“Wrap around your dreams”- faery lovers & dreams

Henry Fuseli, Queen Mab, 1814

As Mercutio described in his famous speech in Romeo and Juliet, Queen Mab would bring to lovers dreams of those they adored- and perhaps prognostications of future spouses. John Anster Fitzgerald shows such a scene in his painting below. I’ve described before how Mab might also physically appear to young men and women in their beds and seduce them; however here I’m more interested in how the faeries might use dreams as a means of contact and seduction.

A Scottish shepherd once heard faery pipes playing and felt compelled to try to track down the source of the sound. He followed the music for weeks, months, seasons, living on whatever he could forage along the way- berries and roots. In time he ceased to hear the music, but he had arrived on a shore where a boat was pulled up on the beach, so he climbed aboard and sailed wherever it took him. In due course the shepherd reached an island where a green man with bagpipes met him and invited him to join the sith folk and to accept the love of a faery girl who had seen the mortal man one day when he was tending his flocks and had fallen for him. Unwisely (perhaps) the shepherd fled this offer, and struggled back home over many months. He married a local woman and settled down, but the sith woman never gave him rest: he used to wander in his dreams ever after.

Although, as Fleetwood Mac said in Dreams, “Women, they will come and they will go,” this frequently tends not to be the case with faery lovers. I have described before how the Scottish leannan sith and Manx lhiannan shee can physically haunt the human males they batten upon, albeit frequently they are invisible to everyone else. As the tale of the shepherd demonstrates, a tangible presence isn’t required.

I’ve also described before how Queen Mab can come as a type of succubus to ride young lovers at night. We assume she physically manifests to the young men and women she seduces, but it could just be a very vivid erotic dream that they experience. It’s notable as well how in several folklore accounts faery lovers appear beside the human’s bed, suggesting that the ‘dream-lover’ is actually quite a common form of contact.

The first instance I’ll describe seems to be a fairly straightforward example of dream communication. A man from Caernarfonshire discovered a mermaid on the seashore. They became friendly and she encouraged his interest by bringing him treasure from under the sea. Then, she visited him as he slept in his bed at night and told him to meet her the next day. When he did, the mermaid was present in human form, wearing a dress, and apparently willing to come on to the land and live with him. Eventually they married and had children together.

In a second example, from the Isle of Man, a man from Derbyhaven called Mickleby was picked up by a shee woman at a dance he stumbled across when walking home one night. Thereafter, he was never able to shake her off; she would appear beside his bed at night. This sounds like a physical appearance in the room with him and, without question, what had led him to be tied to her in this way was very corporeal. After dancing with her, Mickleby had wiped the sweat from his face on part of her dress and it seems that this ‘exchange’ of bodily fluids had tied the pair together. What’s more, he could only get rid of this lhiannan shee by throwing an unbleached linen sheet over the two of them, something which appears to indicate that the ‘marital’ bed somehow formed a key to their link, with a suggestion that clean sheets came between them whereas soiled ones formed part of their bond.

John Anster Fitzgerald, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of.

However, in other cases, sleep or dreams seem to make humans highly vulnerable to faery contact. A herdsman from Tiree fell asleep one warm summer afternoon on a small hill. He was rudely woken by a violent slap on his ear. On rubbing his eyes and looking up, he saw a woman in a green dress, the most beautiful female he had ever seen, walking away from him. She headed westward and he followed her for some distance, until she suddenly vanished. This woman was plainly a faery- judging by her dress and by her travel towards the west, known as the faery direction in the Highlands. The slap she gave him could have been punishment for sleeping on what must have been a sithean, a faery hill, but there was clearly more to it than that, even though the story is abruptly curtailed.

Considering the fate of a male from Iona, we might judge that the Tiree herdsman was actually very lucky just to have received a slap. Thinking that it was dawn, the Iona man got up early one morning and went out fishing. After catching some fish, he realised that bright light of a full moon had fooled him into thinking it was day, so he decided to return home. On the way, he sat down to rest on a hillock and fell asleep. He was awakened by a tugging at the fishing rod, which was still in his hand. The rod was being pulled one way and the fish he’d caught another. Next, he heard the sound of a woman weeping. He suspected she was a faery and tried to get away from her but she caught him and thrashed him soundly. Then, every night after that, he was compelled to meet her and could never again escape her.

In these accounts, the fact that the victim falls asleep seems more than just incidental or superfluous detail. Rather, it appears to be a central element in the entrapment by the faery lover. Perhaps sleep is a time when a person is vulnerable, when it is possible for faeries to use dreams to pass into the mortal world and to make contact. Without question, the fact that humankind was particularly at risk during the hours of darkness and sleep was widely understood; the collection of Scottish Gaelic prayers and verses known as the Carmina Gadelica contains numerous charms invoking the protection of the trinity and the saints overnight. Closely comparable is a charm explicitly defending homes at night against faeries from the Isle of Man, which calls on St Columb to protect “each window and each door/ And every hole admitting moonlight.”

For more detail, see my recently published Faery Mysteries from Green Magic Publishing.

Faery Saviours- Helping the Weak & Vulnerable

Frederick George Cotman, Spellbound

I’ve mentioned before the tendency of faeries to help humans who are poor and oppressed- what I’ve termed ‘Robin Hood‘ faeries. These charitable works extend as well to those whom we might class as weak and ill-suited by age or sickness to help themselves.

For example, on the isle of Skye a boy walking home on a stormy night found that the burn that crossed his path had swollen so much he couldn’t cross it. There was no alternative route for him and he faced being trapped outside all night on the wrong side of the watercourse, until a faery helped carry him across.

Rather similar is the case of an elderly woman on the island of Yell, who faced a long journey walking home on a very dark night. Suddenly, hands gripped hers: the trows had come to assist her. They made the dark night bright and guided her all the way to her door, before vanishing.

Of course, there is often an intersection between poverty and vulnerability. An old woman neglected by her son at Barncorkerie in Galloway was helped by the faeries- who at the same time deprived him of goods, food and drink in order to support her. A widow at Barnasketaig on Skye couldn’t afford to pay labourers to harvest her oat crop, so the local faeries did it all for one night, cutting and binding the oats in sheaves. Also on Skye, a man who had been unfairly deprived of his only cow (I assume by some unjust form of legal seizure), the sole source of milk for the family, was given a replacement by the local sith folk. It came to his farm covered with water weeds, and plainly one of the crodh mara or crodh sith, the faery cows, but it fattened and produced rich milk on his grazing. (You might also recall that magical cows might be sent by the faeries to aid human communities struck by drought or famine- examples of helping whole villages of people rather than one needy individual).

Rather similar to the last Skye case is an incident from Clackmannanshire, involving a farmer called Crawford. He had previously been helpful to the local fae- and such acts are always remembered and appreciated. Accordingly, when drought struck the area and three of his cows died, he was provided with a purse of gold with which to buy two new cows. The faeries even helped Crawford drive the cattle home from market and then guided him to a hidden but very rich area of pasture.

A very poor shoemaker of Pathfoot, in the Ochil Hills, one night gave shelter to a faery fiddler when they barely had enough for themselves. This man had been banished from faery, he said, and had supported himself for years by playing his fiddle at human gatherings. Now, he was to be allowed to return to his people, but he could not take his earnings with him. In return for their hospitality, therefore, the fiddler gave them the bag of containing all the human money he’d been paid, a huge sum sufficient to provide ample dowries for both their daughters and to ensure prosperous marriages for them.

What’s especially notable here (beside the faeries helpfulness towards particular mortals) is their distinct streak of paternalist intervention with people’s welfare. They are evidently believers in active charitable assistance.

A Celebration for the Elf Queen- Cliff Richard & Galadriel

The fact that Sir Cliff Richard once sang a song about “Galadriel, Spirit of Starlight” may astound many readers, especially those in the UK who may be more familiar with his work. Although the young Harry Webb came to fame in the late 1950s as a daring and vaguely raunchy rock and roller, subsequent decades have seen him become a staple of the pop charts. Given his well-known Christian faith and his increasingly ‘national treasure’ image (for example, singing at Eurovision in 1968 & 1973), a song of praise for one of the elf queens of Middle Earth may seem rather unexpected- and yet, Frodo of the Shire, it came to pass.

The song was originally composed by Hank Marvin and John Farrar and was included on their Marvin and Farrar album of 1973. The track subsequently formed the B-side to a single, ‘Small and Lonely Light’ which was issued in August 1975. As a tune for acoustic guitar, strings and choir, it bears a discernible lineal descent from Led Zeppelin‘s Stairway to Heaven and has layered vocals and other production effects that make it seem pretty hippy and trippy. Frankly, I personally prefer the slightly more restrained original version– untypical as this might have been for the guitarist for the Shadows, Sir Cliff’s backing band, and the composer of Apache. It’s got some fine psychedelic moments and, I’m sure, at the time sounded pretty in tune with the spirit of the times. Tolkien’s book was at the height of its (first) popularity and the cartoon version of the story was still three years away.

Ten years later, Cliff sang of his adoration for the elf queen. Galadriel is “reading the signs” and “searching for a new life.” The singer celebrates his burning love and devotion to her:

“She’s a light to guide me through the fray…
Eagle and dove gave birth to thee…
You are my love and earth to me…”

The last line might sound faintly unexpected given Sir Cliff’s faith, yet there he was in tuxedo and bow tie, declaring his love for one of Faery kind.

The track was released on Sir Cliff’s 1983 live album, Dressed for the Occasion, which was recorded at the sober and respectable Royal Albert Hall, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, to mark his twenty-fifth year in the music industry. At a distance of forty years, the performance of the song could strike us as rather out of time (as well as out of character) and- to some extent- it was: but not to the degree that one might initially suspect.

Certainly, Lord of the Rings was no longer in vogue as it had been a decade earlier when the song was written- but the choice was (I strongly suspect) a gesture to Sir Cliff’s old friend Hank Marvin. As for the orchestral setting, this concert is- in fact- a late manifestation of something that had been quite popular in rock over the previous fifteen years or so. Witness, for instance, Concerto for Group and Orchestra, a live album by heavy rock band Deep Purple and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, recorded (once again) at the Royal Albert Hall, in September 1969. Nor should we forget Justin Hayward’s War of the Worlds or several albums by Rick Wakeman, such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1974). Equally, I guess, Sir Cliff might have pointed to the lush orchestration of bands like ABC on the Lexicon of Love to suggest that this was actually very hip. The verse has a definite haunting quality that seems rather appropriate; the rousing chorus with its backing choir puts me in mind (a bit) of the elven lament for Gandalf in the first Lord of the Rings film.

Conditioned as we are, these days, to associating Tolkien-based music with heavy metal bands, a more mainstream handling of its characters strikes us now as quite surprising. There’s no real justification for this, of course, and what Sir Cliff’s performance of ‘Galadriel, Spirit of Starlight’ does definitively demonstrate is how pervasive Lord of the Rings has been in our culture, with its characters becoming part of everyday discourse- rather as Titania and Oberon were in Victorian times..

For more on this and other chart topping faery hits, see my posts on Queen and Marc Bolan, and my book, The Faery Faith in British Music.

Bad Breath? A source of faery magic

Brian’s Froud’s Bully Bogey

In his 1998 book, Good Fairies, Bad Fairies, artist Brian Froud invented numerous humorously intended faery types, amongst which he included the ‘Bully Bogey,’ a being presumably in part derived from the bull-beggar of British tradition. His character is manipulative and contagious; he “loiters in lonely places and sullenly waits for his prey. His fetid breath inspires brutality and oppressive actions.”

In fact, I’m not concerned here in this post with halitosis, but with an intriguing facet of faery magic- the ability to change things simply by blowing upon them. We tend, to day, to be attached to the idea of faeries carrying wands, but they don’t actually need them. Just their breath alone can transfer their glamour. For example, at Arisdale on the Shetland island of Yell, an old woman travelling home late one dark night was helped by the trows: they blew into the air and it became as light as day. In Dumfriesshire, a woman living at Auchencreath helped a faery neighbour one day by lending her some oatmeal. In return, the faery breathed over the mortal woman’s meal chest, saying that it would never be empty again.

These examples demonstrate the application of faery magic for good, helping those the faeries favour- often those who’ve helped them. They can, of course, curse as well as bless by the very same means. Very common indeed is the treatment of midwives and nurses who have inadvertently given themselves second sight by touching their eyes with the green ointment that they’re meant to be using to anoint the faery baby. Once it is discovered, the second sight is almost always promptly taken away by the faeries. This may be by violent blinding, depriving the human of their sight completely, but breathing on the eye to return it to its original state is also known. Examples of this are found in accounts from Scotland down to Wales.

Such treatment of midwives is, naturally, preferable to poking sticks or fingers in the eyes, and it underlines the fact that very little is needed by the fae to wield their magical power. Intention alone (perhaps combined with some spell recited in the head) is sufficient to achieve the purpose. A comparison might be made to their ability to fly (without wings) simply by holding a bundle of straws and pronouncing the correct words. Whatever the exact nature and source of their magical powers, it needs only the lightest of physical contacts to be conferred.