesh and blood when she is there. The High Fairies are vital, energetic, wilful, passionate beings. Launfal’s Fairy lies in her rich pavilion naked down to the waist, white as a lily, red as a rose. Her first words demand his love. An excellent lunch follows, and then to bed (289–348). Thomas the Rymer’s Fairy shows herself, so far as ballad brevity allows, a stirring and sportive creature, ‘a lady gay come out to hunt in her follee’. Bercilak is the best of all in his mingled ferocity and geniality, his complete mastery of every situation, his madcap mirth. Two descriptions of fairies, one from a later and one from an earlier period, come far nearer to the High Fairies of the Middle Ages than anything our modern imaginations would be likely to produce. A rowdy High Fairy would seem to us a kind of oxymoron. But Robert Kirk in his Secret Commonwealth (1691) calls some of these ‘wights like furious hardie men’. And an old Irish poet describes them as routing battalions of enemies, devastating every land they attack, great killers, noisy in the beer-house, makers of songs.12 One can imagine the Fairy King in Sir Orfeo, or Bercilak, feeling at home with these.

  If we are to call the High Fairies in any sense ‘spirits’, we must take along with us Blake’s warning that ‘a Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing; they are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce’.13 And if we call them ‘supernatural’ we must be clear what we mean. Their life is, in one sense, more ‘natural’—stronger, more reckless, less inhibited, more triumphantly and impenitently passionate—than ours. They are liberated both from the beast’s perpetual slavery to nutrition, self-protection and procreation, and also from the responsibilities, shames, scruples, and melancholy of Man. Perhaps also from death; but of that later.

  Such, very briefly, are the three kinds of Fairies or Longaevi we meet in our older literature. How far, by how many, and how consistently, they were believed in, I do not know. But there was sufficient belief to produce rival theories of their nature; attempts, which never reached finality, to fit even these lawless vagrants into the Model.

  I will mention four.

  (1) That they are a third rational species distinct from angels and men. This third species can be variously conceived. The ‘Silvans, Pans and Nerei’ of Bernardus, who live longer than we but not forever, are clearly a rational (and terrestrial) species distinct from our own, and such figures, for all their classical names, could be equated with Fairies. Hence Douglas in his Eneados glosses Virgil’s Fauni nymphaeque (VIII, 314) with the line ‘Quhilk fair folkis or than elvis cleping we’. The fata in Boiardo who explains that she, like all her kind, cannot die till Doomsday comes,14 implies the same conception. An alternative view could find the required third species among those spirits which, according to the principle of plenitude, existed in every element15—the ‘spirits of every element’ in Faustus (151), the ‘Tetrarchs of Fire, Air, Flood, and on the Earth’ in Paradise Regained (IV, 201). Shakespeare’s Ariel, a figure incomparably more serious than any in the Dream, would be a tetrarch of air. The most precise account of the elementals would, however, leave only one of their kinds to be strictly identified with the Fairies. Paracelsus16 enumerates: (a) Nymphae or Undinae, of water, who are human in stature, and talk. (b) Sylphi or Silvestres, of air. They are larger than men and don’t speak. (c) Gnomi or Pygmaei, of earth: about two spans high and extremely taciturn. (d) Salamandrae or Vulcani, of fire. The Nymphs or Undines are clearly Fairies. The Gnomes are closer to the Dwarfs of märchen. Paracelsus would be rather too late an author for my purpose if there were not reason to suppose that he is, in part anyway, using much earlier folklore. In the fourteenth century the family of Lusignan boasted a water-spirit among their ancestresses.17 Later still we get the theory of a third rational species with no attempt to identify it. The Discourse concerning Devils and Spirits, added in 1665 to Scot’s Discouerie, says ‘their nature is middle between Heaven and Hell . . . they reign in a third kingdom, having no other judgement or doom to expect forever’. Finally, Kirk in his Secret Commonwealth identifies them with those aerial people whom I have had to mention so often already: ‘of a middle nature between Man and Angel, as were Daemons thought to be of old’.

  (2) That they are angels, but a special class of angels who have been, in our jargon, ‘demoted’. This view is developed at some length in the South English Legendary.18

  When Lucifer rebelled, he and his followers were cast into Hell. But there were also angels who ‘somdel with him hulde’: fellow-travellers who did not actually join the rebellion. These were banished into the lower and more turbulent levels of the airy region. They remain there till Doomsday, after which they go to Hell. And thirdly there was what I suppose we might call a party of the centre; angels who were only ‘somdel in misthought’; almost, but not quite, guilty of sedition. These were banished, some to the higher and calmer levels of air, some to various places on earth, including the Earthly Paradise. Both the second and the third group sometimes communicate with men in dreams. Of those whom mortals have seen dancing and called eluene many will return to Heaven at Doomsday.

  (3) That they are the dead, or some special class of the dead. At the end of the twelfth century, Walter Map in his De Nugis Curialium twice19 tells the following story. There was in his time a family known as The Dead Woman’s Sons (filii mortuae). A Breton knight had buried his wife, who was really and truly dead—re vera mortuam. Later, by night, passing through a lonely valley, he saw her alive amidst a great company of ladies. He was frightened, and wondered what was being done ‘by the Fairies’ (a fatis), but he snatched her from them and carried her off. She lived happily with him for several years and bore children. Similarly in Gower’s story of Rosiphelee20 the company of ladies, who are in all respects exactly like High Fairies, turn out to be dead women. Boccaccio tells the same story, and Dryden borrowed it from him in his Theodore and Honoria. In Thomas the Rymer, it will be remembered, the Fairy brings Thomas to a place where the road divides into three, leading respectively to Heaven, Hell, and ‘fair Elfland’. Of those who reach the latter some will finally go to Hell, for the Devil has a right to 10 per cent of them every seventh year. In Orfeo the poet seems quite unable to make up his mind whether the place to which the Fairies have taken Dame Heurodis is or is not the land of the dead. At first all seems plain sailing. It is full of people who had been supposed dead and weren’t (389–90). That is imaginable; some whom we think dead are only ‘with the faerie’. But next moment it appears to be full of people who had really died; the beheaded, the strangled, the drowned, those who died in childbed (391–400). Then we revert to those who in their sleep were taken thither by Fairies (401–4).

  The identity, or close connection between the Fairies and the dead was certainly believed in, for witches confessed to seeing the dead among the Fairies.21 Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.

  (4) That they are fallen angels; in other words, devils. This becomes almost the official view after the accession of James I. ‘That kinde of Devils conversing in the earth’, he says (Daemonologie, III, i) ‘may be divided in foure different kindes . . . the fourth is these kinde of spirites that are called vulgarlie the Fayrie’. Burton includes among terrestrial devils ‘Lares, Genii, Fauns, Satyrs, Wood-Nymphs, Foliots, Fairies, Robin Good-fellow, Trulli, etc.’22

  T
his view, which is closely connected with the later Renaissance phobia about witches, goes far to explain the degradation of the Fairies from their medieval vitality into the kickshaws of Drayton or William Browne. A churchyard or a brimstone smell came to hang about any treatment of them which was not obviously playful. Shakespeare may have had practical as well as poetical reasons for making Oberon assure us that he and his fellows are ‘spirits of another sort’ than those who have to vanish at daybreak (Dream, III, ii, 388). One might have expected the High Fairies to have been expelled by science; I think they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition.