Fairies

They plat the manes of horses in the night...

What exactly are fairies? Tolkien would say this isn’t the question to start with, for Fairy is not so much a particular creature as it is a place, and anything from the realm of Fairy is, in fact, a “fairy” (or “elf,” as it would be in English). My imagination is deeply influenced by Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-Stories,” from which these ideas about Fairy derive, but it’s still hard to escape the popular cultural idea of a fairy — the Tinker Bell kind — with its diminutive, winged form, flitting from flower to flower like a humanoid hummingbird and sprinkling fairy dust on everything. When we hear the word “fairy,” for most of us in the 21st century, we still imagine the tiny, winged, spritely thing.

Of course, the concept of The Fae has become more widespread in our popular imagination, due in large part to the rise of urban fantasy as a genre, and as such, many of us will easily accept “fairy” to mean a member of the Fae race, the people from the Otherworld, the human-like magical creatures who walk amongst and are usually at war with some branch or other of their tribe or with humans or with vampires or whatever. The Fae are a well-worn trope of urban fantasy by now.

And by virtue of their human form — almost indistinguishable from human except for some strange differences, like the Man with the Thistle-down Hair — these Fae are nearer to Tolkien’s concept of the elves, and they fit more closely with Tolkien’s idea of “fairy,” meaning any denizen from the land of Fairy.

But I find the word “fairy” cannot be so easily pinned down to one type of creature, whether tiny Peaseblossom or fully grown Lady Maeve. The fairies are myriad and mixed up with other magical beings. The list is long. In the Denham Tracts, a compilation of folklore collected by a Yorkshire tradesman named Michael Denham in the 1800s, we find a list of fairy creatures that includes spirits, fairies, ghosts, and goblins, and I find it fascinating that the fair folk are lumped in with ghosts and ghouls. “Fairy,” here and elsewhere, is not the Disneyfied version but something menacing. These creatures are hostile and horifying, not to be trifled with.

Amongst the list are “Robin-Goodfellows,” which brings us to Shakespeare, who gave us not only the mischief-makers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also the dream-haunting Queen Mab, who sends bloody and terrifying dreams to those who run afoul of her. Shakespeare understood — even as he contributed to the idea of the diminutive, flowery fairy — that the fairies are tricksters. It shouldn’t be a wonder that they end up on lists with restless spirits and poltergiests: fairies are dangerous. They are not safe (to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis about Aslan), and they are not often good either. Fairyland, the Otherworld, is a kind of subsitute for death. The fairies, afterall, live in barrows and under hills, tethered to cairns and dolmens and other waysides that might serve as the crossroads between the living world and the underworld. Our desire to travel to Fairyland might be seen as a desire to evade death — for a time — but not forever. The fairies have a way of giving us what we desire but then twisting it; they show us the folly of our baser hungers and lusts. They are utterly natural, in the sense that they are tied to the natural world, to the trees and streams and rocks that cover our wilderness. They are magical, but their magic is of an earthy kind, something close to our human world but also separate. We may not live in the same realm, but we border each other and sometimes cross paths.

I think this is one of the enticing things about fairies: we can have contact with them. They are more ordinary than the gods and monsters of our mythic stories, but yet still imbued with ancient and unsettling magic. My seven-year-old daughter, at this very moment, is getting ready to make her leprechaun house in order to invite a leprechaun to stay with us on St. Patrick’s Day. She has the safer version of the fairy in mind, the gentler version that pervades our contemporary culture — particularly in media meant for children — but I wonder if someday she might also be attracted to the more ambiguous and dangerous version of the fairy, the version that is both alluring but also menacing. The trickster. The human-like but inhuman.

Why do I write about fairies in my own stories? Maybe, like my daughter, I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of one, to bridge the razor-thin gap between our world and the fairy world. I think this is why the Arthurian stories have always held a special place in my imagination. They are, in so many ways, fairy stories. This is why my Merlin’s Last Magic series involves sojourns into fairylands and underdarks: I love the stories that blend the real world with the realm of Fairy, that cross the borders into and out of that enchanted land. Even now, I’m working on a novella that involves the crossing of an “edge” — the edge of a forest and then suddenly my young heroine is no longer in her ordinary world. She has entered Fairy and must find a way to stay. To do so, she must sacrifice some of her humanity, give up some of her mortality, become more like the fairies. It’s a steep price, and she does not (yet) understand the dangers.

When writing the story, I decided to make the fairies dangerous and decidely unsafe, but I didn’t want to write them as winged sprites nor as fully-grown human figures. I wanted them to be strange; I wanted to unsettle my readers, to shake them out of picturing that default image of the Tinker Bell fairy. My fairies are sometimes grotesque; sometimes, ellusive and undefined. I wanted to return to the linkage of fairies with ghouls and horrors that we see in the Denham Tracts. I deliberately used the word “fairy” because I wanted to subvert that word: I wanted to describe them in ways we wouldn’t immediately recognize or code as “fairy” in order to recapture the strangeness and danger of the ancient fairy stories. I’m fascinated by these creatures that haunted our ancestors’ dreams. The creatures who are Other, conjured by a spell from the mist or the depths of a dark mere.

Even as I finish my Merlin series (I’m working on it!), and finish my novella (it’s called Gates to Illvelion, if you’re interested), and finish my other fairy-tinged project (it’s a fictional memoir called Avalon Summer), I might move on from fairies for awhile, but I don’t think I’ll ever completely abandon them. They will always be there, on the edge of my imagination, waiting to be invited in and cast their spell.