From the Wild Hunt to the Fairy Rade

Sir Joseph Noel Paton: 'The Fairy Rade: Carrying Off A Changeling - Midsummer's Eve'

This account from an unnamed 'old woman’ of Nithsdale tells of a Fairy Rade or cavalcade of the fairies which she had witnessed as a lass. It was recorded by Allan Cunningham and R.H. Cromek in Remains of Nithdale and Galloway Song (1810) and is repeated verbatim in Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828). It is strangely convincing, as folk accounts often are. (Translation below!)

 

“In the night afore Roodmass I had trysted with a neebor lass a Scots mile frae hame to talk anent buying braws i’ the fair.  We had nae sutten lang aneath the haw-buss till we heard the loud laugh of fowk riding, wi’ the jingling o’ bridles, and the clankin’ o’ hoofs. We banged up, thinking they wad ride owre us. We kent nae but it was drunken fowk ridin’ to the fair i’ the forenight.  We glow’red roun’ and roun’ and sune saw it was the Fairie-fowks Rade. We cowred down till they passed by. A beam o’ light was dancin’ owre them mair bonnie than moonshine: they were a wee wee fowk wi’ green scarfs on, but ane that rade foremost, and that ane was a good deal larger than the lave wi’ bonnie lang hair, bun about wi’ a strap whilk glinted like stars.  They rade on braw wee white naigs, wi’ unco lang swooping tails, an’ manes hung wi’ whustles that the win’ played on.  This an’ their tongue when they sang was like the soun’ of a far-away psalm. Marion and me was in a brade lea fiel’, where they came by us; a high hedge o’ haw-trees keepit them frae gaun through Johnnie Corrie’s corn, but they lap owre it like sparrows, and gallopt into a green know beyont it.  We gaed i’ the morning to look at the treddit corn; but the fient a hoofmark was there, nor a blade broken.”

 Here is my tamer English version:

 

In the night before Roodmas [the Feast of the Cross, May 3^rd] I had met up with a neighbour lass a Scots mile from home [a Scots mile was about 220 yards longer than an English mile], to talk about buying pretty things at the fair. We hadn’t been sitting long under the hawthorn bushes when we heard the loud laugh of folk riding, with jingling bridles and clattering hoofs. We jumped up, thinking they would ride over us. We assumed it was drunken folk riding to the fair in the early evening. We stared round and about and soon saw it was the Fairy-folk's Raid. We cowered down as they passed by. A beam of light was dancing over them, prettier than moonshine: they were tiny little folk with green scarves on, all but the one who rode in front, who was a good deal bigger than the rest, with lovely long hair bound about with a band that glinted like stars. They rode on fine little white horses, with uncommonly long sweeping tails, and manes hung with whistles which the wind played on. This, and their voices when they sang, was like the sound of a far-away psalm. Marion and I were in a broad pasture field, where they came by us; a high hedge of hawthorn trees barred them from going through Johnnie Corrie’s corn, but they leaped over it like sparrows and galloped into a green hill beyond it. We went next morning to look at the trodden-down corn, but devil a hoofmark [ie: not a single hoofmark] was to be seen, nor a blade broken. 

 

Charming as this seems, it’s quite clear that the young women’s experience was startling, even alarming. Hearing the loud, possibly drunken laughter, jingling bridles and thudding hoofs, they leap up in fear of being trampled – but when they see the fairy troop, they cower down.

             The Lowland Scots word ‘rade’ means ‘raid’. It’s derived from Old English rād (‘road’) used in the sense of a (usually military) expedition or incursion upon horseback, ‘a foray, an inroad’ as the OED states. So a fairy rade really is a ‘raid’: an implicitly threatening intrusion into the everyday world. No matter how beautiful fairies may be, they are always dangerous, and the Fairy Rade is related to the phenomenon of the Wild Hunt or familia Herlequini, the host of the dead. Related, yet no longer the same, for superstitions are in constant evolution. The Fairy Rade branched off, you might say, from the Wild Hunt, stories of which of course continued to exist in parallel. Jacob Grimm, in his Teutonic Mythology, connected the Germen wilde Jagt (wild hunt) or wütende heer (furious horde) with Wotan – Odin, the wild or mad god who goes ‘driving, riding, hunting … with valkyrs and einheriar in his train’, and versions of the Wild Hunt led by demi-gods and legendary characters both male and female have been recorded across Europe: it was always bad luck to see it – a harbinger of death. But how did the ancient and fearsome host of the dead evolve into the green-clad trooping fairies of early 19^th century Nithsdale?

The Wild Hunt by Johann Corde

In a marvellous book, Elf Queens and Holy Friars (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) Professor Richard Firth Green suggests that medieval clerical commentators put a deliberately dark spin on the Europe-wide concept of the Wild Hunt. I’m not entirely convinced by this, for I suspect the familia Herlequini had its frightening side well before Christianity. However, it could certainly be adapted to a Christian agenda, and Green contrasts two of the earliest accounts. The Anglo-Norman monk Orderic Vitalis, writing of an event ‘witnessed’ in 1091, depicts a grim procession of dead knights, priests, ladies and commoners suffering dreadful torments for their sins. A half century or so later, Anglo-Norman courtier Walter Map tells in his book De Nugis Curialium the story of the British king Herla who, returning from attendance at a fairy king’s wedding, finds that centuries have elapsed and he and his company are now doomed to wander the hills forever. Green drily comments: ‘People could hardly be allowed to believe that Herla and his followers were living happily in fairyland.’ Reading this, I was struck by the memory of Aucassin’s famous defiance – ‘To Hell will I go!’ – in the 13^th century French romance Aucassin and Nicolette:

For to Hell go the fine scholars and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney and the great wars, and the good men-at-arms and all noble men. With them I will go: and there go the lovely courteous ladies who have two or three lovers as well as their lords, and there go the gold and silver and ermine and miniver, and there go the harpers and minstrels and kings of this world: I will go with them, so only that I have Nicolette my sweetest love beside me. 

 

Aucassin & Nicolette (artist unknown to me)

One might well imagine that Aucassin has Orderic’s gloomy vision of the trooping dead clearly in his mind, and is deliberately subverting, diverting it. This gaily-clad cavalcade will surely end up in fairyland – not hell – and Aucassin’s vehement, emotional rejection of the stark hell/heaven binary may express a more general sense that alternatives had to be available. Could true love such as Aucassin’s really be a sin? Where did the unbaptised babies go, and men who died in battle unshriven, and mothers who died in childbirth.

They were taken away into fairyland, according to the anonymous author of the late 13^th century romance Sir Orfeo, for when Orfeo is admitted to the fairy king’s subterranean crystal castle, he sees lying all about him in the courtyard: ‘folk that had been brought here, and were thought to be dead, but weren’t…’ And there follows a grim catalogue of the headless, maimed, wounded, mad, drowned and burned… ‘Wives lay there in child-bed … and wondrous many others lay there too: as they had fallen asleep at noon each was taken from this world and carried there by fairy magic.’ It’s got to be better than hell.

‘Queen of heaven ne am I naught,’ says the fairy queen to Thomas of Ercildoune, in the medieval Scots romance of that name: ‘For I took never so high degree,/But I am of another countree.’ 

 

Illustration: HM Brock

Her counterpart in the much later ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (first published in Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802/3) points out to Thomas three ways that diverge ahead of them: the thorny path of righteousness, the easy road of wickedness, and lastly the ‘bonny road that winds about the ferny brae’ which will lead them to fair Elfland. It must have been tempting! And once you’ve imagined fairy land as a place, and a sumptuous, royal place at that, what remains but to wonder what the people of Elfland do? The answer was obvious: they danced, and they rode out. Not just because of the living tradition of the Wild Hunt, but because this was the way kings, queens and nobles always displayed themselves to the people. Like earthly kings, fairy kings and queens rode out in procession for three main purposes – ceremony, hunting or war – so that the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court are aspects of the same thing. 

 

Les Tres Riches Heures, Musée de Condé, Chantilly, France by the Limbourg brothers

 

The medieval romances emphasise the courtly aspect of the fairies: in Walter Map’s 12^th century tale of King Herla, the unnamed pygmy fairy king is grotesque in appearance but his entourage is dressed in splendid livery and jewels. He eats and drinks from vessels and plates carved from single precious stones and his underground palace is lit by innumerable lamps as if it were the palace of the sun. The fairy king of Sir Orfeo comes by with a company of over two hundred knights and damsels dressed in white and riding on snow-white steeds: the king’s crown is made neither of gold or silver, but all of one precious stone that shines as bright as the sun. And in the late medieval French romance of Huon of Bordeaux the child-size fairy king Oberon (‘the dwarf of the fairy’) entertains Huon by magicking up a beautiful palace, ‘hung with rich cloth of silk beaten with gold, with tables set ready full of meat’, and he and his guests wash their hands in ‘basins of gold, garnished with precious stones’ and are seated on benches of gold and ivory.

 

Fairies in a Bird's Nest, by John Anster Fitzgerald

 

By the late 16^th century however, literary representations of the fairy rade had become far more rustic and a lot less serious. Writers like Shakespeare and Jonson (and in the 17^th century, Drayton and Herrick) popularised the notion of the fairies as amusing miniature creatures. In part of his Flyting (a poetic duel) against fellow-poet Patrick Hume of Polwart some time in the early 1580s, the Scots writer Alexander Montgomerie includes a fanciful account of the fairy rade:

            In the hinder end of haruest, on Alhallow even

            When our good nighbours do ryd, gif I read right,

            Some buckland on a bunwand, and some on a been,

            Ay trottand in trupes from the twilight;

            Some sadleand a shoe aip all graithed into green,

            Some hobland on ane hempstalke, hoveand to the hight.

            The King of Pharie, and his curt, with the Elfe Queen,

            With many elrich Incubus, was rydand that night…

In rough translation:

            At the back-end of harvest, on All Hallows eve,

            When our good neighbours [euphemism for the fairies] do ride, if I'm correct,

            Some buckling on a plant-stem and some a dry stalk [as weapons],

            Always trotting in troops from the [beginning of?] twilight;

            Some saddling a she-ape all harnessed in green,

            Some jogging on a hempstalk, hovering to the height.

            The King of Fairy and his court, with the Elf Queen

            With many eldritch Incubus, was riding that night…

This may seem whimsical or even cute to us, but the point for Montgomerie is to smear Polwart’s character and morals. For the Reformation has occurred: the fairies are now regarded as disreputable rather than dangerous, and he continues with a scurrilously imaginative account of Polwart’s supposedly monstrous origins:

            There ane elf, on ane aipe, an vnsell begat,

            Into ane pot, by Pomathorne;

            That bratchart in ane busse was borne;

            They fand ane monster, on the morne.

            War faced not a cat.

 That is:

            There an elf, on an ape, begot a wretch

            In a pit near Pomathorn [a place in Midlothian];

            That brat was born in a bush;

            They found a monster in the morning,

            Worse faced than a cat.

You cannot write this kind of thing if you really believe in fairies. Even though some of the fairy lore is genuine (flying on hemp-stalks, for example), you can tell that Montgomerie's attitude towards these country superstitions is part scepticism, part mockery. A few years later in 1599, King James VI of Scotland (soon to succeed Elizabeth as James I of England) writes with disbelief and disapproval in his Daemonology of the popular belief in spirits called ‘by the Gentiles…Diana, and her wandering court’ and ‘amongst us, the Phairie… or our good neighbours’:

How there was a King and Quene of Phairie, of such a iolly [jolly] court and train as they had, how they had a teynd [tithe], & dutie [tax], as it were, of all goods: how they naturallie rode and wente, eate and drank, and did all other actiones like naturall men and women…

He adds that this is ‘no[t] anie thing that ought to be beleeved by Christians’: in fact, the only possible explanation is that ‘the devil illuded the senses of sundry simple creatures, in making them beleeve that they saw and harde [heard] such thinges as were nothing so indeed.’

But if poets and playwrights and kings no longer believed in fairies, many ordinary country people and other common folk undoubtedly still did - and they were interested in them, which is why some of the now unfashionable medieval romances ended up as tales in chapbooks or sung as ballads. The 13^th century Sir Orfeo became the Shetland ballad King Orfeo: it was collected there in 1865 and was still being sung up till the mid 20^th century, when two different tunes were recorded for it. And Thomas of Ercildoune morphed into the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer (collected by Walter Scott), when a fairy queen as richly attired as any of her predecessors comes riding down past the Eildon tree on her milk-white steed –though without followers:

Her shirt was o’ the grass-green silk

Her mantle  o’ the velvet fine:

At ilka tett o’ her horse’s mane

Hung fifty siller bells and nine.

 

The ballad of Tam Lin includes a famous account of a fairy rade, and one that adds a twist to King James’s dour comment about the fairy king or queen claiming a ‘teynde’ or tithe on earthly goods. For on Hallowe’en, young Tam Lin will pay the seven-year ‘tiend’ the fairies owe to hell – unless his lover Janet can save him.

 

        Just at the mirk and midnight hour

        The fairy folk will ride;

        And they that would their true love win,

        At Milescross they maun bide.

…

About the middle of the night

She heard the bridles ring;

This lady was as glad of that

As any earthly thing.

 

First she let the black pass by,

And syne she let the brown

But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed

And pu’ed the rider down…

This is as serious a treatment as it could be, far removed from the satire and whimsy of Mongomerie, and untouched by the notion that trooping fairies were diminutive. The oral tradition preserved the gravity of the fairy kingdom. But writers couldn’t take fairies seriously and expect to be taken seriously themselves: they had to guy it up. It’s not that you can’t find any fairy lore in the poetry of Robert Herrick (1591-1674), it’s just that he’s at such pains to make it all light, decorative, amusing. In his poem The Beggar to Mab, the Fairy Queen, the beggar pleads with Mab to feed him:

            Give me then an ant to eat,

            Or the cleft ear of a mouse…

            Or, sweet lady, reach to me

            The abdomen of a bee…

 

The Fairy Queen's Messenger, by Richard Doyle

Contrast such elegant flippancy with the genuine shiver we get at the end of the ballad of Tam Lin when the fairy queen, furious that she’s lost her knight, swears that if she had known ‘what now this night I see,/I wad hae ta’en out thy twa grey een,/And put in twa een o’ tree.’

Andrew Lang, in The Book of Dreams and Ghosts, tells of a man called Donald Ban who fought at the battle of Culloden and was afterwards troubled by a bocan (boggart) which made great difficulties for him. The bocan was thought to be the spirit of a man who had died at the battle, and it once led Donald to dig up some plough-irons which had been hidden while he was alive: as Donald lifted them, ‘the two eyes of the bocan were causing him greater fear than anything else he ever heard or saw.’ This is very like the incident in the medieval Icelandic Grettir’s Saga, where Grettir slays the corpse-ghost Glam and is never able to shed the terror of seeing Glam’s eyes roll horribly in the moonlight... Donald Ban saw other fairy sights too: for out hunting one day ‘in the year of the great snow, at nightfall he saw a man mounted on the back of a deer ascending a great rock. He heard the man saying, “Home, Donald Ban,” and fortunately he took the advice, for that very night there fell eleven feet of snow in the very spot where he had intended to stay.

Country people – small-holders, crofters, farmers – took the world of spirits and fairies seriously because they had to: they lived liminal lives themselves, dependent on weather, on crops doing well, on animals thriving. Anything that might tip the balance, anything that might help or hinder their own survival, was worth paying attention to. So they kept a belief in their ‘good neighbours’ the fairies, whom it really wasn’t worth offending, and they kept telling the old tales and finding new ones. That is why the story of the fairy rade of Nithsdale with which I opened this post is so compelling. The fairies those young lassies witnessed may have been ‘tiny little folk in green scarves’, bedecked with stars, and shining with a light ‘prettier than moonshine’ – but they were really scary. 

And that’s why the two girls cowered down, afraid of being seen. 

 

Baccanal: Richard Dadd

The Lost Kings of Faeryland

Who reigns in fairyland?  Many modern fantasies concern themselves with the fate of doomed but brilliant young men in thrall to a beautiful, capricious and often cruel faerie Queen.  Often it’s the heroine’s role to try and rescue the young man, who would be her own boyfriend or lover if only he were free.  Examples are Holly Black’s fantastic ‘Tithe’ and Melissa Marr's 'Wicked Lovely'.

This particular theme has its source in the 16th century ballads ‘Tam Lin’, 'Thomas of Ercildoune' and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ – especially the former: Janet saves her lover Tam Lin from the worst possible fate (hellfire) by her bravery and single-mindedness.  She goes to Miles Cross at midnight and waits for the Seelie Court to go riding by, seizes Tam Lin from his horse and holds on to him while he is transformed into a number of horrifying shapes.  At last he appears in his own shape, a naked man, and Janet casts her cloak around him and claims him as her own true love, while the furious fairy queen can only threaten and rage.

The story, in which a woman rescues a man, is popular today partly because we got tired of the stereotype of ‘man rescues woman’.  We want strong women, and in this legend we get double offerings: staunch Janet, and the powerful Queen of Fays.  I was looking for a good picture to illustrate the modern notion of a fairy queen - vengeful, beautiful, dangerous - and came across this electrifying photo of Maria Callas as Medea, taken in Dallas, Texas, 1958.  (And yes, Medea is a witch queen rather than a faery queen, but same difference.)

Of course, a strong heroine doesn’t mean the male characters need to be weak. Tam Lin in the ballad is far from effeminate – the very first verse warns maidens to keep away from him, and he rapidly gets Janet pregnant – but let’s face it, there’s something sexy about a handsome young man in bondage to a cruel queen, and sexy goes down well in YA fiction… and so we’ve all got used to it: Faeryland is ruled by a capricious, dangerous queen.  And the idea of the tithe to hell, the sacrifice of the young man, meshes with the figure of the Corn King or Year King made familiar by Sir James Fraser’s ‘The Golden Bough’: in a parable of the corn which springs up and dies each year, the vigorous young king marries the Earth Goddess and is sacrificed at the end of his short term. (I don't expect many teenagers have ever heard of 'The Golden Bough', and modern scholars doubt if Corn Kings were ever sacrificed, and in archeological or anthropological circles, the whole idea has been pretty well discredited: but it’s a good story and is there in the back of a lot of fantasy writers’ minds, I'm sure.)


All this is something of a preamble: I want to point out that fairyland hasn’t always been this way.  As far as I can discover - after many years of reading early texts -  the all-powerful Faerie Queen never existed in the popular imagination before the 16th century, when Queen Elizabeth I was lauded by Edmund Spenser as Gloriana, the Faerie Queen herself. Prior to that, for centuries upon centuries, in a reflection of what English people saw about them and regarded as the natural order, Fairyland was ruled by kings.

Pwyll meets Arawn; 19th C. illustration

The Welsh Annwn was ruled by King Arawn, whom Pwyll Prince of Dyfed meets in the Mabinogion.  Annwn is the underworld: the kingdoms of death and faery are closely blended throughout the early medieval period and right through into the 16^th century.  After an incident out stag-hunting when the mortal prince Pwyll mistakenly chases off Arawn’s white-coated, red-eared hounds in favour of his own pack, he offers Arawn recompense and friendship. In a bargain reminiscent of Gawain’s with the Green Knight, King Arawn suggests an identity swap:  Pwyll is to take Arawn’s place in his kingdom, and at the end of the year must face and fight Arawn’s enemy King Hafgan.

‘I will set thee in Annwn in my stead, and the fairest lady thou didst ever see I will set to sleep with thee each night, and my form and semblance upon thee, so that [no man] shall know that thou art not I.  And that,’ said he, ‘till the end of a year from tomorrow, and our tryst then in this very place.’

‘Aye,’ [Pwyll] replied, ‘though I be there till the end of the year, what guidance shall I have to find the man thou tellest of?’

‘A year from tonight,’ said he, ‘there is a tryst between him and me, at the ford. And be thou there in my likeness,’ said he. ‘And one blow only thou art to give him; he will not survive it. And though he ask thee to give him another, give it not, however he entreat thee.’

The Mabinogion, trans. Gwyn Jones, Thomas Jones

Like Gawain, Pwyll is courteous and canny enough to refrain from sexual intercourse with the beautiful lady, who is of course Arawn’s wife: ‘the moment they got into bed, he turned his face to the bedside and his back towards her… not a single night to the year’s end was different from what that first night was.’ At the end of the year he rides to the ford, meets King Hafgan and strikes the single blow that fells him ‘with a mortal wound’.  These proofs of faith impress Arawn, and thenceforth he and Pwyll are constant friends.



In the medieval metrical romance ‘Sir Orfeo’ which blends Celtic and English fairy lore with the Greek myth of Orpheus, the fairy king is clearly Pluto, lord of the dead – though he is not named.  In the very early Irish tale, ‘The Wooing of Etain’, the beautiful Etain is stolen away by a fairy king called Midir.  And in a legend related by the 12th century courtier Walter Map, a British king called Herla is invited to a wedding by an unnamed, goat-footed pygmy king who rules underground halls of unutterable splendour:

[They] entered a cave in a high cliff, and after an interval of darkness, passed, in a light which seemed to proceed not from sun or moon, but from a multitude of lamps, to the mansion of the pigmy. Here the wedding was celebrated … and when leave was granted, Herla departed laden with gifts and presents of horses, dogs [and] hawks… The pigmy then escorted them as far as the place where darkness began, and then presented the king with a small blood-hound to carry, strictly enjoining him that on no account must any of his train dismount until that dog leapt from the arms of his bearer… Within a short space Herla arrived once more at the light of the sun and at his kingdom, where he accosted an old shepherd and asked for news of his Queen, naming her. The shepherd gazed at him in astonishment and said: ‘Sir, I can hardly understand your speech, for you are a Briton and I a Saxon, but they say… that long ago, there was a Queen of that name over the very ancient Britons, who was the wife of King Herla; and he, the story says, disappeared in company with a pigmy at this very cliff, and was never seen on earth again…’

The king, who thought he had made a stay of but three days, could scarce sit his horse for amazement. Some of his company, forgetting the pigmy’s orders, dismounted before the dog had alighted, and in a moment fell into dust. Whereupon the king… warned the rest under pain of a like fate not to touch the earth before the alighting of the dog.  The dog has not yet alighted. And the story says that this King Herla still holds on his mad course with his band in eternal wanderings, without stop or stay.

                Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, trans. MR James

Also pygmy-sized is the Fairy King in the French fairy romance ‘Huon of Bordeaux’: Auberon, a dwarf with the face of beautiful child – whose name resurfaces in 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' as Oberon.  Here’s his description in the translation by Lord Berners, who was Governor of Calais for Henry VIII, and whiled away his spare time translating French histories and romances into English. The hero of the tale, Sir Huon, is on his way to Babylon, when he is warned of the dangers of a magical wood:

You must pass through a wood, sixteen leagues in length, but the way is so full of magic and strange things that such as pass that way are lost. In that wood abideth the King of Fairyland named Oberon: he is but three feet high, and crooked shouldered, but he hath an angelic visage, so that there is no mortal man that seeth him but that taketh great pleasure in beholding his face. … He will find the way to speak to you, and if you speak to him you are lost forever: and you will ever find him before you…

Huon determines to risk the wood, and once under the shade of the trees:

 

…the dwarf of the fairies, King Oberon, came riding by, wearing a gown so rich that it were marvel to recount… and garnished with precious stones whose clearness shone like the sun. He had a goodly bow in his hand, and his arrows after the same sort, and these had such a property that they could hit any beast in the world.  Moreover, he had about his neck a rich horn, hung by two laces of gold… and whosoever heard it, if he were a hundred days journey thereof, should come at the pleasure of him that blew it. … Therewith the dwarf began to cry aloud and said, ‘Ye fourteen men that pass by my wood, God keep you all. I desire you to speak with me, and I conjure you by Almighty God, and by the Christendom that you have received, and by all that God has made, answer me.’

Hearing the dwarf speak, Huon and his company…rode away as fast as they were able, and the dwarf was sorrowful and angry, so he set one of his fingers on his horn, out of which there issued a wind and a tempest so great that it bore down the trees. …Then suddenly a great river appeared before them that ran swifter than the birds did fly; and the water was black and perilous…

Huon of Bordeax, trans. Lord Berners, retold by R Steele

But this is all enchantment; and when Huon eventually speaks to Oberon, he wins his friendship and alliance.  


These early fairy kings rule over lands which are usually underground, and there is a pervading sense of loss that hangs about them. Except for Oberon (who though he claims to be the son of the Lady of the Secret Isle and Julius Caesar, yet has a place reserved for him in Paradise), they are clearly pagan kings: there is no sense that they will ever attain to a Christian heaven.  Their lands are lands of shadow. Moreover, there’s an interesting hint in all of these stories of substitution, of succession. The Wooing of Etain
 contains references to identity swaps.  In the Mabinogion, Pwyll becomes Arawn for a whole year, and is afterwards so closely identified with him in friendship that his name is changed to ‘Pwyll Head of Annwn’.  (In the 19th century illustration of their meeting, shown above, the artist has made their black and white figures seem like linked opposites, sunlight and shadow, darkness and light.)  In Walter Map's 12th century tale, after visiting the pygmy king’s halls, King Herla finds himself hundreds of years in the future.  He cannot dismount from his horse without crumbling to dust, and therefore still rides the Welsh border hills at the head of his troop of knights. The pygmy king vanishes from the tale: in some sense, Herla has replaced him.  And even in the late medieval romance of Duke Huon, at Oberon’s death Huon and his wife Esclaramond become King and Queen of Faeryland (much to the wrath of King Arthur, who hoped to succeed).  Rudyard Kipling must have read this romance, it’s behind this fabulous piece of writing in his story ‘Weland’s Sword’ in Puck of Pook’s Hill:

“Butterfly wings, indeed! I’ve seen Sir Huon and a troop of his people setting out from Tintagel Castle for Hy-Brasil in the teeth of a sou-westerly gale, with the spray flying all over the Castle, and the Horses of the Hills wild with fright. Out they’d go in a lull, screaming like gulls, and back they’d be driven five good miles inland before they could come head to wind again. Butterfly wings! It was Magic – Magic as black as Merlin could make it, and the whole sea was green fire and white foam with singing mermaids in it. And the Horses of the Hills picked their way from one wave to another by the lightning flashes. That was how it was in the old days!”

And in its companion story ‘Cold Iron’, from Rewards and Fairies, Puck tells the children about ‘Sir Huon of Bordeaux – he succeeded King Oberon.  He had been a bold knight once, but he was lost on the road to Babylon, a long while back…’


There it is again, you see? - that hint of loss in all these stories.  In a tale called ‘The Sons of the Dead Woman’, Walter Map tells of a Breton knight who buried his wife and then saw her one evening dancing in a gloomy valley, in a ring of maidens. When the fairy king steals Orfeo’s wife, she is mourned as dead. And yet, tantalisingly, the dead may not be dead, but stolen away into some other dimension, some fairy realm of half-existence. This is the fantasy of grief. And of course time runs differently there: if you visit, you risk losing yourself forever.

This 12th century fairyland, the mysterious underground kingdom of the dead or half-dead, is the fairyland I wrote about in my book ‘Dark Angels’ (The Shadow Hunt’ in the USA).  One of the characters, the troubadour knight Lord Hugo, lost his wife seven years before the book opens.  

“The night she died – it was New Year’s Eve, and the candles burned so low and blue, and we heard over and over again the sound of thunder.  That was the Mesnie Furieuse – the Wild Host – riding over the valleys.  Between the old year and the new, between life and death – don’t you think, when the soul is loosening from the body, the elves can steal it?”

So I sent my young hero Wolf searching for Hugo's lost wife through the cramped tunnels of the old lead mines under the local mountain, Devil's Edge, to confront the lord of the underworld himself: with unexpected consequences, as this trailer for the book suggests.

Picture credits: Huon of Bordeaux illustrations by Fred Mason, 1895