Introduction

      For many pious Christians, as for the inquisitors of Joan of Arc, this was a distinction without a difference. Fairies were demons, plain and simple.

      —Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

      On Trinity Sunday sometime around the year 1400 a sermon was preached in England containing an extended denunciation of popular superstition.¹ Palmists, dream readers, pythoners, nigromancers, astrologers, and the makers of wax effigies were all quickly dismissed, and then the preacher turned to those who believed in fairies:

      There are also others who say that they see women and girls dancing by night whom they call elvish folk and they believe that these can transform both men and women or, leaving others in their place, carry them with them to elfland; all of these are mere fantasies bequeathed to them by an evil spirit. For when the devil has won over the soul of such a person to believing such things, he transforms himself otherwise, now into the form of an angel, now a man, now a woman, now other creatures, now in dances and other games, and thus by the weak faith of their souls such wretches are deceived. But those who believe in the aforesaid things, or stubbornly defend them, or propagate them, especially when they shall have learned the truth, are faithless and worse than pagans, and four times a year they are cursed by the Lord and his holy church…. They should know that they have forsaken the faith of Christ, betrayed their baptism, and incurred the anger and enmity of God.²

      This attack is not entirely original, for it draws heavily on an early fourteenth-century preachers’ manual, the Fasciculus Morum (which had also included tournaments and jousts in its list of fairy activities),³ but it will serve as a useful introduction to the subject of this book: fairyland as a contested site in the struggle between the official and unofficial cultures of the Middle Ages.

      As this quotation implies, the default position of the clerical elite when it came to fairyland was one of unrelieved antagonism (though in practice, as we shall see, not all churchmen were as implacably hostile as our preacher), and the official record is the story of an ever-increasing demonization of fairies and infernalization of fairyland throughout the course of the Middle Ages. Vernacular culture on the other hand might make remarkable efforts to adjust its beliefs to the orthodoxies of the church, either consciously engaging in what Carlo Ginzburg has termed “cultural compromise formation”⁴ or unconsciously echoing what Antonio Gramsci would have regarded as the church’s dominant hegemonic discourse. Thus we should not be surprised to encounter fairies who swear by the Virgin Mary, who are eager to attend mass, or who anticipate salvation on Doomsday. The history of this aspect of medieval popular culture and its systematic suppression is accordingly far from straightforward, and it is made all the more difficult by the nature of the evidence, which overwhelmingly reflects the views of the clerical elite. An analysis of the kinds of evidence available to us and suggestions for ways we might read them will occupy the first two chapters of this study. Fundamental to my approach is the assumption that the beliefs of those for whom fairies were a living presence were sincerely held and that we should do them the courtesy of taking their beliefs seriously. I will argue that this makes a great difference to the way we approach the medieval literary genre that has most to tell us about fairies—that of the popular romance.

      The last three chapters will offer readings of various aspects of fairy belief, but from the outset it is important that I establish what the reader should not expect to find there. First, I will have nothing to say on the vexed question of fairy taxonomy.⁵ Are fairies different from elves? or goblins? or dwarves? or pucks? or brownies? and how do they relate to French netons or luitons? or German Nixen or Kobolde? Moreover, are they of human stature or smaller? Are they ruled by a king, or a queen, or even a trio of queens? And what color are they? In my view all such questions are unanswerable, and any attempt at a totalizing definition will prove illusory. For instance, while some fairies were small (such as the pygmies in Walter