I am not entirely sure why tiny flower fairies are
currently regarded by so many adults with such dislike. Believe me, they are: I was present at a session at the World
Fantasy Convention in London in 2013 when a number of high-profile panel members reviled the Victorians for their infantilisation of the fairies.
Maybe it’s something to do with the Celtic revival and the
perennial desire – which I emphatically share – to get fantasy and fairy tales taken seriously,
to present them as fit for grown-up attention. This is often done by
emphasising the folk-roots of fairy tales and their relevance to adult
concerns such as death and sex. I
do get it. Frivolous tinselly things with
wings hardly cut it in this context. The Flower Fairies, or pixies such as the
one I read about as a child in Enid Blyton’s ‘A Story-Party at Green Hedges’,
who painted the tips of the daisies pink – I didn't really mind them and I still don't, but how can these compare with the
sexy Queen of Elphame? Well, I want to defend the
Victorians. They were not responsible for the invention of the diminutive fairies so
deeply unfashionable today. Indeed, my mission in this
post is to convince you that tiny fairies are nothing to be ashamed of and that
their ancestry is as ancient as that of any other supernatural being.
If you think about it even for a moment it's obvious that miniature fairies have been around
for much longer than the Victorians. Our first stop is 1597, when
Shakespeare’s Mercutio takes off in his long,
exhilarating riff about Queen Mab:
She is the
fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no
bigger than an agate-stone
On the
forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a
team of little atomies
Over men’s noses
as they lie asleep.
Her wagon spokes
made of long spinners legs,
The cover, of
the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of
the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her collars, of
the smallest spider web,
Her whip, of
cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner, a
small grey-coated gnat,
Not half so big
as a round little worm
Pricked from the
lazy finger of a maid.
Her chariot is
an empty hazelnut
Made by the
joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out of mind
the fairies’ coachmaker...
And that’s not even half of it.
Ebullient, unstoppable, Mercutio just keeps on going – telling how Mab tickles,
blisters and frightens men and women with dreams, till finally, reverting from
literary fancy to folklore, he identifies her with hobgoblins and the Nightmare
– and of course, sex:
This is that
very Mab
That plaits the
manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the
elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once
untangled much misfortune bodes,
This is that
hag, when maids lie on their backs
That presses
them and learns them first to bear,
Making them
women of good carriage.
It really is this magnificent flight of
fancy which establishes Mercutio’s charisma, and lends such poignancy to his
death.
Shakespeare clearly expected his audiences to be unfazed by tiny Queen Mab, or by the notion that the lesser fairies of ‘A Midsummer Night’s
Dream’ might ‘creep into acorn-cups’, or that Ariel in ‘The Tempest’ might lie
in a cowslip’s bell or ride on a bat’s back. Of course the actors playing such characters were adult-human-sized – although probably at least some of the non-speaking fairies were
children, as in many performances today. The point is that Shakespeare asks his
audience to imagine that his fairies are
tiny, and there would be little point to this if the notion of miniature
fairies had been an unfamiliar one. It
wasn’t. Even in Shakespeare's day, tiny fairies had already been
around for a long time.
Twelfth-to-thirteenth century Gervase of Tilbury tells a number of supernatural or fairy tales in his Otia Imperiala written to amuse the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto
IV. One of these is about some tiny
English fairy creatures he names ‘Portunes’.
Here is a translation of his account, taken from Thomas Keightley’s ‘The
Fairy Mythology’(1828):
It is their
nature to embrace the simple life of comfortable farmers, and when on account
of their domestic work, they are sitting up at night, when the doors are shut,
they warm themselves by the fire, and take little frogs out of their bosom,
roast them on the coals and eat them. They have the countenance of old men,
with wrinkled cheeks, and they are of a very small stature, not being quite
half an inch high.
Half an inch – about one and a
quarter centimetres – is startlingly small, and Keightley suggests at this
point that by a copyist’s error, pollicis
– ‘thumb’ – has been subsituted for pedis
–‘foot’. Six inches high would
seem much more credible for a creature capable of roasting little frogs. Gervase continues:
They wear little
patched coats, and if anything is to be carried into the house, or any
laborious work is to be done, they lend
a hand, and finish it sooner than any man could. It is their nature to have the power to
serve, but not to injure. They have, however, one mode of annoying. When in the
uncertain shades of night the English are riding anywhere alone, the Portune
sometimes invisibly joins the horseman, and when he has accompanied him a good
while, he at last takes the reins, and leads the horse into a neighbouring
slough; and when he is fixed and floundering in it, the Portune goes off with a
loud laugh, and by sport of this sort he mocks the simplicity of mankind.
This sort of behaviour is just what
we expect of Puck or Robin Goodfellow in the 16th century, three
hundred years later. House-fairies are generally quite small. An example is the
Grimms’ tale of ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’. In the original German text the
tiny shoemakers are ‘zwei kleine
niedliche nackte Männlein’, ‘two pretty little naked men’, and the title is
‘Die Wichtelmännchen’, which Margaret
Hunt in 1884 chose to translate as ‘The Elves’ – but such creatures more
properly belong with the Scots brownies, English boggarts, and the Scandinavian
nisses and tomtes. According to
Keightley, the Norwegian Nis is ‘of the size of a one-year-old child, but has
the face of an old man.’ Nisses dress in grey, wear pointed red caps, help in
house and farmyard, and can be seen in winter jumping about the yard in the
moonlight. They are mischievous. The Swedish Tomte can be much smaller:
In Sweden the
Tomte is sometimes seen at noon, in summer, slowly and stealthily dragging a
straw or an ear of corn. A farmer,
seeing him thus engaged, laughed and said, ‘What difference does it make if
you bring that away or nothing?’ The
Tomte in displeasure left his farm and went to that of his neighbour; and with
him went all prosperity from him who had made light of him, and passed over to
the other farmer.
Gervase of Tilbury’s much earlier Portunes seem to be house fairies of this same type.
In the account of his journey
through Wales in 1188, Gerald of Wales tells the story of Elidor, a twelve
year-old boy who, hiding from his cruel teacher by a river bank, was rescued by
‘two little men of pygmy stature’ who led him away into a subterranean
fairyland inhabited by many other pygmies ‘of the smallest stature, but
well-proportioned for their size’ who rode on horses the size of
greyhounds. In another legend related by
the 12th century courtier Walter Map, a British king called Herla meets an
unnamed, goat-footed pygmy king who dwells in splendid underground halls: ‘a pygmy in his low stature, not above that of a monkey’; and John
Bourchier, Lord Berners, translating the French romance ‘Huon of Bordeaux’ in
the early 16th century, describes the fairy King Oberon as only
three feet high, with a beautiful face.
Shakespeare’s Oberon is apparently
of human size – nothing in the text of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ directly
suggests otherwise – but Shakespeare may well have read ‘Huon of Bordeaux’, so
we cannot be sure: it’s possible he imagined all the fairies to be of less than
human stature, varying only in degree. After all, Titania sends her fairies on
miniature errands –
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,
Some war with
rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small
elves coats…
Then fashion caught on. The folklorist
Katherine Briggs writes in her 1959 book ‘The Anatomy of Puck’: ‘In the beginning of
the Jacobean times, a little school of friends among the poets, Drayton,
Browne, Herrick, and the almost unknown Simon Steward, caught by the
deliciousness of Shakespeare’s fairies, and coming from counties where the
small fairies belonged to local tradition, [my italics] amused themselves and each other by
writing fantasies on littleness.’ In
1625 Robert Herrick (best known for ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’) tells in
his poem ‘Oberon’s Feast’ how Oberon sits at a mushroom table and quaffs a
dewdrop from a violet:
And now we must
imagine, first
The elves
present, to quench his thirst,
A pure
seed-pearl of infant dew
Brought and
besweetened in a blue
And pregnant
violet (etc etc…)
And Michael Drayton’s mock-heroic
‘Nimphidia’ (1627) describes the diminutive knight Pigwiggen arming himself
with a cockleshell shield, a hornet’s-sting rapier and a beetle’s head helmet,
before riding to the fray on a frisky earwig.
In his ‘The Muses Elyzium’, 1630, a fairy wedding gown is composed ‘Of
Ransie, Pincke and Primrose leaves’, while Browne has fairies who teach ‘the
little birds to build their nests’ and serve up banquets of stuffed
grasshoppers, roast ants, soused fleas and chine of dormouse. Enough already!
Stop blaming the Victorians.
You might suppose that this kind of
whimsy is a consequence of the decline of an actual belief in fairies and it
may partly be so: but the whimsy lies more in the treatment than in the size of the creatures. People still could and did believe in tiny
fairies and find them frightening. Katherine Briggs cites several 17th
century spells to summon fairies and conjure them into a crystal glass:
An excellent way
to gett a Fayrie …
First gett an
broad square christall or venus glass in length and breadth 3 inches, then lay
that glass or christall in the blood of a white henne 3 wednesdayes or 3
fridayes…
And:
I.Coniure.thee.Elaby.Gathen.by.these.holy.names.of.
God.Saday.Eloy.Iskyros.Adonay. Sabaoth.that thou appear presently.meekly.and
mildly.in.this.glasse.without.doeinge.hurt.or. daunger.unto.me.or any
other.living. creature. and to this I binde.thee.by.the.whole.power.
and.vertue.of.our.Lord.Jesus.Christ…
This particular spell goes on for
pages, employing as safeguards every name of God and the Trinity which the
magician can think up. The fairy may
have been small, to be conjurable into a crystal glass three inches square, but
her conjuror was clearly terrified of her.
I’ve said enough, I hope, to
show that the diminutive fairies of late nineteenth and early twentieth
century children’s fiction weren’t a Victorian invention. Tiny fairies have always been with us, and
flower fairies appear to have originated with Shakespeare, Herrick and
Drayton. Certainly by late Victorian
times, at least for the educated classes, all terror had departed from the word
‘fairy’, and the troupes of little girls who danced in pantomimes dressed as
gauzy-winged fairies in frilly dresses were purely decorative. But even Victorian flower fairies are not
always as milk-and-watery as you might suppose. In George MacDonald’s
1858 fantasy novel 'Phantastes' the hero Anodos finds himself in fairyland and strolls at evening
though a cottage garden at the edges of an enchanted wood full of beauty and
horror. There are flower fairies in the garden, but they are a wild bunch.
The whole garden
was like a carnival… From the cups or bells of the tall flowers, as from
balconies, some looked down on the masses below, now bursting with laughter,
now grave as owls; but, even in their deepest solemnity, seeming only to be
waiting for the next laugh. Some were
launched on a little marshy stream at the bottom, on boats chosen from the
heaps of last year’s leaves …
Anodos witnesses a fairy funeral
procession for a primrose ‘whose death Pocket [one of the other flower fairies]
had hastened by biting her stalk’ and then, in true fairy fashion:
The party which
had gone towards the house rushed out again, shouting and screaming with
laughter. Half of them were on the cat’s back, and half more held on by her fur
and tail, or ran beside her; till, more coming to their help, the furious cat
was held fast; and they proceeded to pick the sparks out of her with thorns and
pins, which they handled like harpoons.
MacDonald’s flower fairies are
feral, amoral, unpredictable. As Anodos walks deeper into the forest, things
become more sinister: the path is lined by glowing flowers:
From the lilies,
from the campanulas, from the foxgloves, and every bell-shaped flower, curious
little figures shot up their heads,
peeped at me, and drew back. They seemed
to inhabit threm as snails their shells, but I was sure some of them were
intruders, and belonged to the gnomes or goblin fairies, who inhabit the ground
and earthy creeping plants. From the cups of Arum lilies, creatures with great
heads and grotesque faces shot up like Jack-in-the-Box, and made grimaces at
me; or rose slowly and slily over the edge of the cup and spouted water at me,
slipping suddenly back … and I heard
them saying to each other, evidently intending me to hear … ‘Look at him! Look at him!
He has begun a story without a beginning, and it wll never have any end.
He! he! he! Look at him!’
No wonder Anodos soon finds that ‘a
vague sense of discomfort possessed me, as if some evil thing were wandering
about in my neighbourhood…’ (Which indeed there is.)
Summing up: tiny fairies shouldn’t
be regarded simply as childish, Victorian to modern inventions. I can’t help thinking that household fairies such
as brownies and boggarts and nisses may have descended from the even more
ancient household gods – the Latin lares
and penates, or the teraphim which Rachel stole from her
father Laban without telling her husband Jacob. In one of the more comic
episodes of the Bible, Laban pursues and catches the errant family and demands
his gods back:
Jacob did not
know that Rachel had stolen the gods. So
Laban went into Jacob’s tent, and Leah’s tent and that of the two slave
girls, but he found nothing. When he
came out of Leah’s tent, he went into Rachel’s. Now she had taken the household
gods and put them in the camel bag and was sitting on them. Laban went through
everything in the tent and found nothing.
Rachel said to her father, ‘Do not take it amiss, sir, that I cannot rise
in your presence: the common lot of woman is upon me.’ So for all his search,
Laban did not find his household gods. [Genesis 31, 33-35]
These gods must have been small and
portable, probably small fired-clay images like the ones pictured below.
The other common lot of woman was to cook and clean and bear children: if the
household gods could help with that, no wonder Rachel wanted to keep them. (Her
sister Leah was probably in on the theft too.)
Compared with Jehovah, the little household gods weren’t much, but they
were personal, friendly and domestic: as imbued with imagined personality as a child’s
teddybear – and as interested in the fortunes of their possessors.
Picture credits:
Fairy Song, Arthur Rackham
Puck and Fairy, Arthur Rackham
Elves and Shoemaker, prob. by George Cruickshank
Fairies Attacking a Bat, John Anster Fitzgerald
The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, Sir Joseph Noel Paton
Fairy Banquet, John Anster Fitzgerald
Death of a Fairy, John Anster Gitzgerald
Teraphim from Ur, probably similar to those Rachel hid: http://www.womeninthebible.net/Menstruating_woman_her_world.htm
