I've been recording an episode of
Fictoplasm with
Tim Harford and host Ralph Lovegrove. If you've never caught one of these podcasts, Ralph and his guests take a story and consider both its literary qualities and how it could be used in a roleplaying game. I recommend them all (my own favourites are the Gene Wolfe and Mike Moorcock episodes) and if you want to hear ours, in which we talk about the Lyonesse novels by
Jack Vance, it's
right here.
One of the aspects of Lyonesse that we talked about was Vance's use of
faerie creatures. They are, in a nutshell, droll, capricious and dangerous, just like
fairies in Legend. And that in turn reminded me (there's an end point to this segue, believe me) of
John Hagan's comment recently about
W B Yeats's take on fairies as angels not good enough to be saved, nor yet bad enough to be damned. So I thought let's get a guest post from Yeats, him being dead and hence entirely biddable. So here it is:
The Trooping Fairies
The Irish word for fairy is
sheehogue [sidheog], a diminuitive of "shee" in banshee. Fairies are
deenee shee [daoine sidhe] (Fairy People).
Who are they?
"Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved nor bad enough to be lost,"
say the peasantry. "The gods of the earth," says The Book of Armagh. " The gods
of pagan Ireland," say the antiquarians, "the Tuatha De Danan, who, when no
longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular
imagination, and now are only a few spans high."
And they will tell you,
in proof, that the names of the fairy chiefs are the names of the old Danan
heroes, and the places where they especially gather together, Danan burying
places, and that the Tuatha de Danan used also to be called the
slooa-shee [sheagh sidhe] (the fairy host), or Marcra shee
(the fairy cavalcade).
On the other hand, there is much evidence to
prove them fallen angels. Witness the nature of the creatures, their caprice,
their way of being good to the good and evil to the evil, having every charm but
conscience-consistency. Beings so quickly offended that you must not speak much
about them at all, and never call them anything but the "gentry", or else
daoine maithe, which in English means good people, yet so easily
pleased that they will do their best to keep misfortune away from you, if you leave
a little milk for them on the window-sill over night. On the whole, the popular
belief tells us most about them, telling us how they fell, and yet were not
lost, because their evil was wholly without malice.
Are they "the gods
of the earth?" Perhaps! Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all
ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains
of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of the earth, who have no
inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You
cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The
visible world is merely their skin. In dreams we go among them, and play with
them, and combat with them. They are, perhaps, human souls in the crucible—these
creatures of whim.
Do not think the faeries are always little.
Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what
size or shape pleases them. Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and
making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one
industrious person among them, the lepra-caun --the shoemaker. Perhaps
they wear their shoes out with dancing. Near the village of Ballisodare is a
little woman who lived among them seven years. When she came home she had no
toes; she had danced them off.
They have three great festivals in the
year--May Eve, Midsummer Eve, November Eve. On May Eve, every seventh year, they
fight all round, but mostly on the "Plain-A-Bawn" (wherever that is), for the
harvest, for the best ears of grain belong to them. An old man told me he saw
them fight once; they tore the thatch off a house in the midst of it all. Had
anyone else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling
everything into the air as it passed. When the wind makes the straws and leaves
whirl as it passes, that is the fairies, and the peasantry take their hats off
and say, "God bless them".
On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are
lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the faeries are at their gayest,
and sometimes steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides.
On
November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for according to the old Gaelic
reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the
ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and
girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their
future lover may come through the window and eat of the food. After November
Eve the blackberries are no longer wholesome, for the pooka has spoiled
them.
When they are angry they paralyse men and cattle with their fairy
darts.
When they are gay they sing. Many a poor girl has heard them, and
pined away and died, for love of that singing. Plenty of the old beautiful tunes
of Ireland are only their music, caught up by eavesdroppers. No wise peasant
would hum "The Pretty Girl milking the Cow" near a fairy rath, for they
are jealous, and do not like to hear their songs on clumsy mortal lips. Carolan,
the last of the Irish bards, slept on a rath, and ever after the fairy
tunes ran in his head, and made him the great man he was.
Do they die?
Blake saw a fairy's funeral; but in Ireland we say they are immortal.
Last year (Dave here again now, not W.B.) I started writing a comic set in and around the faerie-haunted Jewelspider Wood. It was to be illustrated by
Gary Chalk, but he didn't like the story so that collaboration never came off. Kind of a shame, as it had changelings, undead, faerie curses, forest monsters, and murder, all mixed up with the misadventures of a travelling theatre troupe. If I can find an artist maybe I should get back to it - though really I need to find a way to finish
my Mirabilis epic first.
