What exactly is a fairy? The Fairy Census 2017

John Anster Fitzgerald, The fairy’s lake, 1866, Tate Gallery

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

(Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5).

In January this year the Fairy Investigation Society published a Fairy Census covering 2014-2017.  The document makes fascinating reading and I will be examining its contents over a couple of posts.  Here, I want to raise the intriguing question of what, exactly, we understand by the word ‘fairy’ in the early 21st century.

The data for the census comes from individuals across the world, although primarily from Britain, Ireland and the USA.  They submitted descriptions of their fairy experiences to the Society and these give us an opportunity to consider what today is popularly understood to be ‘a fairy.’

We all think we know what a fairy looks like: we envisage either a fluttering girl or a small pixie in green. Whatever the detail, the fundamental assumption is that they are humanoids, closely resembling us.  Nevertheless the Census, along with Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing fairies, confronts us with a body of sightings which within themselves are consistent and which challenge our conventional ideas.  Some fairies apparently do not look like fairies at all.

Small animals

It is not unusual to hear of fairies and pixies being described as particularly hirsute and shaggy, with dark and unkempt hair, but a small number of encounters have been with mammalian beings that display human-like characteristics.  Marjorie Johnson gathered together several of these.

During the summer of 1920 fairy seer Tom Charman spent nine weeks in the New Forest and repeatedly met with small cat-like creatures.  Similar beings were described to Johnson by witnesses from Kent, Essex and Cheshire, but she also received a comparable report from Indiana- of a cat standing on its hind legs and wearing brown trousers.  When disturbed, it ran away ‘like a rabbit.’

In his valuable little book, Somerset fairies and pixies (2010), Jon Dathen interviewed a Somerset farmer who recounted a sighting from his childhood, some seventy years earlier. Late at night he had sneaked downstairs to find a small person “like a hare done up in clothes” sitting in front of the farmhouse fire.  He had long ears, whiskers and buck teeth, but he could speak- explaining he had come in to escape the cold.  Later in his life, the farmer had heard of other hare-type pixies being sighted in the county.

John Anster Fitzgerald, The storm.

Furry shapes

 A handful of reports take furriness even further.  A woman on holiday in mid-Cornwall during the 1930s described how she regularly met some cliff dwelling pixies; both were about two feet in height.  The male was a small human with some distinctive features but the female was covered in short dark brown hair with yellow rings on her body and arms, somewhat like a bee.

Two other accounts are even more surprising.  During the early 1940s in Kent one woman was on a country walk when she saw a furry tennis ball rolling up a slope towards her.  It briefly opened when it drew close to where she was sitting to reveal a pixie within- and then disappeared.  Returning to Cornwall in the 1930s, a final witness on a coastal walk sighted a pisky who then changed into “a long furry black roll, which gambolled about on the grass and then disappeared.”

John Anster Fitzgerald, The painter’s dream.

‘Ent fays’

Over the last hundred and fifty years the identification of fairies with the environment and natural processes has become more and more commonplace.  Some fairies are seen dressed in garments made from leaves and flowers, but it may not be especially surprising to find that supernatural beings are met with who appear to be more vegetative than animal.  These are creatures whose body seems to be composed of vegetable matter; they may perhaps be subdivided into ‘ents,’ walking trees, and smaller hybrid entities.

The tree-beings can be tall, seven feet high or more, perhaps with faces showing in the bark of their ‘bodies.’ The smaller vegetation fairies appear to be far more mixed in their appearance.  Some have bodies made of animated leaves and sticks, some are composed of a mixture of plant and insect elements, some are tiny leaf-like creatures.  With more evidence it may very likely be possible to analyse these types further.

Charles Altamont Doyle, A creeper.

Monsters

Last of all, there is a collection of witness accounts that tests our conceptions of fairies to the limits.  There are strange hybrid creatures: a dragonfly-fish, a frog-sparrow or a butterfly-bird.  There are also semi-human forms: beings that are part human and part insect, reptile, dog, spider or frog, as well as fairies that seem to be a combination of traditional fairy and mermaid features. Some fays have appeared as huge tadpoles, another as an ape dressed in leaves.

Some other less conventional forms

There are various other classes of sighting which, whilst fitting within the conventional imagery of fays, still display some unique features.

Aliens 

The boundaries between ‘aliens’ and ‘fairies’ are increasingly uncertain and permeable, it seems.  In Seeing fairies a tiny number of witnesses mentioned beings with pronounced pointed faces or slit/ black eyes.  The proportion of such sightings was distinctly higher in the Census, suggesting that the now-standard concept of a ‘grey alien’ may be shaping fairy experiences.

Humanoids 

Although the commonest fay form is human, they are sometimes said to be noticeably disproportionate, being too tall or having overlong limbs.  This is occasionally hinted at in Johnson’s reports, but spindly or gangly bodies are considerably more frequent in the Census, with bodies described as being very slender, long-limbed or above normal height.

Lights 

The luminosity of fairies is often mentioned, but the last transformation is the eradication of the body altogether: the fairy is reduced to a point of light, which is often seen darting about.  Johnson’s witnesses experienced this only a handful of times.  In the Census fourteen per cent of cases were sightings of bright lights, of which nearly three quarters were moving.  We may suspect here the influence of J. M. Barrie‘s stage representation of Tinkerbell in the minds of those having the experience.

John Anster Fitzgerald, The stuff that dreams are made on (detail).

Conclusions

On their own, these reports are so anomalous as to make no sense, but grouped together some sort of pattern does appear to emerge and it is possible to identify certain ‘species’ that are regularly sighted.  Perhaps they are so different from the standard idea of fairy to demand a new name, but at present ‘faery’ is the only category to which we may assign them.

 

Fairy child care- a different story

Alan Lee, Ghillie dhu

The standard account of the fairies’ dealings with human children is a sombre one: they steal infants and leave changelings in their place, bringing grief to mortal families.  Reassuringly, this is not the whole story.

Our Good Neighbours have been known to help children in need, much against their accepted character.  In addition, the changeling phenomenon might perhaps be something of an exaggeration, albeit for purely practical reasons: Catherine Dawson Scott, writing in the Fairy Investigation Society journal for 1929 on the subject of Cornish pixies and spriggans, had this to say on fears of infant theft:

“I think a human baby would be too big for a fairy to manage. After all they are only little folk, at the most, two feet high and a baby would be a giant to them. It would grow and grow, it would want food, it would scream. Altogether it would be more of a nuisance than a joy. Whatever else the fairies may do, I fancy they would draw the line at burdening themselves with a baby – so you need not worry about that.”

Perhaps Dawson Scott is right, but in any event there is evidence of a kindlier nature than her rational explanation allows for.

From Norfolk come the little known hyter (or hikey) sprites.  They are small and elusive fairies, but they are said to be favourable to humans and will return home lost children they come across (and stray donkeys too).  Oddly, the threat of the sprites was actually more frequently deployed by parents as a sort of nursery bogie to get children to behave.

A similar report is made of the Scottish Highland spirit called the gille dubh (the black boy).  His hair is black and he dresses in moss and leaves, haunting the woods at the southern end of Loch a Druing near Gairloch.  He was well known and often seen in the latter half of the eighteenth century and once found a girl called Jessie MacRae wandering at night in the woods.  He looked after her kindly and took her home in the morning.  Jessie was, in fact, the only person to whom the Gille was ever known to have spoken.  More generally, Campbell reported in his Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900, c.1, p.40) that Scottish fairies would “sometimes take care of children whom they found forgotten.”  Whether he only referred to the gille dubh is unclear.

Lastly, we have the story of Bettie Stoggs from Cornwall.  Robert Hunt reported in Popular Romances of the West of England that throughout the ‘high countries’ of Penwith (the parishes of Morvah, Zennor and Towednack) it was said that the fairies would take poorly cared for children and clean them.  This was Stogs’ experience: she drank, and neglected both her home and her child, but the pixies removed the infant, washed its clothes and left it near the cottage covered in flowers.

Setting aside the fairies’ traditional wish to acquire human infants, it was widely accepted that those children would be well-cared for when they were in fairyland.  That being so, it is not improbable that they might on occasion extend the same care and affection to children in (or sundered from) their own home.

Further reading

I discussed the abduction and substitution of children in my posting on changelings.  An expanded version of this text will appear in my next book, Faeries, which will be published by Llewellyn Worldwide next year.

 

 

The fairies of Albion

Paul Nash- Earth home or The fortress

A quick plug for my other WordPress blog.  On johnkruseblog I write about archaeology, art, history, landscape, theatre, film and anything else that takes my fancy.

A long term theme has been the idea of Albion as a parallel or alternative identity for Britain- a mythical, mystical counterpart.  I’ve just posted a discussion on the fairies of Albion, examining how our local fays may be seen as an expression of the spirit of the land and of the people.

This posting ties in with some thoughts I’ve looked at here, especially the links between fays and our ancient landscape and the theories of William Blake.

Click on over to johnkruseblog and have a look!

Bernard Sleigh and the map of fairyland- Part Two

I continue here my examination of Bernard Sleigh’s Ancient mappe of fairyland and its background.

‘Edwardian innocence’- the context of the map

“Fairies and ghosts are here galore.” (Robert Graves, ‘Letter to SS from Mametz Wood,’ from Fairies and fusiliers. 1918)

Tom Harper, the British Library’s antiquarian map curator, has observed that:

“An ancient mappe of Fairyland… was published in 1918, the year that World War I ended, so it is difficult not to relate the two in some way. Could the Fairyland constitute a yearning for a return to pre-1914 Edwardian innocence? Compared with the devastated, bomb-blasted landscape of northern France, this vision of a make-believe land may have seemed a seductive escape for a European society bearing the physical and psychological scars of mass conflict.

The map is very much a product of the Arts and Crafts ideology which evinced a return to traditional, pre-industrial production methods.  The ornamentation and typeface are in the style of William Morris’ Kelmscott Press. This retrospective stylistic attitude places the map in opposition to a mechanical modernity, which happened to have reached its most destructive pinnacle during the War.”

These comments raise a very interesting question.  To what extent is escapism in art excusable?  Should artists confront the events of their day in their works, as is the case with Great War artist Otto Dix, or should they offer their audiences refuge?  Furthermore, as noted, Sleigh was too old to serve in Flanders.  Without that first-hand experience- what the Germans called Fronterlebnis– was he qualified to speak in any case?

Bernard Sleigh

Modern painter Peter Blake is known for the series of fairy pictures he produced whilst a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists during the 1970s.  Interviewed for the Independent in December 1997, Blake told Andrew Lambirth that-

“Fairies are a vehicle for what we want them to be… There’s an edge of magic realism to them.  The fairies I paint have the ability to make magic.”

More recently, however, Blake seemed to have a change of heart, describing his fairy phase as “unforgivably sentimental.”  Reviewing Tate Liverpool’s 2007 retrospective of Blake’s career, critic Waldemar Januszczak was far less kind; for him the pictures were “unforgivably silly” when set against the political background of late 1970s Britain.  So- were the fairy pictures a dereliction of some perceived duty as a social reporter; should Blake have been painting punks and Grunwick strikers?  Should Sleigh likewise have painted mud and trenches?

Rose Amy Fyleman

Prolific English children’s author Rose Amy Fyleman (1877-1957) is probably best remembered for her first published work, There are fairies at the bottom of our garden, which appeared in May 1917.  It reassures readers that they can participate in fairy revels themselves:

“There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!…
The King is very proud and very handsome;
The Queen- now you can guess who that could be
(She’s a little girl all day, but at night she steals away)?
Well – it’s Me!”

Over the Channel as Fyleman wrote, the British were preparing the appalling offensive at Passchendaele. Talk of fairies, merrymaking with the local wildlife behind the gardener’s shed, might have seemed curiously irrelevant and inappropriate- even unpatriotic- that summer.  The next year, though, Fyleman wrote a partner poem, There used to be, which stands in affecting antithesis to her previous verse:

“There used to be fairies in Germany-

I know, for I’ve seen them there…

What, and oh what were they doing

To let things like this?

How could it be? And didn’t they see

That folk were going amiss?…

There used to be fairies in Germany-

The children will look for them still…

“The flowers,” they will say, “have all vanished,

And where can the fairies be fled

That played in the fern?”- The flowers will return,

But I fear that the fairies are dead.”

This is a remarkable social and political commentary.  The Great War smashed many childhood illusions and security; to some degree it appears that it was the fairies’ fault, arising from neglect of and by them.  The result has been their extinction.

Francis Ledwidge

Whatever our views of Fyleman’s verse, it cannot be denied that fairyland provided comfort and shelter from the experience of war for those actually on the frontline.  Arguably their views are a better measure of the fittest response from art to death and disruption.  Irish poet Francis Ledwidge was writing fairy verse in the trenches right up until the week of his death in 1917.  Awaiting action in Belgium in July that year, Ledwidge preferred not to think about whizz bangs and gas but to imagine fairy dances, piping elves, ceol sidhe (fairy music) and the allurements of fairy lovers:

“From hill to hill, from land to land,

Her lovely hand is beckoning for me,

I follow on through dangerous zones,

Cross dead men’s bones and oceans stormy.”

(The lanawn shee (The fairy lover), July 1917)

In fact, Ledwidge’s attraction to fairy themes only increased as the war progressed.  His first collection of verse, Songs of the fields (1915), contained no fay references.  His second, Songs of peace of 1917, contained two and the third, Last songs, which was published in 1918, includes eight fairy poems.  Arguably, as the stress increased and his odds of avoiding injury diminished, the lure of a fantasy outlet grew irresistible.

Poet and mythologist Robert Graves came out of action in Flanders still able to promise that “you’ll be fairies soon” in his poem Cherry time or to declare “I’d love to be a fairy’s child” in the verse of the same name (both published in his 1918 collection Fairies and fusiliers). Another officer, J. R. R. Tolkien, was likewise writing fairy verse in the trenches- although his subjects may have been toughened by the experience, transforming them from typical winged Victorian elves in his early verse to the noble warriors of Lord of the Rings.

Estella Canziani, The piper of dreams, Medici Society

Lastly, in summer 1915 painter Estella Canziani exhibited The piper of dreams at the Royal Academy.  The picture shows a boy playing a whistle in a wood, unaware of the fairies flitting around him; it was an instant success.  The Medici Society quickly acquired the rights to the image and published prints and postcards, very many of which were sent to troops at the front, where it was very popular.

As Blake indicated, fairies have always had a creative function in our culture, providing inspiration to writers and visual artists alike.  Fairy imagery too is a vehicle for addressing many emotions and problems, from sexuality to violence.  There is no inherent reason why fairy art cannot discuss war- nor why it should not be a legitimate response to conflict.

‘Dreamland’- the content of the map

 One map dealer has described faerie, as depicted by Sleigh, as “an idyllic, fantastical land.”  This captures its mood exactly.  However, we should note at the outset that there is a slight misnomer.  The map portrays the land of fairy-tales, rather than being a depiction of Faerie.

The 1917 Guide to the map is a charming read, being poetic and full of authentic fairylore.  Sleigh begins:

“In the heart of every child is hidden a little golden key which unlocks the door of a silent, clean swept room full of changing lights and mystic shadows.  There, every child that is born into the world enters at times to gaze eagerly upon the one great window, pictured with ancient legends…

Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam,

Of perilous oceans, of faery lands forlorn.” (Guide p.7)

Sleigh concludes with lines from John Keats’ famous poem, Ode to a nightingale, inappropriate as they may be to his generally affectionate vision of faery.

The map is “for the use and guidance of future explorers” who travel to the “rainbow guarded shores” of this mysterious place- The land of heart’s desire, The fortunate isles, The islands of the blest.  It’s needed because the tracks “vanish and reappear- and vanish again in bewildering fashion- baffling and discouraging to even the most earnest traveller.” ( The guide, pp.8-9) In Fairyland distances are measured in thoughts, each equalling five hundred of our miles.  What’s more, travellers must always be cautious.  They should arrive at Dreamland Harbour where their passports will be stamped and their eyes touched with magic ointment.  This traditional protection against fairy glamour is vital because, without it, they won’t be able to tell good fairies from bad and they may end up as a lost child in Never Never Land.  In this emphasis upon the malicious and untrustworthy nature of fairy kind, Sleigh is wholly authentic: faery has always been a place of illusion and peril and Sleigh did not conceal this from his children.

Turning to the map itself, there is a blending of fairytale, myth, fairy lore and the Matter of Britain.  Fairyland is an island, mountainous at its two ends and with a lower land bridge joining these.  A wall, “builded of Stars by manie Elfin Emperours in days remote,” divides the good and evil halves.  The island is littered with symbols indicating inns, fairy shrines and temples, wishing wells and, most exciting of all, the sites of dwarves’ treasure.  There are plenty of traditional folklore references.

Amidst the peaks on the left/ west, we see the Valley of Dragons, in which lies The Weird Wood and “Blackadder Lake- here Afanc broodeth.” The afanc is a Welsh water monster.  Nearby is an elfin monastery, a wandering will of the wisp and, in the hills above, fairy flocks grazing near Fairies’ Marsh, Elfin Mere and the Kobold’s Caves.

Settlements crowd the lower ground between the highlands.  There we find many fairy references: Elfin Citie, Kelpie Hamlet, Undine Bay, Brownies’ Huts, Troll Town, Dwarf’s Caves, Bogles Corner, Pixie Town, an Elfin temple and Oberon’s Cross.  Scattered around these you spot that “Tom Tit Tot lives here,” that there are leprechauns, nixies, neckans, mermaids, sirens and water sprites, a River of White Nymphs and, where “the sidhe make the Water of Life.”

So far, so good: but the traditional theme is not so consistent.  You will also encounter Humpty Dumpty, Goosey Gander, Bo Peep, Puss in Boots and Jack Horner.  In Avalon you may visit the tombs of Arthur and Guinevere and Morgan Le Fay’s house.  Merlin sits disconsolate in the Forest of Lyonesse; there is Ogier le Danois close to ‘The Imp Tree’ from the romance of Sir Orfeo (“Ƿai sett hem doun al þre/ Under a faire ympe-tre”).  You will come across Perseus and Andromeda, Theseus and the Golden Fleece, Valhalla and Asgard.  Very modern elements creep in, too: we see the Lost Boys and, away across the sea, the Water Babies and other personnel from Kingsley’s book.  The range of references is huge and you cannot but be impressed at the breadth of literature with which the Sleigh children were acquainted, aged about ten and twelve.  There is a reading list at the end of The guide, which includes the reasonably predictable Arabian Nights, Andersen, Charles Kingsley, Nesbit and Brothers Grimm, but also suggests the young audience might like to tackle Malory, The Mabinogion, de la Motte Fouqué and Macdonald’s Phantastes- a very different proposition to The princess and the goblin.

‘A key to all the mythologies’

Many authorities have argued that the Victorian fairy fascination was a response to disenchantment with their world- and an effort to re-enchant it.  By 1918 the need for enchantment was very great.

The Ancient mappe of Fairyland won’t teach us a great deal about the location or nature of Faerie, but it will certainly entertain and charm.  For example, along the lower edge you will spot Puck singing for Titania at the foot of an old-fashioned dove cote from which most of the birds have been evicted by tiny winged fays.

Nonetheless, Sleigh’s map is more than amusement.  Whilst Tolkien’s Middle Earth maps can be engrossing, they are no more than drawings of made up places.  Sleigh’s map is the same, but it is more: it is a “little golden key” to a wealth of other stories, opening a magic casement onto a treasury of classic myths.  Like all real maps, it is a guide to a journey, but it’s not the adventure itself.

Further reading

See too my further discussion of the role played by faery art and literature in the 1914-18 war effort: ‘War fairies‘ and my consideration of Rutland Boughton, the Glastonbury Festival and faery opera.  For further discussion of Faery art in the period, see my book Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century

 

 

 

Bernard Sleigh and the map of fairyland: Part One

Fairies can threaten humans, leading them astray or stealing children, but they can also serve as muses, inspiring great works of art and literature.  This post looks at one quite unique product of that inspiration.

Writing on British fairy literature during the 1920s and ‘30s in the journal Mythlore for 2013, author Douglas Anderson teased his audience:

“I’d like to turn to the author I find most interesting from this period. He grew up in the Birmingham area of England and was indelibly inspired after seeing Peter Pan performed on stage. He was devoted to William Morris and George MacDonald. He went on to write about fairies, in poems and in stories, illustrating his own writings with his own artwork. He was particularly renowned for his maps…”[1]

I imagine we all think we know who Anderson is referring to, but he has a surprise for us:

“Though the above could all be said of J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m actually talking about someone else, named Bernard Sleigh.”

Sleigh (1872–1954) was an English muralist, stained-glass designer, illustrator and wood engraver; in late 1917 he created a remarkable fantasy map that constitutes his best-known legacy today.  An Ancient Mappe of Fairyland, Newly Discovered and Set Forth is large, colourful and ambitious, being crammed with a multitude of characters from legend and fairytale.

In this post I want to explore the making and meaning of that chart.  I pored over the maps of Middle Earth as a boy and such plans have now become a staple of fantasy writing, but Tolkien did not initiate this fashion, nor are his maps as loaded with meaning as some.

‘Here they do magic’

Gaskin, Kilhwych, the king’s son (illustration to the Mabinogion)

Born in 1872, the first difference between Sleigh and Tolkien is that the former was twenty years older, which meant that he did not serve during the First World War.  Their education was also utterly different.  Aged fourteen, Sleigh left school and was apprenticed to a wood engraver.  As part of this training, he studied at the Birmingham School of Art, where he was a student of Arthur Gaskin, a painter, illustrator and craftsman, who had in turn worked with Edward Burne-Jones. Whilst attending art school Sleigh came under the influence of the Birmingham Group, an informal collective of Arts and Crafts painters and craftsmen.  All of these influences can be seen in Sleigh’s work, the medieval style of which echoes Burne-Jones, William Morris and Walter Crane.

Sleigh, Phylis and Demoophoon, illustration from George MacDonald’s Phantastes

Sleigh was especially skilled in wood engraving and soon found commissions illustrating books. One of his first major projects was engraving one hundred of Gaskin’s illustrations for a two-volume edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s Stories and Fairy Tales.[2] Sleigh was also published in The Yellow Book, The Dome and The Studio and illustrated Piers Plowman, several novels by Morris, George Macdonald’s Phantastes, Legrand d’Aussy’s Fabliaux and an edition of the romance of Tristan and Iseult, all titles suited to his style and tastes.

Sleigh went on to have a highly distinguished and successful career, designing furnishings and internal decorations for a wide range of private clients.  He also taught at Birmingham School of Art, published several design and craft manuals and was a member of several artistic societies.

In the context of Sleigh’s professional life, the map of fairyland looks like something of an aberration, but it was in fact an expression of much deeper personal interests that persisted throughout his life.

Sleigh, The harbour of the Holy Graal

“I believe in Faeries”

Sleigh is celebrated today not for his handicraft design but for the Ancient Mappe of Fairyland.  This is not, in fact, unfitting.  As a young man, Sleigh was greatly inspired by the mythical writings of MacDonald and Morris and the map clearly reflects their influence.  Indeed, by the time he retired in 1937, Sleigh’s imagery had turned from romantic medievalism entirely to a world peopled by supernatural beings.  His writing, too, changed from the practical to the mythological, for example Witchcraft (1934), The dryad’s child (1936) and two fantasies for children, The boy in the ivy (1955) and The tailor’s friends (1956).

The map’s immediate success encouraged Sleigh to produce further fairy works.  In October 1920 he published The faery calendar, in which illustrations for each month of the year were paired with a piece of prose or verse. In his Preface Sleigh confessed that-

“I believe in Faeries. It is very natural and not a bit foolish; for in these days we are quickly learning how little we know of any other world than our own. It is no more difficult for me to believe that a wild rose, or a daisy, has personality, consciousness of life- a spirit, in short, than that a human being has.”

He was, of course, in very good company at this time, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle promoting the veracity of the Cottingley fairy photographs and espousing very similar Theosophist beliefs.

Sleigh’s next book, A faerie pageant, appeared in 1924; it was a limited-edition volume resembling the Calendar.  Lastly, in 1926 Sleigh wrote a volume of stories about fairies, The Gates of Horn: Being Sundry Records from the Proceedings of the Society for the Investigation of Fairy Fact and Fallacy. Although intended for adults, his publishers J. M. Dent marketed it as a children’s book, resulting in its commercial failure.   This makes copies extremely rare today, although the stories are highly regarded by those fortunate enough to have been able to read them.  As a footnote to this, we should note that in 1927 Sleigh was instrumental in establishing a real Fairy Investigation Society, which still operates online today.

‘The other end of nowhere’- making the map

Sleigh’s daughter, the writer Barbara, recalled in her childhood memoir that:

“One wet holiday my father drew a Map of Faeryland for us. On it were marked the sites of all our best-loved fairy-stories. There is Peter Pan’s House, and the palace of La Belle Dormante and the Bridge of Roc’s Eggs, and such succinct entries as ‘Here be bogles’ and ‘Warlocks live here’. It has fascinated several generations of children.” (The smell of privet, 1971, pp.51-52.)

It is reported that Sleigh got the idea for the map after seeing a production of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.  If this is correct, it is a further interesting parallel with Tolkien who recorded in his diary the profound effect that seeing the play had upon him.  Nonetheless, fantasy maps have always been created, although the growth in fantasy literature in the twentieth century seems to have led to a marked rise in the number produced.  Early examples include the playing board for ‘The Prince’s Quest: A Fairy Race Game’ from 1890 and A map of fairy land (Alan Wright, 1909).  Sleigh’s map was therefore not unique, but its scope and scale were new and inspired others, such as Czech artist Jaro Hess’ 1930 map of The land of make believe, a map of ‘The land of nursery rhyme’ drawn by Charles Folkard as an endpaper to the 1946 book of that name by Alice Daglish and Ernest Rhys and, lastly, a 1973 map to accompany William Goldman’s Princess bride (not forgetting Tolkien and George R. R. Martin, of course).

The prince’s quest

The Ancient Mappe of Fairyland was first published in December 1917 as a full colour scroll with wood ends, rolling out to nearly a metre and a half in width and thirty-five centimetres in height. With it Sleigh produced a small sixteen-page pamphlet, A guide to the Map of Fairyland.  In 1926, because the map had continued to be a good seller, the publishers Sidgwick and Jackson issued a second companion volume: Travels in fairyland is an anthology of the nursery rhymes, stories and poems mentioned on the map or listed at the end of the Guide.

Alan Wright, Map of fairyland

The map is hand-drawn and seems to be a combination of coloured pencil and watercolour wash.  It is somewhat reminiscent of Tolkien’s illustrations of The Hobbit– but plainly rather more accomplished.  Less highly finished than many of Sleigh’s full-colour illustrations, there is a childlike or playful quality to the draftsmanship which is part of its appeal.

After Sleigh retired from teaching in 1937, the map was turned into a Rosebank Fabric by the well-known Lancashire company.  This, in turn, led to many other commissions for textile designs, thereby providing a source of income over and above his meagre teaching pension.

Hess, The land of make believe

Further reading

This posting will be continued.  Another description of the Mappe can be found on The fairy page blog.  There are a few interesting articles on this blog (plus a great deal about Harry Potter) but it seems to have run out of steam in April 2017.

[1] Douglas A. Anderson, ‘Fairy elements in British literary writings in the decade following the Cottingley fairy photographs episode,’ Mythlore 32.1, Fall/Winter 2013.

[2] George Allen, 1893.

Mere maids- freshwater spirits of Britain

 

A fideal, Brian Froud

In this post I want to explore a very particular form of British fairy being, the freshwater mermaids or water sprites.  Mere, meaning a lake or pool, is an old English word that forms the basis of mermaid, although of course this almost exclusively used in reference to the sea fairy now.  Nonetheless, the idea of the inland ‘mere-maid’ is very ancient, the very oldest of these very likely being found in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, in the ghastly shape of the mother of the monster Grendel.

The illustrations I have found suggest that these creatures may be sexually alluring to some extent, but on the whole they are perilous to humankind.

An asrai, from kelfae.com

Drowning, gold and midnight

The majority of our fresh water meremaids share something with Grendel’s mother: they are dangerous, if not fatal, to humans.  A very good example is the creature dwelling in the Black Mere at Morridge in Staffordshire.  No animals would drink the waters and birds were said to avoid overflying the mere.  This was probably because the mermaid used to seize passersby at midnight and drown them.  When an attempt was made to drain the Mere, she emerged and threatened to engulf the whole of the nearby town of Leek in its waters.  Wisely, the work was abandoned and never restarted.

Other mere maidens include those of the ponds, pools and meres at Fordham, Cambridgeshire and in Suffolk at Rendlesham and most notably at the Mermaid Pits, Fornham All Saints.  All these beings came out at night to drag down their victims.  Most are anonymous, but a few have been given names, for example Jenny Greenteeth, who has been encountered at Ellesmere in Shropshire as well as in Lancashire and Cumbria, Grindylow in Yorkshire, Nelly Longarms and the widespread Rawhead and Bloodybones.  In Scotland one encounters the fideal, an evil spirit who haunts Loch na Fideil near Gairloch, in the north-west Highlands; she is often regarded as a personification of the entangling bog grasses and water weeds of the loch’s shore.

It is often said that the purpose of these creatures was to teach children to steer clear of ponds and similar drowning dangers, such as lawn-like mats of pond weed.  The same risk existed around river banks, so that we hear  of ‘Peg Powler’ at Piercebridge on the River Tees, who might drag incautious children from the banks under the waves, and of comparable perilous creatures in the River Gipping in Suffolk.

All of these supernaturals preyed upon passing mortals.  Despite this bad reputation (or possibly because of it) some were also connected to gold or treasure in some way.  A beautiful maiden at Child’s Ercall in Shropshire offered two men gold if they would enter the water to take it from her (but she disappeared when they commented upon their luck, surely a variation of the common idea of keeping quiet about fairy favours).  We must wonder too whether,  if they had entered the water, the outcome might not have been as happy as they anticipated.  At Marden (Herefordshire) and Rostherne Mere (Cheshire) the mere-maids are said to be guarding bells submerged beneath the pool.

Reinhold Maximilian Eichler, Schlinggewächse (Creepers),  Jugend magazine, vol. 3, no. 34, p. 567, Aug. 20th 1898

The asrai

The last creature to discuss is perhaps the most intriguing, the asrai or ashray of Cheshire and Shropshire (no specific locations seem to be identified).  This meremaid combines many of the features already mentioned.  However, the fairy maid is portrayed as far more vulnerable than those seen before.  If she is caught, she does not fight back like some of the creatures mentioned, she instead pleads in an incomprehensible language to be set free and, when she is not, she curls up moaning in the fisherman’s boat and has melted away by the time he reaches shore at daybreak. Where her hands had touched the fisherman, he was burned and marked for life.

Other versions of the folk belief say that asrai have green hair and either a fishtail or webbed feet.  They are reputed to live for many centuries, coming to the surface of the lake once each century to bathe in the moonlight, which helps them to grow. If the asrai sees a man she will use promises of gold and jewels to attempt to lure him into the deepest part of the lake, there to drown or simply to trick him. She cannot tolerate human coarseness and vulgarity, and this will be enough to frighten her away.  Curiously, the same has been said of other fairies: Lewis Spence recorded that a woman of Loch Aline in the Highlands escaped abduction by the fairies when she used “a very coarse, unseemly word” (as well she might in the circumstances).  The sidhe could not tolerate this and left her where they found her (Lewis Spence, The fairy tradition in Britain, p.264).

Scottish poet Robert Williams Buchanan described the asrai evocatively, if not wholly in line with oral tradition.  In his poem ‘The asrai- prologue to the changeling‘ he says that:

“Before man grew of the four elements
The Asrai grew of three- fire, water, air-
Not earth, -they were not earthly….

The Asrai wander’d, choosing for their homes
All gentle places- valleys mossy deep,
Star-haunted waters, yellow strips of sand
Kissing the sad edge of the shimmering sea,                                         
And porphyry caverns in the gaunt hill-sides.”

In his sequel poem ‘The changeling‘ Buchanan tells us that “of the dew and the crystal air,/ And the moonray mild, were the Asrai made.”  Because, “In the glorious gleam of the natal ray,/The pallid Asrai faded away!” they were forced to retreat “far away in the darkened places,/ Deep in the mountains and under the meres.”

The most intriguing aspect of the asrai belief is the combination of predatory danger and vulnerability when caught.  It is comparable to the Scottish selkies, the seal women, who can be trapped and forced into marriage with a human if their seal skins can be stolen from them.  Perhaps in both we see the idea of the dangers of travelling between elements or dimensions.  Humans who visit fairyland can suffer both physically and mentally, and these stories demonstrate that the reverse is just as true.  The supernatural stranded in the physical world loses his or her power and is prey to mortality.

The kelpie, Herbert James Draper, 1913.

Further reading

I have discussed the capture of fairies more generally before and have also outlined mermaid belief in an early post.  See too my discussion of the ‘water horse‘ incident in the first book of the Outlander series.