In Our Time - Fairies

Episode Date: May 11, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the literary and visual depiction of fairies, supernatural creatures that inhabit a half-way world between this one and the next.'They stole little Bridget for seven years long; When she came down again her friends were all gone. They took her lightly back, between the night and morrow; They thought that she was fast asleep, but she was dead with sorrow. They have kept her ever since deep within the lake, On a bed of flag-leaves, watching till she wake.' When the 19th century Anglo-Irish poet Richard Allingham wrote his poem The Fairies, he was replicating a belief about supernatural figures who steal children that stretched back to ancient Persian myths that date from 3000 BC. So universal is the terror of losing a child that the images of a lonely lost child and a mother who loses her child to fairies exist in civilisations everywhere. Demon Figures and Fairies have undergone a series of transformations according to their historical context, but what remains constant is their supernatural power and their association with the very human concerns of marriage, death and loss. In what way have fairies changed in guise and purpose throughout history? How did ancient fairy lore sit with the Christianity of the Middle Ages? How were fairies appropriated for the purpose of the 16th century witchcraft trials and why did fairies obsess so many Victorian artists and writers? And why is it that stories about fairies exist all over the world and what is our fascination with them?With Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at Cardiff University and Secretary of the Folklore Society; Diane Purkiss, Fellow and Tutor of English at Keble College, Oxford; Nicola Bown, Lecturer in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. They stole Little Bridget for seven years long. When she came down again, her friends were all gone. They were the fairies. When the 19th century Anglo-Irish poet Richard Allingham wrote the fairies, he was replicating a belief about supernatural figures who steal children that stretched back to ancient Persian myths that date from 3,000 BC. Demon figures and fairies have undergone a series of transformations, but what remains constant is their supernatural power

and their association with the concerns of birth, death and loss. In what way have fairies changed in guise and purpose throughout history? How did ancient fairy law sit with the Christianity of the Middle Ages? How were fairies appropriated for the purposes of 16th century witchcraft trials and why did fairies beguiled so many Victorian artists and writers? With me to discuss fairies at Juliet Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at Cardiff University, Diane Perkins, fellow and tutor of English at Keeble College, Oxford, and Nicola Bone lecturer in Victorian studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Juliet Wood, what are fairies historically and what have they been associated with? Well, there are supernatural beings who inhabit a space, both conceptual and physical, between gods and men. And they are specifically supernatural beings, and they are associated with places. They have their own world, which parallels the human world. But they're also associated with natural places, forests, streams, and with the works of man, with bridges and orchards. They love apple trees, with the dairy, and with the hearth. So you get a group of beings who are not really gods, but have a supernatural nature which parallels our own. And that's the really important thing.

They're very ancient. We know them from India, or relatively similar beings from India, things. like the Nagas who could marry human beings and many royal Indian families have a Nagas as their ancestor or ancestress. We know them from Persia, where they get to be much darker. So we're actually talking about a tradition

which goes back several thousand years and which is very, very widely distributed through India, the Near East and Europe. And this is what the fairies are. You say this other world is bridges and Indyarism and the hearth of the bottom of gardens and so on. So it's another one. world, but it's on our world? Yes, I think the best way probably is to think of it as another

dimension. It's almost as they inhabit the same space, but they inhabit it in a different dimension, because of course the fairies are spiritual. They're not physical. So we kind of have to think of them as very, very close to us, and therefore very easy for them to interact with us, but they're not us. And they're not gods. Very often they're called demigods, but the fairies are what the fairies are. They're a distinct class of supernatural being. But the thing with the fairies is they could appear like us. We can easily mistake a fairy for a human being. It's only the way the fairy

acts that suddenly gives him or her away and we realize this is not a human. Diane Perkis, the Persian fairy demon Lamashtu was appropriated by the Jews and became the Hebrew demoness Lilith. Can you tell us about those two? And what was important though? Yeah, the idea is that

the Hebrews learned about Lamashtu during the Babylonian captivity. she is a scary fairy because she represents something that's often intrinsic to fairy. She's stuck at a certain point in life. Ferrys often represent a part of mortal life that you kind of can't move on from the way a human being would. And she is stuck at the stage of a woman's life where her desperate need is to have a child and to have a live child. But she can't do it. And the reason is because when she tries to suckle her children, they die.

She's so poisonous. that her children just die at her breast and wither up. And that gives her a longing to steal other women's children. And so the menace that she represents and that her Hebrew avatar, Lilith, represents, is a menace to the newly born child. She comes in the night and she puts the child to her breast and the child suckles her poison and dies.

It's actually said that if the child is restless at the mother's breast, it's because it's sort of formed an unnatural addiction to the poisonous breast of Lamashu or Lilith. So if your child, doesn't breastfeed well, it's a sign that it's in danger. And this is to do with, I think, the mother's terrible fear of the death of the child, but also these creatures represent perhaps the negative feelings that a mother can have about a child, the fear that you're not a good enough mother, the fear that you're not feeding your child enough, the fear that you're somehow

not worthy of your perfect newly born child. And those fears are very difficult to talk about because they're mixed with hatred and aggression. So these stories provide an outlet for that bundle of almost inexpressible maternal hatreds and angers and dreads. Nicola Byrne, can you tell us about the Roman take on this and how they appeared in Ovid's stories, these creatures? Well, I think the fact that we retrospectively call all these beings various. So there's something important about how cultures use the materials that they find. and borrow from each other and rewrite them. So the beings that you get in of its metamorphoses,

the dryads and niads, the well spirits and wood spirits, appear in later forms reworked again as pagan gods and then later and still as fairies. And it's as if we are retrospectively creating a tradition out of a series of writing. tracing continuities, which then come in the Renaissance and later to be called fairies. So I think one of the interesting things is the way that these continuities of these beings who are between our world and the world of the gods reappear again and again in mythological settings

and in writings that we look to for myths. Are they maligned beings? Are they benign beings? I mean, can you give us a rough idea before we move on? They have a dual nature, sometimes benign and sometimes malign. In that sense, they're like nature, and spirits like naiates and dryads are always associated with nature, and the propitiation of nature, which is, of course, the world that we live in as humans. So sometimes spirits are our friends, and sometimes they work against us.

If we can localise it little to this country, well the British, where are these creatures in pre-Christian and early Christian Britain? They are part of a whole strata of supernatural beliefs and deities who gradually become incorporated in the spiritual world of medieval Christianity, passing from sort of divine status as pagan gods, into the panoply of spirits who may be of the devil's party but are certainly part of the belief systems

of medieval Christianity. Can we just entangle that from a moment, Julie, before we go on, because we come to the Anglo-Saxon, the 10th century Exeter book. Now we have the spiritual values of a different order coming in with Christianity, and we have the pagan beliefs system, and we have the ferries.

So if we're keeping our track with these fairies, we've got to know where they are in the 10th century. We do. in the 10th century is very interesting period because of that time Christianity is very elastic and I think we tend to think part of these things were Christian and part of these things were pagan

but for the people who were operating they were simply operating in a powerful spiritual world and of course the fairies or the elves which would have been the name the Anglo-Saxons gave them The Elfshot? The Elfshot were part of this Well in the Exeter book there are several charms and one of them is a charm against Elfshot

and Elf Shot was basically a shot fired by theory. And it caused you a sudden stitch. There's a charm against an arrow, a little sort of bone arrow and the arrow would hit you. You wouldn't see it, but you'd feel it as a sudden stitch. But also more serious things, strokes were thought to come from elf shot. And the most fascinating charm is the one against elf adult, against elf sickness, which is the nightmare, but not just a bad dream, the sense of being completely helpless in sleep. And the feeling that's, you know, somehow the elf had ridden you, that you were taken out of yourself. And it's a very unpleasant experience. So here were all of these physical things. And the interesting thing, they were treated by charms, which referred to the elf, by Christian prayer and by medicine. And the idea is you used all three. So these fairies were not, all these horrible pagan things that we have to Christianize.

But at this point, this very, very powerful supernatural beings who are used, along with other kinds of medicine, to treat human beings. And again, always, the idea is the fairies and the humans or the elves in the humans parallel one another. And in part, the way we behave towards them is the way they behave towards us. They are dual-natured, but they're also curiously neutral in the way nature is neutral.

And if we can control what happens, then we can get the upper hand. Dan, can I ask you, we've moved into the medieval period now. We find the idea of the changeling emerging. Now, it's been around for a while, but let's just discuss the notion of changing in this particular historical context. Can you tell our listeners about the changeling beliefs and how it was so closely riveted to the notion of fairies? Well, a changeling is a fairy child that's been substituted for a human child.

What happens is you get up in the morning and your baby's gone and it's been replaced by a fairy baby. Does the fairy baby look like your baby? The fairy baby can look exactly like your baby. But there are various ways that you can detect the imposture. You can subject the changeling to different kinds of tests. One of the classic ones in folklore is to boil water in an eggshell. The changeling will find it irresistible to comment on the oddity of your proceeding and thus reveal itself by speaking in a way that only an adult could normally speak.

There are other kinds of remedies that you can use if you've got a changing baby, which I'd like to, with a theme I'd like to return to. But this is again about this fairy desire for mortal babies. fairies long for human babies and they take them away and substitute one of their own babies. Why do fairies want human babies? Because they can't have babies very easily. The rationalisation is later.

But I think these stories... But if they're swapping a fairy baby for a human baby, they're not getting any more human babies, aren't they? Because it's not really a fairy baby. It's a sort of imposter. It's actually a really old fairy that just happens to be small. It's not actually an infant.

So what you're getting instead of youth and promise and newness and spring is old age. and wizendness and knowledge. And it's the fairies who want the youth and the promise. Yes, the fairies who need the youth and the promise. Because, of course, they're in a sense trapped in the immortality. Yeah, they're stuck at a certain state of life,

this characteristic of fairies. They desire things that humans have. In a sense, they kind of desire our mortality. And they steal these babies. And young men and women as well. They know they steal old people, it has to be. They still change, almost. They do.

We began to get, we began to get, we began. and have accounts here. We begin to have accounts at this period of meetings between humans and fairies, don't we? That's right. The key thing with changelings is that they provide a way of talking about encounters between the fairy and the human world. One key factor here that we should really mention and probably should have mentioned at an earlier stage, because it's a part of very ancient Celtic mythology, is that fairies are a special class of dead persons. In Celtic tradition, they're not in Anglo-Saxon tradition as far as we know. the fairies are actually dead people who are cut off before their time. So if you die in battle, or if you're a woman who dies in childbirth,

or if you're a baby that dies before you're christened, that's the category of dead people from whom fairies are drawn. So one way of understanding the changeling is that your baby's dead, died, been replaced with death or with a kind of dead person. The changeling myth involves various ways of more or less torturing the changeling in order to induce the ferries to come and take it back and bring back your baby. And people apparently did things

like sitting the alleged changeling on the fire or more moderately leaving the changeling somewhere like a forest for the time it took a candle to burn down. And the ferries were then supposed to come and return your real baby. Now, obviously, you don't need Sigmund Freud to see that these are very hostile ways of treating your baby. They're tantamount to infanticide. They may actually have been a sanctioned form of infanticide.

There were. There were some accounts where clearly they put babies who were deformed in some way and these babies died and it was justified that these were changelings. Yeah, that's right. But I think there's a way of seeing all kinds of relationships between humans and fairies as alibis for other things. So I always think that the very persistent myth of the lost time in the fairy hill where you're captured by the fairies on a dark night and taken away to fairyland,

You think it's for a night You spend their feasting and dancing And in fact you come back after seven years That provides an alibi for all sorts of convenient disappearances There are jokey versions of this Particularly in Irish That people sort of say, no no, I wasn't drunk last night I was taken away by the fairies

And this is regarded is quite hilarious But also the dead woman The idea of the fairies being the dead You get the story quite commonly in Wales And in Scotland and Ireland That a man will see his wife among the fairies, fairies, his wife who is supposedly died, and we'll actually get her back

and we'll then have children, and these children are called the sons of the dead woman, and they have powers of themselves. So, again, it's a way of talking about marriage, human relationships, the relationship with children. Very common things. This isn't cosmology.

This isn't creating the world. These are human lives. It begins to be drawn into, if we're speaking to our country for a while, which we are for a little while, actually. We begins to draw into our literature, Chaucer. Can you give Chaucer's attitude towards inclusion of fairies? Well, Chaucer writes about fairies in several of his works. For example, in the tale of Sopis,

he actually parodies French romances of the fairies and holds them up to ridicule the courtly stories of the fairies in the forest of brink. Rassiliand in Brittany. But in the wife Bath's prologue in the Canterbury Tales, she talks about the fairies as something that people used to believe in, but now fairy belief is disappearing and all the fairies have left. And that's the first instance we know of,

of the start of a very long tradition in which people are constantly lamenting the fact that fairy belief is something that people used to have when the world was young, when people were more innocent, and it's now gone and the fairies have left, and all the magic has gone from the countryside. And that's a theme that gets repeated time and time again. And in a way, I think you could see the whole fairy tradition as a metaphor for a worldview or for a past that's lost and gone forever.

And the magical English. How did they, Dan Percis, how did they, the fairies, as it were, in line with or transfer into witches in about the 16th century? Well, in Scotland we have lots of confessions from people, women accused of witchcraft, that mention fairies. And one of the reasons for this is that if you wanted to set yourself up as what was called a cunning woman, a white witch, you could claim that your power derived from your contact with the fairies. A white witch would do things like curing minor illnesses, finding lost property, being able to locate buried treasure. all of which are skills that the fairies can confer on you.

And one can see that what happened in these witchcraft confessions is that when asked pressing questions by interrogators, the Scottish witches in question would come up with whatever story they've been telling their clients for the last 20 years. So one of them are witch called Bessie Dunlop, explains how she exchanges her baby for the power to see and know given to her by the Queen of the Fairies. The Queen of the Fries takes the baby and she takes the power.

And this would be a kind of self-advertisement. There's another witch in Orkney called Elspah Three. She doesn't lose a baby, but instead agrees to have sex with a fairy lord, who's actually her dead cousin, who's been killed in a recent battle, and who comes to her for three nights running. And in exchange gives her the power to tell who the father of unborn children is, which is obviously a socially pretty dangerous power to have, and which she immediately and very tactlessly uses

to tell another relative of her family that the baby she's carrying, is in her husband's. So one can see how these people may have become unpopular enough to have been unkeled to woodcraft. They also take over the fairy medicine as well. I mean, elf shot becomes associated with witches and cunning women. And there's a very interesting picture

of a man holding his foot with an arrow through it. And next to him is a woman who's clearly a witch, who's got the bow. But the thing is, the man can't see her. I mean, she seems to be invisible to him. So you get very much the idea of the elf from the elf shot, that you could never see

the person who shot you, transferred to the witch. And it's a very visual, dramatic transfer. And this is what was happening at this period, is that you get a formalisation of this and a demonisation of this. And the demonisation goes straight through to the 18th century.

Nick, at the same time as the witchcraft affair is it's becoming nice and complicated now because the literary persons, as you intimated with Chaucer, as fact you stated with Chaucer, are taking this up for their own purposes, and we have a great burgeoning now, don't we? We have Ferrick with Spencer, we have Mitsam and I assume

Shakespeare, we have Drayton, and we have the ideal of the miniaturisation of fairies. So the literary men, and it is all men that I can, you can probably think of of, women, right, is it all men actually, yes. I're taking this up very, very strongly and using it in very subtle and grossing ways.

And in very different ways, the folk traditions that we've been talking about up to now are mainly associated with the countryside and often with domestic, with domestic, with domesticity or farming. But these literary representations are fairies. They're urban and courtly. And they are imagining, again, it's another, it's a world,

it's another parallel world, but it's a parallel world to the, royal court that writers such as Shakespeare and Drayton, though they weren't part of, they were thinking about and looking at. So they take up the court of Oberon and Titania. It becomes a magical dream world of the Tudor and Stuart courts that formed, had so much power in this time and in the lives of these writers. Have you a theory about why so many of them should be so interested in it. The courts themselves seemed to be from the outside and were anxious to be seen as places of

glamour and magic. So in that sense it's natural to, it's a natural step to move from the metaphor of a fairy queen to a poem about a fairy queen, a queen who is actually a fairy. Queen. Queen Elizabeth

the first like to be compared to the Queen of the Fairview? She did. Why is that? Well, it was a power symbol for her and it allowed her, and particularly her poets, to see her in this world, which is very multi-layered, because the world of the Fairy Queen was England. Possibly it was Ireland, which she was conquering, which was giving her so much problem. But also it was Empire. And I think that's the really important one, is that she was Gloria Anna, Queen of an Empire. And of course here was the empire of the fairies that she could have. And then, of course, you can nuance the fairies politically. But I think that the draw initially is that here is something which can be nuanced, which kind of aren't Catholic saints or Catholic angels to begin with. In the 18th century, we begin to get strong visualizations of fairies. And the revival of Shakespeare prompted someone to artist to illustrate it.

And Fuzzelli did an illustration of Fuzzle did illustration of Midsummer Night Stream. you take it on from that? Yes. At the end of the 18th century, there's a big project to illustrate Shakespeare's plays, the first of many. And some of the most popular images from, popular paintings from Boydell Shakespeare Gallery were fuselies pictures for Mid-Summer Night's Dream, Titania and Bottom, and the awakening of Titania. And these are really significant because in all of the representations, all of the accounts of the fairies we have before, there are hardly any images of what fairies look like. There are descriptions of fairies varying wildly, but it's at this time at the end of the 18th century when our picture of what fairies look like, diminutive and with

insect wings, that finally takes shape. And that's the image of the fairy that's been passed onto us. Juliet, how should the 18th century interest in fairies be interpreted, do you think? Well, again, you get a lot of things coming together. You get an interest in insects and you get an interest in nature and I think this helps with the insect wings. And the development of scientific instruments, so you could see proper wings. And, of course, a lot more species were being discovered.

So, I mean, there was a scientific element to this as well. There's an interest in the marvellous. There's a reaction to science as well. which sort of brings fairies to the fore. People were starting to say, ah, if fairies exist and exist in a particular place, this is proof of a spiritual world, a counter to the Enlightenment.

So you get this counter-enlightenment thing as well. And of course you also get the rise of urban culture. And here's where you get the demand for fairy pictures and the revival of Shakespeare's plays and the beginning of these wonderful sort of pantomimes where fairies were brought in. You get the rise of ballet as well. I mean, that had enormous...

Think all of this actually happens in the 19th rather than the 18th century. It crosses over, but this is this started. And certainly the interest in science, and certainly the reaction against science. Let's talk about the sexual aspect of Ferries, which comes in at around this time too more strongly. They seem to be both seductive and innocent. They have sexual allure and they're untouchable.

Where is that going down? Well, I mean, if we look at something that Juliet just touched, on the Victorian Music Hall Ferry. One of the associations for fairies for a Victorian gentleman wouldn't just be cute childlike winged figures but also scantily clad girls in muslin frocks sitting on clouds

showing an awful lot of leg in what were called extravaganzas or spectacles in which Victorian gentlemen could sort of sit in the stalls and look up the dresses of these really scantily clad girls and they're highly sexualised and that borrows from the sexuality of the nymph figures and the fairy queen figures

that we've been discussing. But the sexuality was there in the stories as well. Yes, because a lot of the stories are about marriages or about liaisons between human beings and fairies, which are always very fraught. Yeah, it's not invented by the Victorian. No, it's picked up on something that was there. But it's certainly given this commercial form

and it certainly made the sexuality in the stories was something that could be resolved. The sexuality in Victorian period was simply something that could be sold and was very widely. We know the Victorian enormous number of people, people were writing about fairies, illustrating fairies. Is, excuse me, is Peter Pan, Diane Perkins, is that some apotheosis?

I know it's 19002, but is that some apotheosis of the 19th century Victorian obsession? Absolutely. I think one of the reasons that the ferry is less current for us is Peter Pan, because it brings to a kind of summation everything that the Victorians do with fairies. And also Barry was Scottish, and he knew a lot of Scottish folklore.

There's an enormous amount of fairy folklore in Peter Pan. Well, the Scott put a lot of cow-claw together. Yeah. But I think as well that Barry's mother was Scottish and told him stories, and he says this himself. And what Peter Pan's really about is dead children. I mean, every Wendy house is a kind of tomb, really. There's this intriguing moment where Wendy's thought to be dead and they build a house around her, and then she sort of gets better.

What's fascinating about Peter Pan is that he's rather like an ancient Persian demon called Kubu, who's a lost child, a child that never gets named. and therefore longs for other children as companions. That's exactly what happens to Peter, particularly in early versions of the story, The Little White Bird and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. This is kind of autobiographical because Barry had a brother who died when he was still a child.

And Barry always envied this little boy because he was his mother's favourite and his mother never ceased to mourn for Barry's dead brother. And really the only way not to grow up to be Peter Pan is to be a dead child. And this is sort of implicit in the Peter Pan legend. Peter Pan and his followers are babies who fell out of their perambulators and got lost in Kensington Gardens.

They're changing. Sorry, Nicola. But the climactic moment of Peter Pan on stage, the thing that everybody remembers is Tinkerbell being brought back to life. When Peter Pan comes forward onto the front of the stage and says, quick, say that you believe to the children. The children in the audience are required to clap in order to show that they believe in fairies.

And I think the question is, who are they clapping for? Who are they believing for? I don't think that they are being asked to believe for themselves. Being asked to believe for Peter. No, they're being asked for adults. For their parents who can no longer believe in fairies. And it's the idea, again, of this of childhood as a fairyland that we adults have lost, that's being dramatized very painfully and memorably

in this amazing theatrical moment. Well, I'm sorry we didn't get on to the Cottingley Fairies or the Irish Folklore Commission, which discovered fairies in Ireland way into middle and beyond the middle of the last century. But thank you all very much. Thank you, Julie Wood, Diane Perkis and Nicola Bone. Next week we'll be talking about J.S. Mill, the 19th century philosopher and author of On Liberty.

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