Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
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he suggests—that they are either a trick of the devil (fraus Sathanae) or some kind of mixed species (genus mixtum) halfway between spirit and animal—are found elsewhere,13 though his apparent reluctance to concede that fairies may actually be devils (a third explanation that was widely entertained by other authorities) seems due to an understandable reluctance to endorse the common belief that the mouth of hell was situated in Iceland.14
Citing James I’s statement that the “spirites that are called vulgarlie called the Fayrie” are one of the four kinds of devil “conversing in the earth,” C. S. Lewis suggested that the idea that fairies were really devils became the “official view” only around the beginning of the seventeenth century.15 In actuality, however, it had been the orthodox position of the church for more than three hundred years. While traces of it can be detected much earlier,16 it was first set out systematically in William of Auvergne’s De Universo (written in the 1230s) and was frequently reiterated throughout the later Middle Ages. The popular late eleventh-century theological handbook the Elucidarium,17 composed in England by Honorius of Autun (or Augsberg),18 though it deals at length with good and bad angels, has nothing whatsoever to say about fairies. This silence is unsurprising since the earliest position taken by the church on the question of fairies seems to have been to deny their reality altogether: “Credidisti quod quidam credere solent,” asks Bishop Burchard of Worms in a penitential from around the year 1000, “quod sint agrestes feminae, quas sylvaticas vocant?” [Have you believed what some are accustomed to believe that there are rural women whom they call sylvans?] The bishop then makes quite clear the fatuity of such a belief: “Si credidisti, decem dies in pane et aqua poeniteas” [If you have believed it, do penance on bread and water for ten days].19 Things were very different, however, by the thirteenth century, when, in an adaptation of another of Burchard’s warnings against superstitious practices (this one against making gifts to “satyri vel pilosi” to obtain their goodwill), these creatures were changed to “diaboli … quos faunos vocant” [devils whom they call fauns], and the penance increased from ten days to fifteen.20
By the time of an early fourteenth-century French Dominican redaction and translation of the Elucidarium known as the Second Lucidaire,21 the faithful are left in no doubt not only that fairies exist, but also that they are quite simply devils: “And vnto the regarde of þe feyryes the which man sayth were wonte to be in tymes past, they were not men ne women naturalles but were deuylles þe whiche shewed themselfe vnto þe people of þat tyme, for they were paynyms, ydolatres and without fayth.”22 Things are a little more complicated than this, however, for the Lucydarye has a second explanation of fairy phenomena; they can also be devilish illusions (what Oddur Einarsson calls fraudes Sathanae), rather than actual devils: “And theyr vysyons ben semblables vnto theym of a man the whiche is dronke, vnto whome it semeth that the house turneth vnder his fete, by þe whiche he falleth, and al the house ne the erthe remeueth not. In lyke wyse the deuyl them sheweth these vysyons in theyr entendemente” (p. 51). This distinction, which goes back at least to William of Auvergne, may seem like hairsplitting, but it was evidently important to medieval churchmen as a way of accounting for different kinds of fairy phenomena, particularly the ability of fairies to impersonate humans. Thus Étienne de Bourbon retells the old story of how Saint Germain, “recognizing that it was the trickery of demons” [cognoscens autem esse demonum ludificationem], exposed the true nature of what appeared to be a group of local people attending a feast set out for the fairies (“bone res”) by proving that their human counter parts were actually still sleeping soundly in their beds.23
The recognition that in the discourse of the late medieval church fairies are demons (or demonic illusions) has important consequences for the study of vernacular belief. If fairies are demons, it follows that demons, or at least some demons, are fairies, and this insight opens up a world of still largely unexplored ecclesiastical material for investigation. Understandably, writers on medieval fairy beliefs have hitherto concentrated mainly on vernacular writing, chiefly romances, where fairyland is generally treated with something like transparency, though they have often supplemented these sources with the commentary of learned writers such as Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury, and William of Newburgh. However, when we turn to pastoral manuals, saints’ lives, sermons, exempla, and miracle tales, we encounter a host of fairies masquerading as devils. Admittedly they are generally more shadowy figures than their counter parts in vernacular romance, but they offer the great advantage of highlighting the attitudes of the representatives of official culture toward them. It is this interplay of learned and vernacular culture in the Middle Ages that constitutes the main theme of this book.
Strictly speaking, if fairies are devils, then it must also follow that any belief in fairies as non-devils is potentially heretical. Surprisingly, such an uncompromising line is rarely openly expressed in medieval ecclesiastical discourse, at least before the fifteenth century, but it is certainly implicit in a remarkable story told by the thirteenth-century Belgian Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré in his Bonum Universale de Apibus. Augustine in his City of God briefly discusses creatures he calls dusii, which he represents as the Gaulish equivalents of those “Silvans and Pans, commonly called incubi” [silvanos et panes, quos vulgo incubos vocant] who were said to seduce women—in other words, creatures that a later age would call ‘fairies.’24 Thomas gives this dramatic account of how such “dusii-demons inhabit the mountains and corrupt and derange their dupes”:
In 1231 when Master Conrad was preaching against the heretics in Germany and died a blessed death at their hands,25 a certain heretic who had been corrupted by demons solicited a Dominican friar to join his heresy (as I heard many years ago from Brother Conrad, the Dominican Provincial in Germany).26 When he saw the friar immediately recoil, he said to him: “You are very firm in your faith yet you have seen no more credible evidence of it than what is found in certain books. But if you should wish to believe my words I might show you Christ and his mother and the saints in plain sight.” The friar at once suspected a demonic illusion, but wishing to put it to the test, said, “Not without cause would I then believe, were you to put your promises into effect.” The joyful heretic set a date for the friar. The friar however secretly took along a pix containing Christ’s holy body concealed under his cloak. The heretic then led the friar into a very spacious palace in a cave in a mountain, which shone with a wonderful brightness. They came directly to the lower part of the palace, where they saw thrones placed, as if made of the purest gold, and on them a king, surrounded with glittering splendor, and next to him a most beautiful queen with a radiant face, and on either side benches on which were older men like patriarchs or prophets with a great multitude of angels sitting around, and they were all glittering with starlight (though they might be judged to be nothing less than demons). As soon as he saw them, the heretic adored them lying down before them. But the friar stood motionless, deeply stunned by such a spectacle, and the heretic turned to him at once and said, “Why do you not adore the son of God when you see him? Go and prostrate yourself; worship him whom you see and you will receive the secrets of our faith from his mouth.”27
At this point Brother Conrad finally displays his concealed host, the illusion vanishes, and the crestfallen heretic is returned to the true faith.
I give this story at such length because there can be little doubt that Conrad’s heresy has been built up from a number of elements of traditional fairy lore. We have only to ask ourselves why demons should be portrayed as living in a palace (and this is not the only place where a Dominican preacher describes demons in this way)28 to recognize that Thomas’s demonology has been infiltrated by vernacular conceptions of fairyland. The “very spacious palace in a cave in a mountain, which shone with a wonderful brightness” is an extremely common fairy locale; in English romance, for instance, it occurs in Sir Orfeo, Thomas of Erceldoune, and Reinbrun.29 The king, surrounded with glittering splendor, and his beautiful queen with her radiant face are as likely to remind us of a fairy king and queen as of Christ and his mother. Once again, Sir Orfeo offers an example:
Þer-in her maister king sete,
& her quen, fair & swete:
Her