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

Lost to the Faeries

 

Many a wonderful YA fantasy of the last decade tells 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 attempt the rescue of the young man, who would be her boyfriend or lover if only he were free.  Examples are Holly Black’s fantastic ‘Tithe’ and its sequels, and Gillian Philip’s equally fantastic ‘Firebrand’. 

This is a theme found in the 16th century ballads ‘Tam Lin’ and ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ – especially the former: Janet saves her lover Tam Lin from the worst possible fate by her bravery and single-mindedness. She goes to Miles Cross at midnight and waits for the Seelie Court to come 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 for her true love, while the furious fairy queen can only threaten and rage.

And the story, in which a woman rescues a man, is popular today partly because we grew tired of the stereotype of ‘man rescues woman’. We want strong women, and in this legend we get double helpings: 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 1958.  (And yes, Medea is a witch queen rather than a faery queen: but same difference.) 

This doesn't mean the male characters are weak. Tam Lin of 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 got used to the idea that Faeryland is ruled by a dangerous queen. And the tithe to hell, the sacrifice of the young man, meshes with the figure of the dying Corn King or Year King made familiar by Sir James Fraser’s ‘The Golden Bough’, and Jessie Weston’s ‘From Ritual to Romance’. Though modern anthropologists have their doubts that such kings were ever sacrificed in reality, the idea is there in the back of a lot of fantasy writers’ minds, I'm sure. It's too dramatic to waste.

All this is something of a preamble: I want to point out that fairyland hasn’t always been this way. In fact I’m not at all sure that the all-powerful Faery Queen even 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, Fairyland was ruled by kings. 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 on into later centuries. 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 pigmy-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.

These early fairy kings rule over lands which are usually underground, and there is a pervading sense of loss that hangs about them.  When Herla visits the pigmy king’s halls, he loses his own time: like Oisin returning from the Land of Youth, he 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.  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 quite 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, 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. In deep grief and hoping against hope he may somehow find her again, he says:

“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?”

Here's a poem I love. It’s by Rudyard Kipling, from ‘Rewards and Fairies’; it’s written in a Sussex dialect, and it speaks poignantly and tenderly of loss and longing.


BROOKLAND ROAD

I was very well pleased with what I knowed,
I reckoned myself no fool –
Till I met with a maid on the Brookland Road
That turned me back to school.

Low down – low down!
Where the liddle green lanterns shine –
Oh! maids, I’ve done with ’ee all but one,
And she can never be mine!

‘Twas right in the middest of a hot June night,
With thunder duntin’ round,
And I seed her face by the fairy light
That beats from off the ground.

She only smiled and she never spoke,
She smiled and went away;
But when she’d gone my heart was broke,
And my wits was clean astray.

Oh! Stop your ringing and let me be –
Let be, O Brookland bells!
You’ll ring Old Goodman out of the sea,
Before I wed one else!

Old Goodman’s farm is rank sea sand
And was this thousand year;
But it shall turn to rich ploughland
Before I change my dear!

Oh! Fairfield Church is water-bound
From Autumn to the Spring,
But it shall turn to high hill ground
Before my bells do ring!

Oh! leave me walk on the Brookland Road
In the thunder and warm rain –
Oh! leave me look where my love goed,
And p’raps I’ll see her again!

Low down – low down!
Where the liddle green lanterns shine –
Oh! maids, I’ve done with ’ee all but one,
And she can never be mine!

Picture credits: 

Riders of the Sidhe, 1911, John Duncan

Maria Callas as Medea, 1958, Dallas, Texas
Orpheus and Euridice by Christian Kratzastein-Stub, 1783 - 1816
Orpheus leading Euridice from the Underworld by Camille Corot

Faerie-led

What makes a writer choose one subject over another, one genre over another?  What draws one writer to contemporary fiction, another to historical fiction, fantasy, or thrillers?  While I know and admire a number of authors who can handle a variety of forms (Gillian Philip and Nicola Morgan, for example, who seem equally and brilliantly at home with both gritty thrillers and historical or fantasy novels) – there are others like myself who stick to a single last.  From the age of about ten, writing fantasy has been my first and only love.

This doesn’t mean to say that I haven’t had qualms.  I’ve asked myself, in the past, what relevance fantasy has or can have to the problems of life.  Can it really be serious?  Shouldn’t I – shouldn’t I? – be writing something more meaningful?

But I have come to the conclusion that what is done with a whole heart, with love, and with as much artistic truth as I can personally muster, must be good enough.  More than that is out of my control.  I don’t have a choice.  There is in writing, as in all art  – Susan Price has eloquently written about it for Katherine Robert's Muse Mondays, here – something that feels remarkably like outside inspiration: a fierce compulsion that grasps you by the hair and demands and absolutely requires: this is what you will write about: this and this alone. If you don’t obey it you feel restless, haunted. You cannot ignore it.  You cannot decide to write about something else.  (Or if you try, what you turn out will be stale, flat and unprofitable.)

The problem is that the divine or daemonic impulse will only take you so far.  It sets you going and then leaves you to stumble on alone as best you can.  If you’re lucky, you’ll get occasional vivid flashes to light your path, but for the rest, you’ll need patience, persistence, technique and plenty of common sense.  This applies no matter what type of fiction you happen to have fallen in love with. 

But it’s good to be aware of the particular pitfalls of your chosen genre.  I wouldn’t like to speak for others, but in the early mid stages of my career as a fantasy writer I was anxious for a while about the possibility of getting carried away by colourful but superficial effects, and forgetting or neglecting emotional truth. What it boils down to is, that whatever their circumstances, the characters should have space to live and breathe.  Ulysses isn’t just a man island-hopping from one astounding adventure to another: he’s a war-weary veteran desperate to get home.  Malory’s Lancelot isn’t merely the best knight in the world and a hero sans reproche, he’s a breathing, fallible man torn between his honour and his sense of sin: his love for Arthur and his love for Guinevere.  He knows he’s unworthy of the Holy Grail – so when he’s finally allowed to perform a miracle of healing, he reacts with uncontrollable tears, weeping ‘like a child that has been beaten’. 

Here’s a short ballad I wrote to warn myself about the dangers of following the queen of faerie rather too far into the dry lands. 



As I walked out one summer day,
under the summer sky,
I saw about me the hills of summer
quaking with heat, and I

wondering saw a fair lady ride
down a slope in my mind:
it seemed she was the queen of fays
with the fairy host behind;

but they passed over the dry grass
through the quivering air
like vague thoughts passing
that are hardly there:

and where was the green velvet
and the rich jangling bells,
and the colour, and the dazzle
that the ballad tells

bewildered young Thomas the Rhymer
under the Eildon tree? –
thinking she was the queen of heaven
he bent his knee:

but it’s no, no, she says, no,
I am not what you think.
I cannot give you water and wine,
only dust to drink:


and you shall gain nothing from me
of knowledge of men;
but you shall blow down the hillside
ghostly in the sun.





Picture credit: Thomas Rhymer by Joseph Noel Paton

Fairytale Reflections (15) Gillian Philip

Welcome back to Fairytale Reflections!  And welcome to my first guest of the year, the Scottish YA author Gillian Philip.

Since Gillian lives in the far north of Scotland (with her husband, nine year old twins, two dogs, two psycho cats and eight nervous fish), she and I haven't actually met, yet - but since I always feel happier the further north I go (and I’ve got my eye on a trip to the Outer Isles one of these days) I feel sure it’s only a matter of time. And I don’t have to tell you all that one of the wonders of the internet is the way it’s possible to make long distance friends – especially friends whose books are as striking and compelling as Gillian’s. She writes across genres: ‘anything that comes into my head, including fantasy, crime, science fiction and horror’. ‘Bad Faith’ is a Scottish-set dystopia about a society ruled by a tight-minded religious elite, and ‘Crossing the Line’ is a hard-edged thriller with a hint of the supernatural. And as Gabriella Poole she has written the 'Darke Academy' series for Hothouse.

Gillian’s latest book, ‘Firebrand’, is a full-blooded plunge into fantasy and has to be one of the best books I read last year. Set in the 16th century at a time of witch hunts and burnings, it follows the fortunes of Seth MacGregor, bastard prince of the Scottish faeries, the Sithe, and an attractive hero in every sense of the word. Here’s a moment when he rides a sinister and beautiful waterhorse from the loch:

Smooth skin under my palm. The opalescent shine of its hide as I drew my hand across its neck and the hairs flattened, then sprang back... The cry of a night bird…


And then insanity.


Nothing else on earth could have moved so fast… When the creature reached the crest of the hill, I saw the whole moor and the hills spread out beneath me, the jagged broken curve of the earth at the horizon. I couldn’t get off the horse. I didn’t want to. Plunging, swerving, it swivelled its head to enjoy my awe and my terror. Its jaws opened in a knowing grin, and the canines flashed again. And then, impossibly, it sprang down the precipitous slope. Straight for the dark water and its lair.

The book is rooted in the history and folklore of Scotland, and is quite unflinching about the cruelty and hardship of the times. The Sithe are ruled by a queen, Kate NicNiven, who is volatile, cruel and devious in the best traditions of fairy queens, and who deliberately stretches the loyalty of her subjects, Seth and his brother Conan included, almost to breaking point. There’s a protecting Veil between the land of the Sithe and the mortal world, and Kate wants to tear it away. And she invokes the help of some hauntingly unpleasant creatures called the Lammyr…

‘Firebrand’ opens with the most dramatic of cliff-hangers, and I’m not sure I breathed till I got to the end, where there was a twist I never saw coming, but which was perfectly satisfying. I want more, so it’s a good thing there are three sequels on the way.

Even for an author, Gillian can boast a pretty wild variety of jobs. She says, ‘I’ve been writing all my life, but have also worked as a record store assistant, theatre usherette, barmaid, sales rep, political assistant, radio presenter, typesetter, and as a singer in an Irish bar in Barbados. I’ve always loved the stories of the Scottish landscape, which shimmers with myth and legend; the old tales seem to go on existing just below the surface, in the cities as well as the wild places.’

I asked her to pick a Scottish tale to tell us about, and she has chosen -

TAM LIN

As a child I don’t think I was aware of the story of TAM LIN, one of many mortal men stolen away by the Queen of the Faeries. I’m not even sure when I first read or heard such tales; stories of the faery people were simply a kind of background music that I gradually noticed and that came to fascinate me. Tam Lin is just one variation on a theme that sometimes has a happy ending, more often less so: a mortal – more often than not a man – is foolish or brave or naive enough to go away with the faeries.

There’s a recurring notion that once involved with the People of Peace, you’re going to need all your wits, courage and – usually – the help of a friend to get away. More often than not, even all of those aren’t enough, and that makes many of the stories melancholy.

Tam Lin is a little different, and that’s why I’m fond of it. The traditional ballad begins with a warning not to go to the woods of Carterhaugh, because young Tam Lin is there – a man who was taken by the Queen of the Faeries, who now protects their sacred woods, and who will demand a penalty of anyone who trespasses. Earlier versions are pretty clear about what that penalty will be... and when young Janet, whose father nominally owns the wood, dares to go there to pick roses, she comes back not just wildly in love, but pregnant.

Luckily the love is mutual, and Tam explains to Janet that the Queen of Elfland saved and took him when he fell from his horse in these woods. He is her prized mortal lover, but every seven years the Queen must pay a tithe of souls to Hell, and he fears that this Halloween, he will be the tithe. Janet can save him, and free him from the Queen’s thrall, but it will take huge courage. She must wait in the trees till she sees the faery folk ride in procession through the woods. She must let the first two horses pass, but when the third – a milk-white steed – appears, she must pull him down from it. 

The faeries, he warns her, will be enraged, and now will come the hard part. She has to hold onto him whatever happens, though they’ll morph him into many hideous forms to try to make her let go. Sure enough, when she does as he tells her and pulls him from his horse, he is turned into a snake, a newt, a bear, a lion, red-hot iron, then burning lead. Through all the transformations, Janet holds on  for dear life, and at the touch of the burning lead, forewarned by Tam, she tips her burden into the water of the nearby well. Tam climbs out, returned to his human form and free of servitude to the Queen. Though the Queens rails about the ‘theft’ of her dearest mortal, she sullenly admits defeat, and the young couple live, as they should, happily ever after.

The story has many parallels and similarities in other traditions and tales – Thomas Rhymer, Cupid & Psyche, Childe Rowland, and even Beauty and the Beast: with the last, for instance, there’s the forbidden forest and the rose motif; the threatening inhuman figure with whom the heroine falls in love; his former identity as a noble young lord; and the fact that the heroine must go through dangers and horrors to rescue him. (There’s a theory that Beauty & the Beast is a later bowdlerisation of the Tam Lin story, leaving out the sex. I’ve always rather liked the Disney version more than their other ‘fairytales’, not least for its gutsy heroine, but it’s difficult to imagine it including ravishing among the roses followed by pregnancy...)

The reversal of ‘traditional’ fairytale roles is one of the most appealing aspects of Tam Lin. Tam is effectively helpless before the Faery Queen, though there’s nothing emasculated about him. It’s Janet who must free him, and she’s willing to undergo torments to do so. The fact that it all ends happily is unusual for a tale of the Faery Court. 

Belief in faeries is still strong in areas of Scotland, which isn’t wholly surprising. There are still places wild enough for the barriers between reality and ‘something else’ to seem remarkably, tangibly thin (not least the haunting Isle of Colonsay, whose former laird MacPhie seems to have had an unusual number of run-ins with the people of the Otherworld). Superstitions still exist quite strongly (my mother-in-law’s gardener swore no good would come of her telling him to cut down a rowan tree, and blamed the foul deed immediately when the house subsequently burned down). At a relative’s baptism I remember being quite sure that an aged aunt’s refusal to drink from a green cup was down to an unwillingness to offend the faeries. As it turned out the prejudice was an extreme sectarian one, but I can’t believe the two aren’t linked, somehow and somewhere in the past.

As for the disappearance of unfortunate mortals, there are surprisingly recent tales. Tomnahurich is a hill in the middle of Inverness that’s long been associated with the Otherworld. A local story tells of two buskers, dressed in kilts and carrying pipes (all perfectly normal) who seemed so disoriented and terrified among the traffic that they spent a night in the police cells. When they were brought before the sheriff next day – luckily a Gaelic speaker, since they could speak nothing else – they explained that their panic was down to the world seeming to have changed a great deal since last night, when they were offered good money to play at a gathering of lords and ladies beneath Tomnahurich hill. 

At a loss, the sheriff returned them for the time being to the cells, where a minister was summoned to the disturbed young men. As soon as he began to pray, and God’s name was mentioned, the young men, their instruments, and their payment all crumbled to dust.

It’s a fanciful story, and appears in many forms over the centuries, but in wilder landscapes it’s not hard to imagine another barely-seen world, repressed (perhaps temporarily...) by modernity and religion. Maybe that’s why the stories and their attached superstitions are resilient enough to survive into the contemporary world. 

Or possibly it’s because the fairy stories are so entangled with religion and superstition and the beliefs of even more ancient times. The Fairy Hill of Aberfoyle in Perthshire is believed to house the spirits of the local dead, in a way that echoes the far older beliefs of those who buried their dead in chambered cairns. Catherine Czerkawska’s play The Secret Commonwealth is the tale of Aberfoyle minister Robert Kirk, who wrote a book of the same title, and whose knowledge was thought to come straight from the faeries themselves. He’s another one who meddled with them at his own peril: angry at his betrayal of their secrets, the faeries were said to have faked his death while abducting him to the Otherworld. He came to his cousin in a dream, telling him of his captivity and promising to appear at his own funeral – at which moment the cousin must throw a knife over his head to free him. Kirk duly appeared – but alas, the cousin was too gobsmacked to perform the required act, and the minister was never seen again.

It’s a chilling and wonderful story, but in Czerkawska’s play it’s used also as a metaphor for the loss of the ancient beliefs, the gradual withdrawal of an older tradition before the Christian ascendancy. What’s so fascinating about the fairy traditions is the way they were not discarded, but woven into the new beliefs: loathed by the Church, becoming associated with the devil and necromancy – but never wholly dying out. 

Yet that mingling isn’t all bad. One of the loveliest cross-traditions, and my favourite, is the one – varying from region to region – that says the faeries are the rebel angels. Thrown out of Paradise by an angry God, the angels that fell into the sea became seals and seal people. The ones that were caught in the sky as they fell became the Merry Dancers, the Northern Lights. And the ones that fell on land? They became the Faeries.

POSTSCRIPT:

Gillian's wonderful post jogged my memory.  About twenty years ago I wrote a poem based on Tam Lin. Like Gillian, I loved the ballad, but couldn't help wondering what happened next. Would the Faery Queen really leave the lovers alone?  Or would she look for some sort of revenge?  I dug out the poem and showed it to Gillian, who agreed that this was just the sort of thing the Queen would do. (I know Kate Nic Niven would!) Here's the poem:

Janet Speaks:

‘Oh Tam Lin –

If I had known of this night’s deed

I would have torn out your two grey eyes

And put back in two eyes of tree.’

So said the faery queen that night on the road

when I quenched my love in the peat pool,

but that was not the end of it.

For winter nights, the Sithe shriek round the house,

calling down the chimney like a black wind

plucking the slates away: ‘Come back, Tam Lin!

You who gave a girl a rose from the briar bush!

The heart’s fire dwindles.  Do you remember Elf-hame?

And my love, my love throws back the blanket,

and I grip his arm as I gripped the red-hot iron

in unflinching hands.

‘Tam Lin, can you bear to grow old?

Do you remember the land of young apples?

What have you lost?  What have you gained, Tam Lin,

but aches and agues, toothlessness and death?’

howl the voices down the chimney.

They always bring a night of storm, and all

my paternosters cannot turn them away.

‘Come wind, come rain,

beat on this house until the lintels weep,

beat on this house until the candles quiver

and cold draughts whip under the door and blow

over the floor, cross currents of unease.

Let him feel mortal!’

I could bear all this.

Only, my youngest boy came in today,

with a rose in his hand. ‘Who gave you that?’ said I.

‘O mother,’ said he, ‘a lady in the brakes

of Carterhaugh.  Her kirtle green as grass,

with silver chains that tinkled as she walked.’

‘Your son shall come with me, Janet,

In yon green hill to dwell.

Your son shall be my knight, Janet,

And he shall serve me well.

‘His eyes shall be of wood, Janet,

Cut from an alder tree,

And you may keep Tam Lin, Janet,

For he’s too old for me.’

It’s a cruel price.

I would rather have died in giving birth to him.

I would rather my love rose and went out to them.

Oh Queen of Fays –

If I had known of this day’s deed,

I would have let your knight, Tam Lin,

ride down to Hell on his milk-white steed. 

Picture credits: from 'Tam Lin' by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Charles Mikolaycak