I Heard the Mermaids Singing…?

Edvard Munch, The Mermaid, 1896

A late summer holiday took me back to the Scilly Isles, the largely unspoiled and nearly traffic-free archipelago in the far south west of Britain. Here, beaches are often deserted and human noise rarely drowns the sounds of nature. As a result, perhaps, we twice heard, on one beach, a strange and eerie crying noise. The first time, the source was mysterious; the second I saw that there were two seals floating on one side of the bay. Standing in the surf, one swam ever nearer towards me on the shore whilst its companion continued to drift in the sunlit water. Their presence seemed the only proximate cause for the haunting wails; not a mermaid, but perhaps a selkie, curious about the people on the beach. The sound was so weird though, that you could readily understand how people would have had to conclude that sirens sang out at sea on rocks.

St Varna’s Well

Perhaps my susceptibility to such imaginings was heightened by the fact that, whilst I was away, I reread Ithell Colquhoun‘s Living Stones- Cornwall (published in 1957). I feel sure she would have sympathised with my conviction that the selkies were singing to us, for- as I have described in my Spirits of the Land– her Cornwall was permeated with supernatural power, whether that emerged through the very rocks and vegetation of the ancient landscape or emanated from the water sprites or guardians of the peninsula’s many wells. Colquhoun was acutely sensitive to these presences- not just at locations such as the Carn Euny well, but even beside the stream that ran past her studio/ home in the Lamorna Valley. As for my own recent trip, on the island of St Agnes we visited St Warna’s Well, set in the cliffs overlooking a small bay facing the Atlantic. Sadly, it was run rather dry and offered only a muddy puddle within its stone enclosure; as Colquhoun would have said, the site needed someone “who would cultivate its hidden guardian… I hoped that it too might have already, or would soon attain, its invisible guardian.” She mentions too a faery well called the Pin Well or Pin Mill, which was formerly known above the fishing village of Newlyn in west Penwith (before someone destroyed it and took the basin as a birdbath for their garden). Here, on Good Fridays, the practice was once for little girls to visit the site with their dolls. A pin would be dropped in the well and water would be poured on the doll, at the same time as giving it a new name. What the ancient origins of this baptismal rite may have been may only be speculated, but this sadly-vanished well plainly resembles Venton Bebibell, up on the moors near the Men an Tol, which I described previously.

The Buzza Hill chambered tomb and the view west

On a closely related point, I might add that on the largest Scilly island of St Mary’s, on the edge of the main settlement of Hugh Town, there is Buzza Hill. This is said once to have been a primary haunt of the Scilly faeries. The hill is also crowned by a megalithic tomb, a coincidence that struck me forcefully when I climbed the hill one evening to see the sunset. As I’ve described before, the known presence of the faeries at a burial site for the ancestors cannot be merely fortuitous. They are seen as inextricably associated, the faeries drawn by those ancient spirits to frequent the site.

The scraps of folklore that Colquhoun picked up in the 1940s and ’50s were indicative of how much might have been lost, as well as confirming the remnants that we still possess. So, for example, after a visit to Helston she recorded that “green is seldom worn; it is still considered an unlucky colour for a dress in Cornwall. An assistant in a shop once told me that always had difficulty selling a green garment- unless it was bought by a visitor- as many of their regular customers felt that wearing one might presage a death in the family.” We know that the South Devonshire pixies were said to be highly protective of the colour green: a saying noted down in 1916 at Beesands, near Dartmouth in the south of the county, was that- if a human wears green- they’ll soon be wearing mourning. Clearly, this was information known about the neighbouring pixies that had once been of much broader distribution; Colquhoun, during the 1950s, may have picked up on one of the last traces of this age-old knowledge.

What humans want from faeries…?

Some years ago, whilst studying for an MA, I surveyed the search terms that brought visitors to the British Fairies blog as a guide to what I should focus on writing about. I decided recently to repeat that analysis, curious to see what seven years of stats might tell me about our relationship to the fae.

Hundreds of words and phrases have, naturally, been used in web searches to bring browsers to the site. For example, on 93 occasions individuals searched for terms related to faery language, words or names. On another 61 occasions, the person was interested in the seelie and unseelie courts. Far out in front of all search terms, however, was the question of faery sex. Searches for terms like ‘sexuality,’ ‘nude,’ ‘naked,’ ‘erotic,’ ‘seductive,’ ‘lover’ and (even) “spanking fairies” were used, in a total of 352 searches. This then, is what the majority of people seem to want to know about faeries: what they look like with no clothes on, how they have sex together and if they have sex with humans. I’d like to stress here that the search for ‘spanking’ would have elicited no results from this blog…

Nevertheless, these quite startling results reveal an age-old trait in human nature. Faeries have always been associated with sexuality, from the incubi and succubi of the Middle Ages, through the predatory faery women of Arthurian romance to our modern day AI generated fantasies of pneumatic faery maids with pink hair and pointed ears. It is particularly in modern artistic depictions that these attitudes are most regularly seen. The faery maids of Pre-Raphaelite and other Victorian paintings exuded a hypnotic, fatal and sometimes tragic allure; during the twentieth century, though, we witnessed the curious parallel emergence of, on the one hand, the anodyne Flower Fairies and, on the other, an increasingly sexualised vision of the faery female that developed from Arthur Rackham through Brian Froud, Alan Lee and Peter Blake to the proliferation of sexy elvish males and females that may be discovered on Deviant Art and elsewhere.

Whether demonic, angelic or anime inspired, a deep desire of (mainly male?) humans is- and has been- to encounter other-worldly lovers. The hope, I guess, is that you’ll experience transcendent passions- although (as readers may well know) the reality recorded by folklore has often been harsher. The sex can be insatiable, but it eventually becomes vampiric and draining for the human partner- as seen with the classic leanan-sith and lhiannan shee. The supernatural lover may bring material benefits and unearthly powers to the partnership, but sooner or later the union breaks down, as the husbands of the Welsh lake women and of mermaids know only too well. They return to their kin, taking their valuable dowries with them and abandoning their mortal families. Mermen, meanwhile, seem to be every bit as sexist and predatory as human males, enjoying a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” kind of relationship before disappearing to unreachable safety beneath the waves.

Despite the many traditional reports of selfish and cruel treatment by faery beings, humans can’t seem to resist the attraction of a relationship with a supernatural lover. This is obviously most informative about our own natures: wishful thinking encourages us to think that we can change the non-mortal partner; hope springs eternal that previous experience won’t be repeated (against all the contra-indications), and desire blinds us to the warning signs.

Popular Views of Faeries in Victorian and Edwardian Times

I’ve often written about popular representations of faeries, and how they may shape our perceptions and expectations. Postal communications were extremely popular, cheap (and fast) in Victorian and Edwardian England and were a major medium by which people became familiar with art of various types. Cards might bear reproductions of famous ‘old masters,’ they might feature an engraving of the latest sensation from the Royal Academy (a new painting by Millais for instance) or they might offer ‘popular art’. One of the major publishers of postcards and greetings cards was Raphael Tuck, and it’s informative to look at how they chose to depict supernatural beings for sale to a mass market. It seems very clear from many of these designs that the assumption was that these cards would be bought by or for children.

Faeries & Elves

Established artists were often employed to design cards. Hence we find a Christmas elf carrying mistletoe by Mabel Lucie Atwell (head of page) and a set of three cards by prolific faery painter Agnes Richardson which very much play up the cute, cuddly side of the faeries’ (presumed) nature- see the girlie faeries and bunnies below. Richardson also supplied Tuck with some Christmas faeries in fetching furry onesies (1923)- or fluttering naked in the snow in 1925 (see below). Two tiny, naked winged beings helped to celebrate Easter with a little girl in 1917 and, on a birthday card from the ‘Once Upon a Time’ series, issued in 1930, the faes teach a little girl to tell the time with dandelion clocks (see above). We also find the faes playing ping-pong across a toadstool in 1903 and, in a set of cards from 1909, symbolising the four seasons as painfully cute little girls.

Fred Spurgin in 1942 carried the big-eyed little cutie theme to a distressingly saccharine conclusion with a set of six cards plainly designed for lovers’ messages during war time. There was doubtless demand for them, but… A stark contrast is a set of faery Valentine cards from 1902, which give the impression that the images are in 3D relief on the background, rather like Wedgwood ware. The messages are, naturally, sentimental, but nowhere near as mawkish as those written for Spurgin’s images.

Flower Fairies

A series of six cards issued in 1902 aspired for something rather more aesthetic, matching ‘fairy ladies’ with quotations from poets such as Rossetti, Swinburne, William Morris, Goethe and others. These were evidently designed for a more adult audience- those who liked to consider themselves cultured too. Similar were some other ‘flower fairies’ issued in the same year- tall women seen with blossoms. Another set of four cards, issued in 1911, paired young faery girls in transparent gowns with flowers to celebrate Easter (see below). Small girl faeries were also matched with bowls of flowers, butterflies and birds by the obscure American commercial artist, Ellen Hattie Clapsaddle (1865-1934), for a set of cards bearing sentimental messages to loved ones in a set from 1902.

Sexy Sprites

Things got rather saucier (and arguably more authentic in folklore terms) in a set of six very striking cards designed by Alice Marshall from 1924. The faery females illustrated may be tiny, but they know what they want… There was a good deal of cavorting going on in the countryside in this series- plus the appearance of a small faun (or Pan)- some might say a sure sign of wantonness, despite the otherwise bland and conventional settings

Needless to observe, probably, but the Faery depicted on these postcards is very far from the perilous and cruel place known from British tradition. The worst accusations that might be levelled against them is that the faeries get a bit randy or a bit maudlin from time to time.

Brownies

There are brownies, but not as we know them. In the ‘Brownie Family’ set of 1909 they are seen celebrating Christmas- shopping, admiring the tree, hanging up their stockings, opening presents, singing carols and eating Christmas pudding. The hitherto unknown ‘Easter Brownies’ cultivate the flowers and bring seasonal greetings. The explicit link between faery kind and human religious festivals made obvious commercial sense for Raphael Tuck and other such companies, but makes a nonsense of the traditional antipathy of faeries for all things linked to the Christian faith.

Gnomes

I have described before how ‘gnome‘ is an invented word, unknown before the sixteenth century, but one which has steadily come to parallel or displace the older term ‘dwarf.’ In the British Isles, though, dwarves are absent. Hence, Germanic influence had plainly prevailed in the Christmas cards featuring gnomes that were offered for sale in 1903-1904; note in the example above that the gnomes are enjoying themselves in the proximity of an illuminated church. Although they were not a native British species, the Scandinavian nisse and tomte appeared on our cards, perhaps slightly mystifying the English public- not least when the little man was depicted painting a pig (?) with Irish shamrocks. This seems to be some even stranger hybrid of the gnome and the lucky Irish leprechaun.

It may be the case that the continental influences that began to dilute and confuse British traditions derive as much from these cards as from, say, Perrault’s fairy tales, the work of the Grimm brothers, or Thomas Keightley’s comprehensive study of the Fairy Mythology across Europe and the wider world. Firms like Raphael Tuck had much of their engraving and printing work undertaken by German suppliers before the First World War and this connection may help to explain some of the German gnomes and Swedish tomten.

Mermaids

Three cards published by Tuck in 1908 illustrated mermaids in very typical poses- lying or sitting on rocks admiring their shells and jewels, interacting with other wildlife, or playing music. Probably the most interesting feature of these depictions is the artist’s decision to give the mermaids two scaled legs, rather than a single fish tail. A 1904 series, illustrating scenes from Wagner’s Ring Cycle, also made the Rhine Maidens into two legged mermaids.

A card from 1933, part of a series ‘Fun at the Seaside’ went for a more conventional mermaid, with a single tail- in this case, a merchild meeting some human infants playing on the beach.

In Conclusion

Evidently, these cards cannot be relied upon as any sort of guide to British faery traditions. They are, however, highly instructive as to the process of change in popular views of the faes. As I have discussed in other posts, books like Peter Pan and The Water Babies, and designs such as Cicely Mary Barker’s ‘Flower Fairies‘ were very powerful in shaping the modern image of the faery. These postcards drew upon, and reinforced, those trends- and, of course, they were often seen and absorbed by children from a young age.

For more on the role of art in shaping our ideas, see my Fairy Art of the Twentieth Century and The Modern Fairy Faith.