- Christiane Schilling
- May 28, 2021
- 4 min read
The source of fairies is amongst the most discussed questions of folklore. In support of their arguments, researchers have turned to a couple of medieval texts, and occasionally to the evidence of place names. But there's room for doubt whether these resources should be regarded as describing fairies in any respect.
The fairy tradition in literature begins in the 1380s, with Chaucer and Cower. In their eyes, the fairies are already a vanishing race, partly frightening and partly comic. The implication (particularly in the preamble to The Wife of Bath's Tale) is that people used to believe in fairies, but do not do this anymore. However, Egyptian mythology as a consistent set of beliefs (dance in rings, living in hills, the principle of a queen, etc.) is itself generated by the authors who claim to be documenting its last echoes. Earlier evidence doesn't describe these fairies. Rather, it details encounters with various supernatural beings that were, in retrospect, treated like they were citizens of fairyland. The otherworldly beings that appear in medieval chronicles are a diverse lot. Some of them, like the barrow revelers in William of Newburgh and the maidens found in a wood by Wild Edric, are intentionally left unidentified;such as the maiden in the moor of the carol, their nonhuman standing is indicated by allusion rather than by direct statement. Others are defined by a single strange characteristic, like the color of the Green Children of Wool pit, or the small size of King Herla (a pygmaeus} who rides a goat.
The homunculus is an enigmatic encounter story from Thomas Walsingham was equally diminutive and dressed in red. The otherworldly race who played with the boy Elidurus had their own language (a kind of Greek} and their own superior morals. There is nothing in these scattered references to suggest that the beings concerned are of the same type. All the medieval phrases for spirits were also used, sometimes, for devils. The achievement of fairy authors, from Chaucer to Shakespeare, was to enlarge the indications of an otherworld from the Breton courtly narratives until almost all previous tales of supernatural encounters could be shoehorned into their dominant discourse. Despite Bob Trubshaw's proposal in the accompanying article that Broadly speaking, these Middle English accounts adapt to the Anglo-Saxon categories of elves, dwarfs, and pucks, so appear to represent some continuity of belief there is no systematic mythology of fairies before 1380. There are many unrelated motifs - barrow dwellers, tricksters, little individuals, household guardians - that we know in hindsight will come together to define the fairy kingdom. But this identity is simply not there in the original references. In Old English, the aelfs are just one amongst many otherworldly communities. The Charm for a Sudden Stitch puts them on exactly the same footing as hags and the Aesir, and they have the same role as the Aesir in name compounds - compare Aelfric and Osric. An Anglo-Saxon language of 1100 leaves dryads etc. as types of elves. As Hilda Ellis Davidson revealed in The Road to Hell, the Scandinavian elves are closely assimilated to the Vanir.
By the thirteenth century, the original context of Old English belief had become lost, and people were using the word in a variety of ways. La yam on uses elf to interpret the Romance fades - following a line of thought which was to lead into the elf-fairy equivalence - but other people had other ideas. Robert of Gloucester, explaining which type of being it was that fathered Merlin, says the sky is full of aliens called elves. Here we are on the verge of this diabolical, as we're in Beowulf when the cells have the seed of Cain.
Rather, their place is taken by puca, which appears to describe the inhabitants of wells, pits, and barrows. It is tempting to make the medieval pouke as identical with Renaissance Puck, but this is to fall into another retrospective reading. Even in Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck has the look of being moved into fairyland, somewhat awkwardly, from a quite distinct tradition.
The situation is different in northern England, where self is not uncommon and puca is absent. This is also the region where the elf was kept as the regular word for beings in the modern period, the Romance fairy being rejected. This could well be the consequence of Scandinavian influence - the fact that an elf is liable to chemicals with hair rather than being would imply this.
Scandinavian influence is certainly present in these place names that refer to dwarfs. The Anglo-Saxons had no concept of the reorg for a member of a small supernatural race. When we meet with clearly mythical dwarfs in North Country place names, it seems reasonable to suspect Norse influence, as Keightley observed more than a century ago. In a nutshell, the origins of fairy mythology lie not in the distant past, but at the court of Richard II. The creative synthesis that the poets made out of English and French customs was developed in the Tudor period to include tricksters of the Robin Good fellow type as well as the familiar spirits of cunning men, and domestic spirits such as the brownie. As an English language tradition, it managed to dominate and then alter the native sidhe beliefs of Ireland and the Highlands, introducing alien notions such as small size into their narrative.
From the nineteenth century, it had been possible for Anglo-Saxon spirits such as the grima, scucca and others - that had lived outside a quiet rural existence as Church Grim's, Black Shucks, and Hob thrusts - to locate themselves reinterpreted by folklorists (not the folk!) It follows that we can no longer make out what they were like initially. The fairy glamour of the fully developed tradition has tended to obscure our understanding of the very disparate narratives of supernatural encounters which were patched into it.
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