Faery Page

On a Midsummer's Eve in Ireland long ago, a traveler rode slowly across the meadows of Connacht, heading west toward the sea on a journey that would be like none other in his life. The evening was peaceful enough. From the hedgerows drifted the scent of honeysuckle and bramble rose, on the grass beneath the horses hoofs, a carpet of daisies winked white in the twilight. Ahead lay a forest of oak and ash, the tree trunks swathed in ground mist. And in the distance loomed the blue flanks of the Connermara Mountains.

The moon rose, a silver sickle and the darkness deepened. Still the traveler plodded on, hearing only the sigh of the wind in the grasses and the creaking of his saddle. But as he neared the trees, he reined in, for other sounds floated on the air. Harp strings issues a simmer of notes, flutes described liquid, shining runs, and through the music sounded the ringing of belled bridles, heralding the approach of a great company.

A moment later, a splendid column rode out of the forest - sevenscore gold-clad knights mounted on white horses that were shod in gold and hung with golden bells. Among them was a bevy of women - princesses all, it seemed by their dress. They inclined their graceful necks when they saw the traveler, and out of gleaming eyes gave him a cleat, severe, wild look that made his heart contract with longing. In and out of the mist the strangers wound, now visible, now not - of the earth and yet not of it. They moved in a nimbus of brightness, and behind them, a road leading back into the forest offered a vista of a mighty fortress, also bathed in lambent light.

The traveler never afterward could tell how long he stood transfixed, gazing at the shining company. Its riders pranced before him neither a long time nor a short one, the patterns of their time were alien to the stolid march of human hours and nights and days, just as the rhythms of their music were strange to the beat of the human heart. At last, the traveler later said, he could no longer see the riders, and he heard only an echo of a melody he could never quite recall. The gilded light and the many- towered palace in the distance were gone.

He spun his horse and trotted to the forest's edge, where he found not a blade of grass disturbed or flattened. There was no sign of the riders or of the land that had appeared behind the trees. Although the traveler waited and listened, he saw and heard no more, only the impatient whickering of his horse.

At last he went about his business, but the rest of his life was illuminated by that one moment. When he was old, he forgot much, as old men do, but that one night he never would forget. Nodding by the fireside, he told the tale again and again. He told his son and his son's son, and each time in the telling, even when he was frail and aged, the radiance of his youth passed once more across his face and kindled his old eyes, and his listeners envied him the moonlit meadow and the night journey.

Of what the traveler had been privileged to witness, there could be no doubt. He had beheld a fairy host, riding in procession, he had been given a glimpse of a race of beings - human in form and more than human in power - that once thronged the fringes of the mortal world. And he was among the last of the mortals to see such a sight, which is why his fellows envied him. In the traveler's time, the fairies had begun to retreat from humankind. His was an era when fields were claimed from the green forest that mantled the globe, when peddlers' tracks and traders' highways reached into remote corners of the earth, when villages and cities arose in the wilderness. As the natural world was tamed, the fairies it sheltered became ever more illusive strangers. Yet they were not always thus.

Once at the dreaming dawn of history - before the world was categorized and regulated by mortal minds, before solid boundaries were formed between the mortal world and any other - fairies roamed freely among men, and the two races knew each other well. Yet the knowing was never straightforward, and the adventures that mortals and fairies had together were fraught with uncertainty, for fairies and humans were alien to each other.

Humans were uneasy at this time. Small creatures on a vast, wide planet, they set out to create a reassuring orderliness - to define themselves and the creatures around them, to structure countries and kingdoms, to establish hierarchies among themselves so that each would know his place and all would know the patterns that prevented anarchy.

The fairy nature, by contrast, was essentially fluid and ambiguous, marked by caprice. Fairies existed in human form, sometimes splendid and sometimes grotesque. But if they desired, fairies could also assume the shape of deer or falcons, flames or flowers or jewels. At times, they cloaked themselves in invisibility. Although they lived on a plane that was linked to the physical world that humans knew, their realm was endowed with additional dimensions. Their kingdoms appeared and disappeared between one blink of an eye and the next, in a way that could only disturb humans. It was as if a full, complex and inexplicable life went busily on, unseen among the mortals' precariously maintained civilizations.

Fairies naturally inspired speculation. Ever curious, ever eager to name and define, mortals recorded their glimpses of them in songs and tales and poems. Naming came first, for the name of a thing was charged (as it is in some ways even now) with the essence of that thing. To know a name gave the knower some measure of control over the thing it named..

Like all else about fairies, the sources of their names were ambiguous. The words for "fairy" in Spain and in Italy were fada and fata, respectively, and these seem to have been derived from the Latin fatum, or "fate" in recognition of the skill fairies had in predicting and even controlling human destiny. In France, however, the similar word fee came from the Latin fatare via the Old French feer, meaning "to enchant". Feer referred to the fairies' ability to alter the world that humans saw - to cast a spell over human vision. From feer came not only fee but the English word "Faerie", which encompassed both the art of enchantment and the whole realm in which fairies had their being. "Fairy' and "Fay" - other derivatives of the parent word - referred only to the individual creatures.

The other common English term was "elf", and this derived not from Latin but from the Nordic and Teutonic languages, reaching England with invasions from the Continent. In Scandinavia, the word for "elves" was alfar, which - appropriately, since fairies were tied to the things of the earth - had to do with mountains and water.

Mortals used these various terms interchangeably to describe a broad range of elusive beings. Mindful of the fairies' nature, they most often referred to the race as a whole by epithets - the Gentry or the Good People or the Mothers' Blessing, and the like. In those days, using a creature's true name without permission implied a threat - unwise in the case of fairies, whose reactions were unpredictable and whose powers were great.

For the purpose of classification, however, the entire race could be roughly divided into a peasantry and an aristocracy. The peasants were solitary fairies, descendents of the spirits who at the beginning of time ensouled all nature. They were guardians of tree and field, of forest pool and mountain stream. Although they shared in some powers of Faerie, such as the ability to become invisible or to appear in various shapes, solitary fairies were wild creatures, and their meetings with mortals were relatively rare compared with those of their grand relatives. The presence of a solitary fairy was most often announced not by a direct sighting but by evidence of the creature's activity: the bending of grass as a fairy passed invisibly over it, soughing sounds in tree branches, glittering frost patterns etched on windowpanes.

The aristocracy of Faerie was a different matter. Known as trooping fairies, these beings were descended, it was popularly thought, from ancient, vanquished gods. They were a powerful race who dwelled in kingdoms underground or across the deepest seas; to mortals they were objects of infinite desire and sometimes infinite fear. The alfar of Scandinavia were believed to be divided into good and bad branches: the Liosalfar, or Light elves, who were air dwellers; and the Dockalfar, or Dark Elves, whose kingdoms were beneath the ground. The Scots made the same distinction. Their fairy bands were called the Seelie - or Blessed - Court and the Unseelie Court, the later often being thought of as the vengeful ghosts of dead mortals.

No such division was made in Wales or Ireland. There were trooping fairies - companies like the one the traveler had seen in the meadows of Connacht - were taken as a whole in all their complex manifestations. In Wales they were called the Tylwyth Teg - the Fair Family. In Ireland they were known as the Daoine Side - the Dwellers of the Fairy Mounds, for it was under those softly swelling, grassy knolls that many of their palaces were hidden.

Ireland, in fact, provides the most complete accounts of the trooping fairies and their kind: Irish tales and songs trace the history of these fairies back thousands of years, to a time before the boundaries between their world and the mortal one became dangerous to cross, before mortals grew to fear entrapment in the lands of the fairies, and before the love that could exist between mortal and fairy turned to hopeless yearning.

At that time, the island had not yet been completely formed and defined. Its hills and lakes and streams were still without names and identities. But mortals were present in numbers. According to the histories, Ireland had been settled by a people called the Firbolg, who were beginning to tame the rich wilderness.

The Golden Company's Overlord

The High King of Tuatha De Danann - heroic fairies of Ireland's distant past - was the bearer of many titles and the source of many legends. He was styled the Father of All as well as Lord of Knowledge and Sun of All the Sciences, his chief title, Dagda, meant the "Good God".

The term Dagda did not refer to the elfin lord's virtue. Legends of gluttony and savagery clustered around him. Instead, it meant that he shone in every sphere and was the most powerful among the race of powerful fairies. He had a battle club that could slay nine men with a single blow. He owned a magic caldron that was never empty of food. And the music of his harp could cause laughter or grief, or give the gift of sleep.

When his fairy host left the surface of the earth and took up residence under the hills of Ireland, the Dagda created four separate kingdoms and gave each to a different son. But this mightiest of fairies remained sovereign over all.

A Benison From the Blessed Court

Although their feelings toward mortals were complex, fairies of the early days sometimes acted with great kindness, as this tale tells.

Once a Scottish knight dared to scorn the love of a woman who had witching powers. In her fury at the insult, she transformed him. Where the young man had been lay a reptilian creature, scaled and cold. Trapped in the loathsome body, the knight huddled by a tree for months.

On the Eve of Samhain in that year, when the full moon rose and the fields shone in its light, the pitiful beast heard the sound of flutes and trumpets. It raised its heavy head and saw the glitter of the Seelie Court - the heroic fairies of Scotland - as they wound in procession through the hills, blessing the farmers' crops. All across the countryside the bright troop wandered and at last came to the place where the knight lay in his bestial guise.

The Seelie Queen paused in her riding. She dismounted and drew near him, signaling her fairies to ride on. As their music faded into the distance, she sat on the grass and drew the head of the bewitched knight into her lap. She stroked the scales and softly sang.

All the while, the knight lay motionless. The moon set, the stars dimmed, and the eastern horizon began to glow.

Then the skin that covered the knight split and tore and at last fell away, so that the young man emerged clean and whole. He started to thank the Seelie Queen, but before he could speak, she faded into the light of morning, returning invisibly to her kingdom underground.