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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In Thomas Keightley's 'The Fairy Legends,' readers are taken on a mystical journey through various folklore and mythological creatures, from fairies to elves and everything in between. Keightley's detailed descriptions and vivid storytelling immerse readers in a world where magic and wonder are at every turn. The book's literary style is reminiscent of classic folklore collections, with a focus on preserving the oral traditions and cultural significance of these creatures. Keightley's rich storytelling and thorough research make 'The Fairy Legends' a valuable resource for those interested in folklore and mythology studies. His attention to detail and respect for the stories he presents shine through in every page, making this book a must-read for lovers of fairy tales and folklore. Thomas Keightley's passion for preserving and sharing these magical tales is evident in 'The Fairy Legends,' making it a captivating and informative read for anyone curious about the enchanting world of mythical creatures. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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The Fairy Legends
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Between the bright mischief of sprites and the sober gaze of inquiry, this book traces the boundary where folklore and reason negotiate with one another. Thomas Keightley presents a gathering of tales that preserves the charm of oral wonder while testing it against observation. Aimed neither at credulous belief nor at dismissive skepticism, his undertaking invites readers to linger where customs, landscapes, and memory give shape to the supernatural. The result is a work at once intimate and panoramic, attentive to the cadence of a storyteller and the habits of a scholar. It opens doors to kitchens and crossroads, woods and shorelines, where experience brushes against an order beyond it.
Composed in the early nineteenth century, during a period when European writers were newly attentive to popular tradition, Keightley’s collection stands at the intersection of anthology and early folklore study. Drawing on narratives circulating in Ireland, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, among other locales, it assembles legends tied to farms, mountains, bogs, and market towns rather than courts and battlefields. First issued in the late 1820s, the volume belongs to the same historical moment that prized the recovery of vernacular memory while also systematizing it. Its pages record local color without losing sight of patterns that reach across borders and languages.
Readers encounter a sequence of compact narratives, each presenting a reported encounter with fairies, household spirits, or other beings, followed by commentary that clarifies sources or compares similar motifs. Keightley’s voice is lucid and economical, preferring brisk narration to ornament, and his tone remains courteous to belief while retaining critical distance. The style favors clarity over spectacle, so that incidents stand out in clean relief and the beliefs that sustain them can be seen at work. The experience is part fireside storytelling, part cabinet of curiosities, paced to encourage both immersion and reflection.
Throughout, certain themes recur with quietly insistent force. The threshold is everywhere: doorsteps, fords, hedges, and moments between dusk and dawn where ordinary conduct must be adjusted to other rules. Gifts are weighed against obligations, hospitality against offense, and work against idleness, as the supernatural world polices minor breaches of courtesy and custom. Landscapes are not neutral backdrops but storied grounds that remember footprints and keep faith with local names. Keightley shows how such narratives encode communal ethics—care for the household, fairness in exchange, prudence in speech—while allowing space for delight, wonder, and the abrupt comedy of misrecognition.
One of the book’s enduring contributions lies in its comparative reach. By placing similar episodes from different regions in proximity, Keightley lets readers recognize shared patterns without flattening local distinctiveness. The accompanying remarks often identify printed or oral sources and sketch parallels that illuminate how a figure adapts to new soils while retaining a family resemblance. Such method, practiced before folklore fully professionalized later in the century, gives the collection a double value: it preserves narrative textures and it maps connections. The scholarship remains modest in tone, never eclipsing the tales, yet it equips the reader to see kinships otherwise missed.
For contemporary readers, the collection matters not only as a root-system for later fantasy and children’s literature, but as a guide to cultural memory in motion. It demonstrates how stories travel, how they dignify local speech and habit, and how they accommodate contradiction without collapsing into cynicism. In a time alert to plural identities and to the imprint of place on imagination, these legends model a way to listen across differences and to inhabit landscapes attentively. They also reveal how communal values are negotiated through narrative play, rendering the strange familiar and the familiar newly strange.
This volume rewards both wandering and study. One may dip into a single district’s legends, follow a motif from one country to another, or pause over the notes to watch sources come into view. Read with an ear for cadence and with awareness that its author writes from a nineteenth‑century vantage, and the book yields a layered portrait of belief without caricature. Keightley’s steady, unhysterical prose allows the marvelous to keep its shimmer while inviting analysis. Approached in that spirit, The Fairy Legends becomes less a museum case than a living bridge between worlds, holding open the threshold it so carefully charts.
Synopsis
Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Legends presents a nineteenth-century survey of European fairy lore, gathering stories and beliefs from the British Isles and the Continent into a coherent, readable compendium. Keightley alternates between succinct retellings and explanatory notes, aiming to preserve local colour while clarifying context for general readers. The work balances curiosity with restraint: it records marvels but resists credulity, and it values tradition without romantic excess. Organized broadly by region and type, the collection introduces recurring beings, settings, and practices, situating each account within its customary landscape and social use, so that narrative entertainment also serves as a guide to belief and behavior.
A substantial portion attends to insular traditions, where fairies appear as neighbors at the margins of fields, homes, and hills. Keightley highlights how daily routines—spinning, herding, midwifery, music—become points of contact with the otherworld. He records rules of caution, small offerings, and taboos that mark an ethic of coexistence, alongside tale-patterns of reward and retribution. Episodes of disappearance and return, uncanny substitutions, and nocturnal processions illustrate how communities negotiate uncertainty. Without declaring judgment, Keightley notes how practical knowledge and supernatural etiquette interlock, preserving customary rights and explaining misfortune, while also providing a dramatic repertoire for evenings of storytelling.
On the Continent, the survey turns to mountain, forest, and water spirits inhabiting mines, mills, lakes, and riverbanks. Keightley details the economy of exchange that governs these encounters: bargains struck, hospitality offered or denied, and the strict consequences of breaking terms. Tales of household helpers and capricious tricksters underscore the fragile boundary between aid and harm. The narratives emphasize liminal times and places, especially thresholds, bridges, and crossroads, where attention to ritual safeguards is most needed. Keightley’s retellings remain concise, allowing the cumulative force of motif and setting to suggest each region’s temperament without flattening local difference.
Throughout, Keightley supplements stories with comparative notes on phrasing, custom, and etymology, indicating where a belief is strongly localized and where it echoes patterns found elsewhere. He cites earlier antiquarian collections, printed chapbooks, and informants, often signaling the reliability or ambiguity of a source. His method foregrounds transmission—how motifs migrate, merge, or persist—while respecting the narrative integrity of each example. The apparatus is neither pedantic nor speculative; it equips readers to see resemblances without collapsing distinctions. As a result, the book doubles as both an anthology and an introduction to a nascent comparative study of popular tradition.
Questions of origin surface cautiously. Keightley notes Christian overlays on older practices, as well as resemblances that suggest earlier mythic strata, yet he avoids sweeping derivations. Instead, he stresses how belief adapts to local needs: seasonal rites, household protections, and moral exempla that regulate community life. The repeated stress on hospitality, oaths, secrecy, and naming—along with prohibitions on boasting and curiosity—frames fairies less as metaphysical puzzles than as figures through which societies teach prudence. This pragmatic lens allows the supernatural to appear vivid without demanding assent, preserving both narrative pleasure and ethnographic value.
Underlying many episodes is a tension between human autonomy and otherworldly constraint. Gifts that bind, dances that compel, food that forbids departure, and music that unsettles judgment all dramatize the costs of crossing boundaries. Keightley’s selection shows how fairness and reciprocity can forestall harm, while greed, neglect, or betrayal invite reprisal. Gendered roles, property rules, and customary labor shape these outcomes, revealing how tales function as social commentary as much as enchantment. The book therefore stages a conversation between freedom and obligation, instruction and wonder, with the fairies’ unpredictability reinforcing the need for care in speech and deed.
The Fairy Legends endures as a carefully arranged window onto living tradition at a moment when industrial modernity threatened to disperse it. Keightley’s even-handed style, regional breadth, and attention to sources make the volume a foundation for later folklore study and a touchstone for readers interested in the imaginative ecology of everyday life. By presenting patterns without overexplaining them, he preserves the suggestive openness of the material. The collection’s broader significance lies in how it documents practices of attention—what to notice, when to speak, how to offer—that continue to resonate beyond their original communities.
Historical Context
Thomas Keightley’s The Fairy Legends emerged from the British‑Irish literary world of the late 1820s, when London was a central hub for scholarly compendia and popular anthologies. Keightley, an Irish-born writer who settled in England, shaped his collection amid expanding libraries and learned networks linking Dublin and London, including the British Museum’s resources and active antiquarian circles. The United Kingdom formed by the 1801 Act of Union framed the book’s geographical horizons, drawing Ireland firmly into British print culture. The collection’s emphasis on traditional narratives reflects a moment when oral rural lore was being codified in print for circulating libraries and family reading.
Across Europe, Romanticism fostered a program of recovering national traditions, encouraging collectors to treat peasant tales as the voice of a people. Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas about Volksgeist, the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–1815; expanded subsequently), and Walter Scott’s antiquarian projects shaped British expectations for folklore. In Ireland, Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825–1828) popularized regional fairy lore in English. Keightley’s work occupied this same moment, presenting fairy narratives as culturally significant rather than merely whimsical. He wrote for readers already primed to see such material as historical evidence of belief, language, and custom.
The Irish setting that supplies many of the legends was undergoing rapid change. Post‑Union governance centralized administration in London, while rural Ireland remained overwhelmingly agrarian, Irish‑speaking in many districts, and dependent on local customary practices. Oral storytelling thrived at hearths and in seasonal gatherings, with motifs about fairies, changelings, and protective rituals tied to everyday concerns over health, land boundaries, and neighborly conduct. Catholic Emancipation debates culminating in the 1829 Relief Act underscored tensions between official authority and vernacular life. Keightley’s collection records beliefs circulating in that environment, where clergy, landlords, and magistrates might discourage “superstition,” yet community memory preserved explanatory tales.
Keightley compiled across languages, drawing on Irish, Scottish, German, and Scandinavian sources then newly available through translations and reviews. British periodicals such as The Foreign Quarterly Review (founded 1827) and The Athenaeum (launched 1828) mediated continental scholarship for Anglophone readers, including reports on German philology and Norse antiquities. The comparative tenor of his notes reflects a scholarly fashion for aligning Celtic, Teutonic, and Romance traditions by motif and etymology. While systematic folklore science would come later, the book participates in early nineteenth‑century comparative mythography, situating local anecdotes within a pan‑European map of elves, dwarfs, and household spirits gleaned from printed collections and informants.
Technological shifts in printing and distribution broadened the audience for compilations like Keightley’s. Steam‑powered presses, stereotype plates, and expanding railway networks (soon after the book’s appearance) made inexpensive editions viable, while circulating libraries and subscription reading rooms diffused them beyond metropolitan elites. Reformist publishers, including the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (founded 1826), promoted concise, sourced handbooks; Keightley published widely in that educational market. His fairy collection adopts a similar pedagogy, pairing retold episodes with explanatory commentary and references to earlier authorities. The apparatus offered readers a way to approach marvels critically, balancing entertainment with guided historical contextualization.
Questions of authenticity and method shadowed the era’s folklore collecting, and Keightley was entangled in them. A notable controversy surrounded “The Soul Cages,” a tale he composed and allowed to circulate as vernacular tradition, which Thomas Crofton Croker printed; Keightley later acknowledged authorship. The episode exemplified the porous boundary between literary invention and reportage in the 1820s, when collectors debated how faithfully to transpose oral accounts and how fully to credit informants. Such disputes helped pressure authors toward clearer citation and fieldwork standards, developments that later culminated institutionally in bodies like the Folklore Society (founded in London in 1878).
Religious and reform movements informed how readers framed supernatural lore. Evangelical campaigns and Catholic pastoral initiatives often denounced charms and fairy practices as remnants of superstition, aligning with broader nineteenth‑century drives for moral improvement and education. Legal frameworks changed the stakes: Britain’s Witchcraft Act of 1735 had long redefined witchcraft as fraudulent, and nineteenth‑century statutes penalized fortune‑telling and imposture. In this climate, stories about encounters with fairies could be read simultaneously as cultural heritage and as cautionary material. Keightley’s explanatory notes tend toward measured skepticism, cataloging variants and rational explanations without dismissing the narratives’ ethnographic value or imaginative power.
Within this matrix of Romantic recovery, expanding print culture, and nascent comparative inquiry, The Fairy Legends reflects and interrogates its age. It preserves a record of Irish and wider European beliefs at the moment they were being reframed as literature and data, not doctrine. The book mirrors the period’s confidence that careful compilation could rescue perishable traditions, yet its controversies foreshadow later demands for stricter ethnographic method. By translating rural voices for urban readers and juxtaposing local tales with continental analogues, Keightley’s collection both celebrates the diversity of folk imagination and critiques credulity, modeling a transitional, quasi‑scholarly approach to popular belief.
The Fairy Legends
INTRODUCTION.
ORIGIN OF THE BELIEF IN FAIRIES.
According to a well-known law of our nature, effects suggest causes; and another law, perhaps equally general, impels us to ascribe to the actual and efficient cause the attribute of intelligence. The mind of the deepest philosopher is thus acted upon equally with that of the peasant or the savage; the only difference lies in the nature of the intelligent cause at which they respectively stop. The one pursues the chain of cause and effect, and traces out its various links till he arrives at the great intelligent cause of all, however he may designate him; the other, when unusual phenomena excite his attention, ascribes their production to the immediate agency of some of the inferior beings recognised by his legendary creed.
The action of this latter principle must forcibly strike the minds of those who disdain not to bestow a portion of their attention on the popular legends and traditions of different countries. Every extraordinary appearance is found to have its extraordinary cause assigned; a cause always connected with the history or religion, ancient or modern, of the country, and not unfrequently varying with a change of faith.1
The noises and eruptions of Ætna and Stromboli were, in ancient times, ascribed to Typhon or Vulcan, and at this day the popular belief connects them with the infernal regions. The sounds resembling the clanking of chains, hammering of iron, and blowing of bellows, once to be heard in the island of Barrie, were made by the fiends whom Merlin had set to work to frame the wall of brass to surround Caermarthen.2 The marks which natural causes have impressed on the solid and unyielding granite rock were produced, according to the popular creed, by the contact of the hero, the saint, or the god: masses of stone, resembling domestic implements in form, were the toys, or the corresponding implements of the heroes and giants of old. Grecian imagination ascribed to the galaxy or milky way an origin in the teeming breast of the queen of heaven: marks appeared in the petals of flowers on the occasion of a youth's or a hero's untimely death: the rose derived its present hue from the blood of Venus, as she hurried barefoot through the woods and lawns; while the professors of Islâm, less fancifully, refer the origin of this flower to the moisture that exuded from the sacred person of their prophet. Under a purer form of religion, the cruciform stripes which mark the back and shoulders of the patient ass first appeared, according to the popular tradition, when the Son of God condescended to enter the Holy City, mounted on that animal; and a fish only to be found in the sea3 stills bears the impress of the finger and thumb of the apostle, who drew him out of the waters of Lake Tiberias to take the tribute-money that lay in his mouth. The repetition of the voice among the hills is, in Norway and Sweden, ascribed to the Dwarfs mocking the human speaker, while the more elegant fancy of Greece gave birth to Echo, a nymph who pined for love, and who still fondly repeats the accents that she hears. The magic scenery occasionally presented on the waters of the Straits of Messina is produced by the power of the Fata Morgana; the gossamers that float through the haze of an autumnal morning, are woven by the ingenious dwarfs; the verdant circlets in the mead are traced beneath the light steps of the dancing elves; and St. Cuthbert forges and fashions the beads that bear his name, and lie scattered along the shore of Lindisfarne.4
In accordance with these laws, we find in most countries a popular belief in different classes of beings distinct from men, and from the higher orders of divinities. These beings are usually believed to inhabit, in the caverns of earth, or the depths of the waters, a region of their own. They generally excel mankind in power and in knowledge, and like them are subject to the inevitable laws of death, though after a more prolonged period of existence.
How these classes were first called into existence it is not easy to say; but if, as some assert, all the ancient systems of heathen religion were devised by philosophers for the instruction of rude tribes by appeals to their senses, we might suppose that the minds which peopled the skies with their thousands and tens of thousands of divinities gave birth also to the inhabitants of the field and flood, and that the numerous tales of their exploits and adventures are the production of poetic fiction or rude invention. It may further be observed, that not unfrequently a change of religious faith has invested with dark and malignant attributes beings once the objects of love, confidence, and veneration.5
It is not our intention in the following pages to treat of the awful or lovely deities of Olympus, Valhalla, or Merû. Our subject is less aspiring; and we confine ourselves to those beings who are our fellow-inhabitants of earth, whose manners we aim to describe, and whose deeds we propose to record. We write of Fairies, Fays, Elves, aut alio quo nomine gaudent.
ORIGIN OF THE WORD FAIRY.
Like every other word in extensive use, whose derivation is not historically certain, the word Fairy has obtained various and opposite etymons. Meyric Casaubon, and those who like him deduce everything from a classic source, however unlikely, derive Fairy from Φηρ, a Homeric name of the Centaurs;6 or think that fée, whence Fairy, is the last syllable of nympha. Sir W. Ouseley derives it from the Hebrew פאר (peër), to adorn; Skinner, from the Anglo-Saxon aan, to fare, to go; others from Feres, companions, or think that Fairy-folk is quasi Fair-folk. Finally, it has been queried if it be not Celtic.7
But no theory is so plausible, or is supported by such names, as that which deduces the English Fairy from the Persian Peri[1]. It is said that the Paynim foe, whom the warriors of the Cross encountered in Palestine, spoke only Arabic; the alphabet of which language, it is well known, possesses no p, and therefore organically substitutes an f in such foreign words as contain the former letter; consequently Peri became, in the mouth of an Arab, Feri, whence the crusaders and pilgrims, who carried back to Europe the marvellous tales of Asia, introduced into the West the Arabo-Persian word Fairy. It is further added, that the Morgain or Morgana, so celebrated in old romance, is Merjan Peri, equally celebrated all over the East.
All that is wanting to this so very plausible theory is something like proof, and some slight agreement with the ordinary rules of etymology. Had Feërie, or Fairy, originally signified the individual in the French and English, the only languages in which the word occurs, we might feel disposed to acquiesce in it. But they do not: and even if they did, how should we deduce from them the Italian Fata, and the Spanish Fada or Hada, (words which unquestionably stand for the same imaginary being,) unless on the principle by which Menage must have deduced Lutin from Lemur—the first letter being the same in both? As to the fair Merjan Peri (D'Herbelot calls her Merjan Banou8), we fancy a little too much importance has been attached to her. Her name, as far as we can learn, only occurs in the Cahermân Nâmeh, a Turkish romance, though perhaps translated from the Persian.
The foregoing etymologies, it is to be observed, are all the conjectures of English scholars; for the English is the only language in which the name of the individual, Fairy, has the canine letter to afford any foundation for them.
Leaving, then, these sports of fancy, we will discuss the true origin of the words used in the Romanic languages to express the being which we name Fairy of Romance. These are Faée, Fée, French; Fada, Provençal (whence Hada, Spanish); and Fata, Italian.
The root is evidently, we think, the Latin fatum. In the fourth century of our æra we find this word made plural, and even feminine, and used as the equivalent of Parcæ. On the reverse of a gold medal of the Emperor Diocletian are three female figures, with the legend Fatis victricibus; a cippus, found at Valencia in Spain, has on one of its sidesFatis Q. Fabius ex voto, and on the other, three female figures, with the attributes of the Mœræ or Parcæ.9 In this last place the gender is uncertain, but the figures would lead us to suppose it feminine. On the other hand, Ausonius10 has tres Charites, tria Fata; and Procopius11 names a building at the Roman Forum τα τρια φατα, adding ουτω γαρ ῥωμαιοι τας μοιρας νενομικασι καλειν. The Fatæ or Fata, then, being persons, and their name coinciding so exactly with the modern terms, and it being observed that the Mœræ were, at the birth of Meleager, just as the Fées were at that of Ogier le Danois, and other heroes of romance and tale, their identity has been at once asserted, and this is now, we believe, the most prevalent theory. To this it may be added, that in Gervase of Tilbury, and other writers of the thirteenth century, the Fada or Fée seems to be regarded as a being different from human kind.12
On the other hand, in a passage presently to be quoted from a celebrated old romance, we shall meet a definition of the word Fée, which expressly asserts that such a being was nothing more than a woman skilled in magic; and such, on examination, we shall find to have been all the Fées of the romances of chivalry and of the popular tales; in effect, that fée is a participle, and the words dame or femme is to be understood.
In the middle ages there was in use a Latin verb, fatare,13 derived from fatum or fata, and signifying to enchant. This verb was adopted by the Italian, Provençal14 and Spanish languages; in French it became, according to the analogy of that tongue, faer, féer. Of this verb the past participle faé, fé; hence in the romances we continually meet with les chevaliers faés, les dames faées, Oberon la faé, le cheval étoit faé, la clef était fée, and such like. We have further, we think, demonstrated15 that it was the practice of the Latin language to elide accented syllables, especially in the past participle of verbs of the first conjugation, and that this practice had been transmitted to the Italian, whence fatato-a would form fato-a, and una donna fatata might thus become una fata. Whether the same was the case in the Provençal we cannot affirm, as our knowledge of that dialect is very slight; but, judging from analogy, we would say it was, for in Spanish Hadada and Hada are synonymous. In the Neapolitan Pentamerone Fata and Maga are the same, and a Fata sends the heroine of it to a sister of hers, pure fatata.
Ariosto says of Medea—
The same poet, however, elsewhere says—
and,
which last, however, is not decisive. Bojardo also calls the water-nymphs Fate; and our old translators of the Classics named them fairies. From all this can only, we apprehend, be collected, that the ideas of the Italian poets, and others, were somewhat vague on the subject.
From the verb faer, féer, to enchant, illude, the French made a substantive faerie, féerie,16 illusion, enchantment, the meaning of which was afterwards extended, particularly after it had been adopted into the English language.
We find the word Faerie, in fact, to be employed in four different senses, which we will now arrange and exemplify.
1. Illusion, enchantment.
Where we must observe, as Sir Walter Scott seems not to have been aware of it, that the four last substantives bear the same relation to each other as those in the two first verses do.
Mr. Ritson professes not to understand the meaning of faerie in this last passage. Mr. Ritson should, as Sir Hugh Evans says, have 'prayed his pible petter;' where, among other things that might have been of service to him, he would have learned that 'man walketh in a vain shew,' that 'all is vanity,' and that 'the fashion of this world passeth away;' and then he would have found no difficulty in comprehending the pious language of 'moral Gower,' in his allusion to the transitory and deceptive vanities of the world.
2. From the sense of illusion simply, the transition was easy to that of the land of illusions, the abode of the Faés, who produced them; and Faerie next came to signify the country of the Fays. Analogy also was here aiding; for as a Nonnerie was a place inhabited by Nonnes, a Jewerie a place inhabited by Jews, so a Faerie was naturally a place inhabited by Fays. Its termination, too, corresponded with a usual one in the names of countries: Tartarie, for instance, and 'the regne of Feminie.'
En effect, s'il me falloit retourner en faerie, je ne sçauroye ou prendre mon chemin.—Ogier le Dannoys.
3. From the country the appellation passed to the inhabitants in their collective capacity, and the Faerie now signified the people of Fairy-land.17
4. Lastly, the word came to signify the individual denizen of Fairy-land, and was equally applied to the full-sized fairy knights and ladies of romance, and to the pygmy elves that haunt the woods and dells. At what precise period it got this its last, and subsequently most usual sense, we are unable to say positively; but it was probably posterior to Chaucer, in whom it never occurs, and certainly anterior to Spenser, to whom, however, it seems chiefly indebted for its future general currency.18 It was employed during the sixteenth century19 for the Fays of romance, and also, especially by translators, for the Elves, as corresponding to the Latin Nympha.
They believed that king Arthur was not dead, but carried awaie by the Fairies into some pleasant place, where he should remaine for a time, and then returne again and reign in as great authority as ever.
Hollingshed, bk. v. c. 14. Printed 1577.
Thus we have endeavoured to trace out the origin, and mark the progress of the word Fairy, through its varying significations, and trust that the subject will now appear placed in a clear and intelligible light.
After the appearance of the Faerie Queene, all distinctions were confounded, the name and attributes of the real Fays or Fairies of romance were completely transferred to the little beings who, according to the popular belief, made 'the green sour ringlets whereof the ewe not bites.' The change thus operated by the poets established itself firmly among the people; a strong proof, if this idea be correct, of the power of the poetry of a nation in altering the phraseology of even the lowest classes20 of its society.
Shakspeare must be regarded as a principal agent in this revolution; yet even he uses Fairy once in the proper sense of Fay; a sense it seems to have nearly lost, till it was again brought into use by the translators of the French Contes des Fées in the last century.
And Milton speaks
Yet he elsewhere mentions the
Finally, Randolph, in his Amyntas, employs it, for perhaps the last time, in its second sense, Fairy-land:
We must not here omit to mention that the Germans, along with the French romances, early adopted the name of the Fées. They called them Feen and Feinen.21 In the Tristram of Gottfried von Strazburg we are told that Duke Gylan had a syren-like little dog,
Dez wart dem Herzoge gesandt
'Twas sent unto the duke, pardé,
Uz Avalun, der
Feinen
land,
From Avalun, the Fays' countrie,
Von einer Gottinne.—V. 1673.
By a gentle goddess.
In the old German romance of Isotte and Blanscheflur, the hunter who sees Isotte asleep says, I doubt
Dez sie menschlich sei,
If she human be,
Sie ist schöner denn eine
Feine
,
She is fairer than a Fay.
Von Fleische noch von Beine
Of flesh or bone, I say,
Kunte nit gewerden
Never could have birth
So schönes auf der erden.
A thing so fair on earth.
Our subject naturally divides itself into two principal branches, corresponding to the different classes of beings to which the name Fairy has been applied. The first, beings of the human race, but endowed with powers beyond those usually allotted to men, whom we shall term Fays, or Fairies of romance. The second, those little beings of the popular creeds, whose descent we propose to trace from the cunning and ingenious Duergar or dwarfs of northern mythology, and whom we shall denominate Elves or popular Fairies.
It cannot be expected that our classifications should vie in accuracy and determinateness with those of natural science. The human imagination, of which these beings are the offspring, works not, at least that we can discover, like nature, by fixed and invariable laws; and it would be hard indeed to exact from the Fairy historian the rigid distinction of classes and orders which we expect from the botanist or chemist. The various species so run into and are confounded with one another; the actions and attributes of one kind are so frequently ascribed to another, that scarcely have we begun to erect our system, when we find the foundation crumbling under our feet. Indeed it could not well be otherwise, when we recollect that all these beings once formed parts of ancient and exploded systems of religion, and that it is chiefly in the traditions of the peasantry that their memorial has been preserved.
We will now proceed to consider the Fairies of romance; and as they are indebted, though not for their name, yet perhaps for some of their attributes, to the Peries of Persia, we will commence with that country. We will thence pursue our course through Arabia, till we arrive at the middle-age romance of Europe, and the gorgeous realms of Fairy-land; and thence, casting a glance at the Faerie Queene, advance to the mountains and forests of the North, there to trace the origin of the light-hearted, night-tripping elves.
ORIENTAL ROMANCE.22
Sadee.
PERSIAN ROMANCE.
The pure and simple religion of ancient Persia, originating, it is said, with a pastoral and hunting race among the lofty hills of Aderbijân, or, as others think, in the elevated plains of Bactria, in a region where light appears in all its splendour, took as its fundamental principle the opposition between light and darkness, and viewed that opposition as a conflict. Light was happiness; and the people of Irân, the land of light, were the favourites of Heaven; while those of Turân, the gloomy region beyond the mountains to the north, were its enemies. In the realms of supernal light sits enthroned Ormuzd[2], the first-born of beings; around him are the six Amshaspands, the twenty-eight Izeds, and the countless myriads of Ferohers.23 In the opposite kingdom of darkness Aherman is supreme, and his throne is encompassed by the six Arch-Deevs, and the numerous hosts of inferior Deevs. Between these rival powers ceaseless warfare prevails; but at the end the prince of darkness will be subdued, and peace and happiness prevail beneath the righteous sway of Ormuzd.
From this sublime system of religion probably arose the Peri-24 or Fairy-system of modern Persia; and thus what was once taught by sages, and believed by monarchs, has shared the fate of everything human, and has sunk from its pristine rank to become the material and the machinery of poets and romancers. The wars waged by the fanatical successors of the Prophet, in which literature was confounded with idolatry, have deprived us of the means of judging of this system in its perfect form; and in what has been written respecting the Peries and their country since Persia has received the law of Mohammed, the admixture of the tenets and ideas of Islam is evidently perceptible. If, however, Orientalists be right in their interpretation of the name of Artaxerxes' queen, Parisatis, as Pari-zadeh25 (Peri-born), the Peri must be coeval with the religion of Zoroaster.
The Peries and Deevs of the modern Persians answer to the good and evil Jinn of the Arabs, of whose origin and nature we shall presently give an account. The same Suleymans ruled over them as over the Jinn, and both alike were punished for disobedience. It is difficult to say which is the original; but when we recollect in how much higher a state of culture the Persians were than the Arabs, and how well this view accords with their ancient system of religion, we shall feel inclined to believe that the Arabs were the borrowers, and that by mingling with the Persian system ideas derived from the Jews, that one was formed by them which is now the common property of all Moslems.
In like manner we regard the mountains of Kâf, the abode alike of Jinn and of Peries and Deevs, as having belonged originally to Persian geography. The fullest account of it appears in the Persian romance of Hatim Taï,26 the hero of which often visited its regions. From this it would seem that this mountain-range was regarded as, like that of the ancient Greek cosmology, surrounding the flat circular earth like a ring, or rather like the bulwarks of a ship, outside of which flowed the ocean; while some Arab authorities make it to lie beyond, and to enclose the ocean as well as the earth.27 It is said to be composed of green chrysolite, the reflection of which gives its greenish tint to the sky. According to some, its height is two thousand English miles.
Jinnestân is the common appellation of the whole of this ideal region. Its respective empires were divided into many kingdoms, containing numerous provinces and cities. Thus in the Peri-realms we meet with the luxuriant province of Shad-u-kâm (Pleasure and Delight), with its magnificent capital Juherabâd (Jewel-city), whose two kings solicited the aid of Cahermân against the Deevs,28 and also the stately Amberabâd (Amber-city), and others equally splendid. The metropolis of the Deev-empire is named Ahermanabâd (Aherman's city); and imagination has lavished its stores in the description of the enchanted castle, palace, and gallery of the Deev monarch, Arzshenk.
The Deevs and Peries wage incessant war with each other. Like mankind, they are subject to death, but after a much longer period of existence; and, though far superior to man in power, they partake of his sentiments and passions.
We are told that when the Deevs in their wars make prisoners of the Peries, they shut them up in iron cages, and hang them from the tops of the highest trees, exposed to every gaze and to every chilling blast. Here their companions visit them, and bring them the choicest odours to feed on; for the ethereal Peri lives on perfume, which has moreover the property of repelling the cruel Deevs, whose malignant nature is impatient of fragrance.29
When the Peries are unable to withstand their foes, they solicit the aid of some mortal hero. Enchanted arms and talismans enable him to cope with the gigantic Deevs, and he is conveyed to Jinnestân on the back of some strange and wonderful animal. His adventures in that country usually furnish a wide field for poetry and romance to expatiate in.
The most celebrated adventurer in Jinnestân was Tahmuras, surnamed Deev-bend (Deev-binder),30 one of the ancient kings of Persia. The Peries sent him a splendid embassy, and the Deevs, who dreaded him, despatched another. Tahmuras, in doubt how to act, consults the wonderful bird Seemurgh,31 who speaks all languages, and whose knowledge embraces futurity. She advises him to aid the Peries, warns him of the dangers he has to encounter, and discloses his proper line of action. She further offers to convey him to Jinnestân, and plucks some feathers from her breast, with which the Persian monarch adorns his helmet.
Mounted on the Seemurgh, and bracing on his arm the potent buckler of Jân-ibn-Jân,32 Tahmuras crosses the abyss impassable to unaided mortality. The vizier Imlân, who had headed the Deev embassy, deserting his original friends, had gone over to Tahmuras, and through the magic arts of the Deev, and his own daring valour, the Persian hero defeats the Deev-king Arzshenk. He next vanquishes a Deev still more fierce, named Demrush, who dwelt in a gloomy cavern, surrounded by piles of wealth plundered from the neighbouring realms of Persia and India. Here Tahmuras finds a fair captive, the Peri Merjân,33 whom Demrush had carried off, and whom her brothers, Dâl Peri and Milân Shâh Peri, had long sought in vain. He chains the Deev in the centre of the mountain, and at the suit of Merjân hastens to attack another powerful Deev named Houndkonz; but here, alas! fortune deserts him, and, maugre his talismans and enchanted arms, the gallant Tahmuras falls beneath his foe.
The great Deev-bend, or conqueror of Deevs, of the Shâh-Nâmeh34 is the illustrious Roostem. In the third of his Seven Tables or adventures, on his way to relieve the Shâh Ky-Caoos, whom the artifice of a Deev had led to Mazenderân, where he was in danger of perishing, he encounters in the dark of the night a Deev named Asdeev, who stole on him in a dragon's form as he slept. Twice the hero's steed, Reksh, awoke him, but each time the Deev vanished, and Roostem was near slaying his good steed for giving him a false alarm. The third time he saw the Deev and slew him after a fearful combat. He then pursued his way to the cleft in the mountain in which abode the great Deev Sefeed, or White Deev. The seventh Table brought him to where lay an army of the Deev Sefeed's Deevs, commanded by Arzshenk, whose head he struck off, and put his troops to flight. At length he reached the gloomy cavern of the Deev Sefeed himself, whom he found asleep, and scorning the advantage he awoke him, and after a terrific combat deprived him also of life.
Many years after, when Ky-Khosroo sat on the throne, a wild ass of huge size, his skin like the sun, and a black stripe along his back, appeared among the royal herds and destroyed the horses. It was supposed to be the Deev Akvân, who was known to haunt an adjacent spring. Roostem went in quest of him; on the fourth day he found him and cast his noose at him, but the Deev vanished. He re-appeared; the hero shot at him, but he became again invisible. Roostem then let Reksh graze, and laid him to sleep by the fount. As he slept, Akvân came and flew up into the air with him; and when he awoke, he gave him his choice of being let fall on the mountains or the sea. Roostem secretly chose the latter, and to obtain it he pretended to have heard that he who was drowned never entered paradise. Akvân thereupon let him fall into the sea, from which he escaped, and returning to the fount, he there met and slew the Deev. Roostem's last encounter with Deevs was with Akvân's son, Berkhyas, and his army, when he went to deliver Peshen from the dry well in which he was confined by Afrasiâb. He slew him and two-thirds of his troops. Berkhyas is described as being a mountain in size, his face black, his body covered with hair, his neck like that of a dragon, two boar's tusks from his mouth, his eyes wells of blood, his hair bristling like needles, his height 140 ells, his breadth 17, pigeons nestling in his snaky locks. Akvân had had a head like an elephant.
In the Hindoo-Persian Bahar Danush (Garden of Knowledge) of Ynâyet-ûllah, written in India a.d. 1650,35 we find the following tale of the Peries, which has a surprising resemblance to European legends hereafter to be noticed.36
The Peri-Wife.
The son of a merchant in a city of Hindostan, having been driven from his father's house on account of his undutiful conduct, assumed the garb of a Kalenderee or wandering Derweesh, and left his native town. On the first day of his travels, being overcome with fatigue before he reached any place of rest, he went off the high road and sat down at the foot of a tree by a piece of water: while he sat there, he saw at sunset four doves alight from a tree on the edge of the pond, and resuming their natural form (for they were Peries) take off their clothes and amuse themselves by bathing in the water. He immediately advanced softly, took up their garments, without being seen, and concealed them in the hollow of a tree, behind which he placed himself. The Peries when they came out of the water and missed their clothes were distressed beyond measure. They ran about on all sides looking for them, but in vain. At length, finding the young man and judging that he had possessed himself of them, they implored him to restore them. He would only consent on one condition, which was that one of them should become his wife. The Peries asserted that such a union was impossible between them whose bodies were formed of fire and a mortal who was composed of clay and water; but he persisted, and selected the one which was the youngest and handsomest. They were at last obliged to consent, and having endeavoured to console their sister, who shed copious floods of tears at the idea of parting with them and spending her days with one of the sons of Adam; and having received their garments, they took leave of her and flew away.
The young merchant then led home his fair bride and clad her magnificently; but he took care to bury her Peri-raiment in a secret place, that she might not be able to leave him. He made every effort to gain her affections, and at length succeeded in his object "she placed her foot in the path of regard, and her head on the carpet of affection." She bore him children, and gradually began to take pleasure in the society of his female relatives and neighbours. All doubts of her affection now vanished from his mind, and he became assured of her love and attachment.
At the end of ten years the merchant became embarrassed in his circumstances, and he found it necessary to undertake a long voyage. He committed the Peri to the care of an aged matron in whom he had the greatest confidence, and to whom he revealed the secret of her real nature, and showed the spot where he had concealed her raiment. He then "placed the foot of departure in the stirrup of travel," and set out on his journey. The Peri was now overwhelmed with sorrow for his absence, or for some more secret cause, and continually uttered expressions of regret. The old woman sought to console her, assuring her that "the dark night of absence would soon come to an end, and the bright dawn of interview gleam from the horizon of divine bounty." One day when the Peri had bathed, and was drying her amber-scented tresses with a corner of her veil, the old woman burst out into expressions of admiration at her dazzling beauty. "Ah, nurse," replied she, "though you think my present charms great, yet had you seen me in my native raiment, you would have witnessed what beauty and grace the Divine Creator has bestowed upon Peries; for know that we are among the most finished portraits on the tablets of existence. If then thou desirest to behold the skill of the divine artist, and admire the wonders of creation, bring the robes which my husband has kept concealed, that I may wear them for an instant, and show thee my native beauty, the like of which no human eye, but my lord's, hath gazed upon."
The simple woman assented, and fetched the robes and presented them to the Peri. She put them on, and then, like a bird escaped from the cage, spread her wings, and, crying Farewell, soared to the sky and was seen no more. When the merchant returned from his voyage "and found no signs of the rose of enjoyment on the tree of hope, but the lamp of bliss extinguished in the chamber of felicity, he became as one Peri-stricken,37 a recluse in the cell of madness. Banished from the path of understanding, he remained lost to all the bounties of fortune and the useful purposes of life."
* * * * *
The Peri has been styled "the fairest creation of poetical imagination." No description can equal the beauty of the female Peri,38 and the highest compliment a Persian poet can pay a lady is to liken her to one of these lovely aerial beings.39 Thus Sâdee, in the lines prefixed to this section, declares that only the beauty of a Peri can be compared with that of the fair one he addresses; and more lately, Aboo Taleeb Khân says to Lady Elgin, as he is translated by M. von Hammer,40
Sir W. Ouseley is at a loss what to compare them to. They do not, he thinks, resemble the Angels, the Cherubim and Seraphim of the Hebrews, the Dæmons of the Platonists, or the Genii of the Romans; neither do they accord with the Houri of the Arabs. Still less do they agree with the Fairies of Shakspeare; for though fond of fragrance, and living on that sweet essential food, we never find them employed in
or obliged
Neither is their stature ever represented so diminutive as to make key-holes pervious to their flight, or the bells of flowers their habitations. But Milton's sublime idea of a 'faery vision,' he thinks, corresponds more nearly with what the Persian poets have conceived of the Peries.
"I can venture to affirm," concludes Sir William gallantly, "that he will entertain a pretty just idea of a Persian Peri, who shall fix his eyes on the charms of a beloved and beautiful mistress."
If poetic imagination exhausted itself in portraying the beauty of the Peries, it was no less strenuous in heaping attributes of deformity on the Deevs. They may well vie in ugliness with the devils of our forefathers. "At Lahore, in the Mogul's palace," says William Finch, "are pictures of Dews, or Dives, intermixed in most ugly shapes, with long horns, staring eyes, shaggy hair, great fangs, ugly paws, long tails, with such horrible difformity and deformity, that I wonder the poor women are not frightened therewith."41
Such then is the Peri-system of the Mohammedan Persians, in which the influence of Islâm is clearly perceptible, the very names of their fabled country and its kings being Arabic. Had we it as it was before the Arabs forced their law on Persia, we should doubtless find it more consistent in all its parts, more light, fanciful, and etherial.
ARABIAN ROMANCE.
The Prophet is the centre round which every thing connected with Arabia revolves. The period preceding his birth is regarded and designated as the times of ignorance, and our knowledge of the ancient Arabian mythology comprises little more than he has been pleased to transmit to us. The Arabs, however, appear at no period of their history to have been a people addicted to fanciful invention. Their minds are acute and logical, and their poetry is that of the heart rather than of the fancy. They dwell with fondness on the joys and pains of love, and with enthusiasm describe the courage and daring deeds of warriors, or in moving strains pour forth the plaintive elegy; but for the description of gorgeous palaces and fragrant gardens, or for the wonders of magic, they are indebted chiefly to their Persian neighbours.42
What classes of beings the popular creed may have recognised before the establishment of Islâm we have no means of ascertaining.43 The Suspended Poems[3], and Antar, give us little or no information; we only know that the tales of Persia were current among them, and were listened to with such avidity as to rouse the indignation of the Prophet. We must, therefore, quit the tents of the Bedoween, and the valleys of 'Araby the Blest,' and accompany the khaleefehs to their magnificent capital on the Tigris, whence emanated all that has thrown such a halo of splendour around the genius and language of Arabia. It is in this seat of empire that we must look to meet with the origin of the marvels of Arabian literature.
Transplanted to a rich and fertile soil, the sons of the desert speedily abandoned their former simple mode of life; and the court of Bagdad equalled or surpassed in magnificence any thing that the East has ever witnessed. Genius, whatever its direction, was encouraged and rewarded, and the musician and the story-teller shared with the astronomer and historian the favour of the munificent khaleefehs. The tales which had amused the leisure of the Shahpoors and Yezdejirds were not disdained by the Haroons and Almansoors. The expert narrators altered them so as to accord with the new faith. And it was thus, probably, that the delightful Thousand and One Nights44 were gradually produced and modified.
As the Genii or Jinn45 are prominent actors in these tales, where they take the place of the Persian Peries and Deevs, we will here give some account of them.
According to Arabian writers, there is a species of beings named Jinn or Jân (Jinnee m., Jinniyeh f. sing.), which were created and occupied the earth several thousand years before Adam. A tradition from the Prophet says that they were formed of "smokeless fire," i.e. the fire of the wind Simoom. They were governed by a succession of forty, or, as others say, seventy-two monarchs, named Suleyman, the last of whom, called Jân-ibn-Jân, built the Pyramids of Egypt. Prophets were sent from time to time to instruct and admonish them; but on their continued disobedience, an army of angels appeared, who drove them from the earth to the regions of the islands, making many prisoners, and slaughtering many more. Among the prisoners, was a young Jinnee, named 'Azâzeel, or El-Hârith (afterwards called Iblees, from his despair), who grew up among the angels, and became at last their chief. When Adam was created, God commanded the angels to worship him; and they all obeyed except Iblees, who, for his disobedience, was turned into a Sheytân or Devil, and he became the father of the Sheytâns.46
The Jinn are not immortal; they are to survive mankind, but to die before the general resurrection. Even at present many of them are slain by other Jinn, or by men; but chiefly by shooting-stars hurled at them from Heaven. The fire of which they were created, circulates in their veins instead of blood, and when they receive a mortal wound, it bursts forth and consumes them to ashes. They eat and drink, and propagate their species. Sometimes they unite with human beings, and the offspring partakes of the nature of both parents. Some of the Jinn are obedient to the will of God, and believers in the Prophet, answering to the Peries of the Persians; others are like the Deevs, disobedient and malignant. Both kinds are divided into communities, and ruled over by princes. They have the power to make themselves visible and invisible at pleasure. They can assume the form of various animals, especially those of serpents, cats, and dogs. When they appear in the human form, that of the good Jinnee is usually of great beauty; that of the evil one, of hideous deformity, and sometimes of gigantic size.
When the Zôba'ah, a whirlwind that raises the sand in the form of a pillar of tremendous height, is seen sweeping over the desert, the Arabs, who believe it to be caused by the flight of an evil Jinnee, cry, Iron! Iron! (Hadeed!Hadeed!) or Iron! thou unlucky one! (Hadeed! yâ meshoom!) of which metal the Jinn are believed to have a great dread. Or else they cry, God is most great! (Allâhu akbar!) They do the same when they see a water-spout at sea; for they assign the same cause to its origin.47
