The Faery Sense of Time

Faeries are probably not immortal- they can succumb to fatal attacks, for example, and have a very long, but not infinite life span, at the end of which they will expire from exhaustion and debility, like any human- but their ability to survive for hundreds (if not thousands) of years inevitably shapes their interactions with us mortals and, arguably, their own mental states.

I have discussed previously how faery vengeance may be postponed over centuries, so that some human misdeed is punished long after the perpetrators have died and their descendants have forgotten the offence and the consequent threat hanging over them. This is best represented in the Welsh case concerning a farmer at Pantannas; to mortal readers it seems incredibly unjust that later generations, wholly innocent of a forebear’s sins, should be punished but, in defence of the faeries, we have to appreciate that the delay in taking revenge will, to them, have seemed only the matter of a few weeks or months (in human terms).

Other implications for humans include the disastrous effects of spending time with the faes in their homes. What may to the human visitor may appear to have been only hours or days will turn out to have been decades (or more) on the earth surface. The joy of return to loved ones is instantly destroyed because all the returnee’s family and friends have long ago died and, in the worst cases, even the landscape has transformed: homes have fallen into ruin; woods have been felled and fields changed. Wirt Sykes gives several such stories from Wales in his British Goblins. Give a thought as well to those humans with faery lovers: the human ages yet the supernatural partner stays ever young. These are not equal or sustainable relationships and they can only be made to work by sacrifice by one party or the other; someone has to abandon their home and kin to stay with the beloved. Many will immediately think of Tolkien’s Arwen and Aragorn, which dramatises this ancient dilemma very well.

In this last example, there is pain, too, for the faery. Another example of such suffering, in a rather different context, can be found in the story of the Cauld Lad of Hilton. This being appears as a sort of hybrid creature- partly brownie, but partly ghost as well. The liminal nature of many faery beings (especially in the north of Britain) is common- there is frequent uncertainty over whether boggarts, brownies and others may best be classified as sprite or haunting spirit, and in the case of the Cauld Lad he was reported to be a stable boy cruelly beaten to death by a Lord of Hilton. He worked in the kitchens at night, and could be heard to sing a sad song that bewailed his trapped state:

“Wae’s me, wae’s me,
The acorn’s not yet fallen from the tree,
That’s to grow the wood,
That’s to make the cradle,
That’s to rock the bairn,
That’s to grow to the man
That’s to lay me!”

He wanted to escape his ambiguous status, neither fully alive nor dead, and- luckily- the servants of the house took pity upon his lonely plight and decided to give him a cloak and hood to cover his naked, cold form and, thereby, laid or exorcised him (just as happens so frequently with brownies and boggarts).

What’s notable about his song is not so much that the Cauld Lad was wrong about how long he’d have to wait to be released, but the terms in which he measured time. We seem here (once again) to be dealing in centuries, from the sprouting of the new tree to its felling and the use of its timber; for some readers the formula used here may be familiar because almost identical words are often used by changelings when they are being exposed as faeries by their human hosts. Most typically the trick of cooking or brewing in eggshells is played upon them, and the apparent human infant will exclaim something along the lines that “I have seen the first acorn before the oak, but I have never seen brewing done in eggshells before”- in other words, they have already lived for many centuries and are plainly faeries, not babies or toddlers as they outwardly appear.

The disparity between faery and human perceptions of time inevitably place a considerable and often unbridgeable gulf between us and must always be factored into our assessments of their behaviour and motives. For more detail of some of these subjects, see my British Brownies and Faery Lifecycle.

Faery Morality- some initial thoughts

from Govey, The New Book of Fairies

I wish to explore the difficult question of faery morality, a subject that can be the source of much mystery and confusion for human observers. As the victims of faery blasts, thefts and abductions, it would be easy for us to assume that the faeries are- at the very least- amoral and arbitrary, but this would be an incorrect deduction. Study of the folklore evidence reveals that they have a pretty strict and well-defined moral position; the problem is that its application encompasses humans as well as the faeries themselves and, when it comes to us mortals, their views on what is permissible or forbidden do not coincide with our own. This problem arises, ultimately, from the faery view of humankind. We are, as it were, fair game for them a lot of the time: actions that would not be tolerated against other faeries are sanctioned against us. This seems to be because they do not consider us their equals,. We are less powerful (magically), physically frail and- in many respects- only good for manual tasks and breeding.

Faery morals (and the rules for their implementation) work on the age-old basis of distinguishing between the tribe and others- between an in-group and out-group. What is repeatedly prohibited between faery-kind- theft, lying, breaking promises- is permitted against those who are ‘aliens’ simply on the basis that they are ‘other.’ This is a very black and white approach to regulating society, but it obviously ignores issues such as equity, proportionality and ‘humanoid rights.’ This probably has to be the case, given the apparent absence of any complex social structure within Faery; other than the occasional monarch, it looks to be a largely individualistic society.

The fundamental principle of faery morality would appear to be this: ‘one good turn deserves another.’ Reciprocity (for good and bad deeds) operates well in the Faery’s largely structureless society, as the duty of responding falls upon the beneficiary/ victim and it is a simple rule to apply, albeit one subject to individual interpretations of kindness, disrespect, entitlement and so on. For example, households who leave out water and/ or food before a fire overnight so that the Good Folk may enter a home to bathe and eat may be regarded as displaying respect and generosity to the their neighbours- or they might be considered only to be providing what is the faeries’ due. Such assessments will, of course, determine how the faery responds.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suggest that faery morals are entirely weighted against humans. Those individuals who help faery-kind, are generous toward them or show them their due respect, will be treated well. Favouritism can be shown towards certain humans and they are assisted and protected in return. As I wrote in a post several years ago, there is also evidence that faeries have a particular interest in the conduct of human relationships. They seem to set great store by constancy and faithfulness and lovers who behave in line with this will be treated well- whereas those who misuse their partners can face punishment. This is an imposition of faery values on us that benefits some and chastises others. From our perspective, it probably seems far less of an interference in our affairs than other faery conduct simply because it coincides with our own ideals of behaviour.

For faeries who violate their communities’ rules of conduct, the usual sanction is expulsion. I have previously discussed a Scottish report of a faery prison, but this is a unique account and is perhaps suggestive of far more administration and bureaucracy in Faery than we have any other evidence to support. Exile from the society of other Folk seems punishment enough: the guilty individual is stranded between dimensions, between peoples, with no hope of support. As for us mortals, our infringements are sanctioned by the afflictions and losses mentioned already, but it is commonly the case that- initially at least- the person has no idea that they have offended or that they are being punished. This frequently only becomes apparent after a local wise person- a faery doctor- has been consulted and they have divined the supernatural cause of the problem and have suggested some sort of reparatory actions.

As with faery magic, as I described in a recent post, fae morals can be hidden or obscured from us because we are not part of their community. Determining their principles involves working at second-hand, deducing from the consequences witnessed by humans that there has been a breach of some injunction and, in turn, trying to determine what that infringement may have been. There is much more detailed research to do here.

Edith Mendham, Fairies in a Battle of Flowers

‘England on Fire’: exploring the spirit of the land

Another recent birthday present, I saw this book and immediately knew that I wanted it, as it seemed to chime so well with my interests in Albion as a faery realm and the concepts of genius loci and the idea of the spirits of the land. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the text is written by Mat Osman, better known to me as the bassist in Brit pop stars Suede, but who turns out to have a literary and historical side. Osman’s brief poetic musings on aspects of English culture- stones, folklore, magic- and so on, are matched by some beautiful images selected by Stephen Ellcock.

Osman writes that “All traditions were new once, no family is truly young, England will grind every story beneath the harrow, back into the soil, and let strange wild blooms burst forth.” Over centuries we have absorbed and assimilated concepts and traditions from across the world and recreated them as something uniquely our own.

In his chapter on ‘Enchantment,’ Osman considers our faery-lore and describes the existence of two Englands, those of the mortals and of the ‘magic folk’, the latter being an “upside down England… as cruel and capricious as this world… but home to wild, whirling overthrow and dancing madness.” He writes how- “There are rare places where the two worlds meet… In madness and intoxication. In the shadow of rings of trees… In the heart of fire… But our time in the other world is short, too short, and it’s only in dreams that we ever see our true home.” I have often described these liminal places, where we may enter Faery wittingly or not. Faery rings are, of course, the commonest examples.

Yard Broom Shuck

The volume is a kind of coffee table book in a way, but with a thought provoking collection of really lovely art works that range from Richard Dadd and Samuel Palmer through to modern invocations of our mystical and magical past. I especially loved John Douglas Piper’s contemporary sculptures of East Anglian shucks or shugs made from rubbish picked up on farms. Also powerful are Dan Hillier’s prints, such as Fount (2021) which is used on the cover of the book.

Cousin of Yard Broom Shuck

The book is published by Watkins and is to be enjoyed again and again.

The Other Side, by Jennifer Higgie

For my birthday recently, I was given a copy of The Other Side- A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie. I’d asked for it as I’d seen it reviewed in the paper and in the shops and thought it looked interesting, as it’s concerned with the influence- or interaction- of the paranormal, supernatural, mystical and spiritual upon art.

What had especially caught my notice was the fact that Higgie had once written a novel based on the faery artist Richard Dadd, concentrating on the year he went mad and murdered his father. She’d first become aware of him when she visited the exhibition at the Royal Academy on Victorian Fairy Painting in 1997-1998 (as did I). She described feeling “an immediate kinship [to the] sixty six hallucinatory paintings and drawings from the golden age of fairy painting… I was entranced by the near-supernatural powers of observation of Richard Dadd, the wild fancies, translucent beings and benign animals who populated John Anster Fitzgerald’s canvases and the thinly veiled orgies- which masqueraded as meetings of the fairy court- of Noel Paton and Robert Huskisson.” As Higgie goes on to observe, “their Victorian audience was an adult one and painters competed to come up with visions that were ever more extreme. If a painter put wings on an image of a naked girl, then she was no longer human, and so exempt from the rules of propriety that governed representations of the so-called real world…” I have myself discussed how faery art can be a vehicle to deal with some of our own obsessions- a fact that’s coupled with the existing nature of the folklore, in which faery sexuality is powerful and forms a major point of interaction between them and mortals.

Higgie’s interest in faeries immediately interested me. The book also discusses the work of Ithell Colquhoun (an artist who, as Higgie records, “had seen fairies since she was a child) and Estella Canziani, whose Piper of Dreams I have discussed before. This picture is, as she says, “charming in its own way, [but] is a vastly diluted version of the wild imaginings that fairy painting at its best was capable of.” Other artists, like Fitzgerald, “pictured fairies as complex and as potentially malevolent to humans; for them, the nightmare was as rich with potential as the dream. Canziani’s player, by contrast, is predicated on reassurance…” This reflects when it was first exhibited- 1915; against the background of war on the western front, the painting “gently posits a psychic space that was desperately needed… It’s a safe image- but its popularity surely betrays a widespread desire to be elsewhere.”

It was the book’s mentions of faery art that drew me to it in the first place, but- as the title suggests- it is much more than that. It’s concerned with a large number of female artists (mainly of whom were entirely new to me) who have created work that tries to depict other dimensions and states of consciousness. It will repay re-readings and is a pointer to many further explorations.