Believing in Fairies

      One asking what hee thought of Fayries: hee answered, he thought they were spirits; but hee distinguished betweene them and other spirites, as commonly men distinguish betweene good witches and bad witches.

      —Richard Greenham, Pastor of Drayton (1597)

      Let us begin with some thoughts on the marvelous from what was intended to be the first chapter of a book that C. S. Lewis never lived to complete:

      The reader who sees in all the (let us call them) “ferlies” [marvels] of medieval romance mere “sports of fancy” … utterly misunderstands the best specimens of the genre he is reading…. A satisfactory theory of ferlies and their effect is, I believe, still to seek. I suspect that it will not succeed unless it fulfils two conditions. In the first place, it will have to be sure that it has exhausted the possibilities of purely literary diagnosis before it looks further afield…. The second condition … is that the theory should deeply study the ferlies as things (in a sense) in the real world [my italics]. Probably such things did not occur. But if no one in real life had either seen, or thought he saw, or accepted on hearsay, or dreaded, or hoped for, any such things, the poet and romancer could do nothing with them. As anthropologists we may want to know how belief in them originated. But it will illuminate the literary problem more if we can imagine what it would feel like to witness, or think we had witnessed, or merely to believe in, the things. What it would feel like, and why.¹

      Perhaps the innate elusiveness of all such ferlies must render any theory of them finally inadequate (“the medieval fantastic,” writes Francis Dubost, “is just as evanescent as its modern counterpart”),² but for whatever reason, more than fifty years later Lewis’s challenge is still to be met.

      Progress, however, has been made on both fronts. In fulfillment of Lewis’s first condition, that of purely literary analysis, we can point to a number of fine studies. In England, Helen Cooper, Corinne Saunders, and James Wade have recently made important contributions,³ and in France literary study of le merveilleux is now regarded as mainstream.⁴ In the United States literary scholars such as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Geraldine Heng have concerned themselves with the more extreme manifestations of the marvelous, in particular associating the grotesque and the monstrous with issues of race, identity, and gender.⁵ Fulfillment of Lewis’s second condition, the study of ferlies as things, has been made much easier by the work of historians of medieval mentalités, particularly that of the annalistes Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt in France⁶ and in the English-speaking world by a number of premodernists following in the footsteps of Keith Thomas.⁷ Though it should now be much simpler than it would have been in 1966 to illuminate the ferlies of romance by imagining “what it would feel like … to believe in the things,” the dominant mode of critical analysis has remained stubbornly functionalist (“magic used as a literary tool”),⁸ at least in the Anglophone world.⁹ Even Fredric Jameson, for all that his recognition that magical narratives (that is, romances) belong to a world where nature remains “a mysterious and alien border around the still precarious and minute human activities of village and field,”¹⁰ treats magic as a literary device, a solution to the problem of apprehending unstable chivalric loyalties in a period of emergent class solidarity (p. 161). My own conviction is that we will make real progress only when we learn to treat magic, or at least its manifestations in medieval literature (those things that Lewis called ferlies), less as tenor and more as vehicle, to adapt I. A. Richards’s terminology; the first task is not to establish what such ferlies represent or exemplify or epitomize, but rather to ask what they are and what cultural work they are doing. From this perspective Lewis was putting the cart before the horse: literary diagnosis, I believe, should properly follow, not precede, the study of ferlies as things. Even with this proviso, however, I cannot pretend to be responding to Lewis’s general call to arms here; my aim in what follows is rather more modest: to elucidate not the whole territory of the medieval marvelous but merely one of its most prominent fiefdoms—that of fairyland.

      For sixteenth-century England, it is a comparatively simple matter, in M. W. Latham’s words, “to reproduce the everyday belief of the Elizabethans concerning the fairies, to treat the fairies not as mythical personages or as fanciful creations of the literary imagination or of popular superstition, but to regard them, as did their human contemporaries of the 16^th century, as credible entities and as actual and existing beings.”¹¹ For the Middle Ages, however, the problem of trying to imagine what it would feel like to believe in fairies is compounded by the fact that much of what little evidence there is comes from texts written by members of a clerical elite who officially did not believe in them, at least not “as credible entities and as actual and existing beings,” and who felt obliged for the most part to show open hostility to all such beliefs. Nevertheless the attempts of such people to rationalize, negate, or dismiss fairy beliefs can tell us a great deal about both their vigor and their ubiquity.

      One of the most concise and thorough descriptions of the kind of creature I am concerned with in this book appears in a treatise on the geography of Iceland written in the late sixteenth century probably by Oddur Einarsson, the Lutheran bishop of Skálholt; it will provide us with a useful point of departure:

      But some [beings], who live in the hills close to men, are more amicable and not so dangerous unless they chance to have been harmed by some kind of injury and provoked to wickedness. They seem, indeed, to be endowed with bodies of incredible subtlety, since they are even thought to enter into mountains and hills. They are invisible to us unless they wish to appear of their own volition, yet the properties of certain men’s eyes are such that the presence of no spirit can ever escape their sight (as was Lynceus’s unhappy situation). They know a thousand devices and an infinite number of tricks with which they harass men in wretched ways, but their young people are said to have a similar stature, clothing, and even way of life to that of their human neighbors, and to take excessive pleasure in coupling with humans. Examples are not lacking of a number of the rogues who are said to have impregnated women beneath the earth and had access to them at fixed times or as many times as they wished. And from time to time the women of our land have been oppressed by these earth-dwellers and innocent boys and girls and the young people and adolescents of both sexes have very often been taken away, though quite a few are restored safe and sound after a number of days, or sometimes a number of weeks, but some are never seen again, and certain ones are found half-alive, etc. But it would be tedious to waste more of this study on them; for whether these things are brought about by the frauds, impostures, and illusions of the devil, which seems to be the view of almost all the more reasonable people, or whether they are some kind of mixed species created between spirits and animals, as some conjecture, yet it is certain that the appearance of these spirits has been common in many other regions, not only in Iceland, so that it is pointless to take this [their ubiquity in Iceland] as evidence that these curious creatures were fashioned in the underworld.¹²

      Some European traditions locate fairies in castles deep in the woods or even in realms beneath the surface of lakes, rather than in underground kingdoms, but otherwise Oddur Einarsson’s description conforms closely to the common understanding of the vast majority of medieval people. Though several other kinds of interaction are certainly possible, fairies most often impinge on the human life world in two ways: by copulating with mortals or by abducting them. What is more interesting about Oddur’s account for our immediate purposes, however, is