The Heart's Far-Carrying Call
In the season of mists, when the earth was white with hoarfrost and the trees gleamed bare and black, a solitary knight wandered the Kentish hills. He was a young man, but his gait was shambling and slow. One he had been comely, now his bones stretched the pale skin of his face, and his eyes were sunk in shadows. The knight had been brought to this pass by an encounter during the summer of that year. The land was blooming then: The meadows were carpeted with primrose and heartease, and the air was laden with the scent of lavender. One bright morning, he set out for London to join the King's armies. He rode briskly at first, but the country lanes were warm and quiet, save for the blackbird's song and the echoing notes of the cuckoo, and soon the knight's horse slowed to a walk. The young man rode on unheeding, drowsily dreaming his young man's dream. After some time, his reverie was broken by a fluttering movement near an oak beside the lane. He spoke, but no one replied. Made foolhardy by curiosity, he dismounted and strode to the tree.
"Come out," he said.
A thrill of laughter was the only reply.
"Come out," called the knight again.
A woman stepped lightly into the lane and stood before him. She seemed clothed with the dawn, for her draperies were the color of rose petals, and she was crowned with a cascade of fiery hair. She met the knight's stare with green cat eyes as shy as any forest creature's, and in that instant, the knight was lost. Every thought of king and country faded into that gaze.
Without speaking a word, he held out his arms to the fairy. She came quite willingly, it seemed, and the knight lifted her to the saddle of his horse. In a language he could not understand, she whispered to the animal, which turned obediently from the path and, with the knight pacing alongside, threaded its way through the trees and into the sunny meadows that lay beyond.
They traveled thus for hours, now in field and now in shady forest. From time to time, the lady spoke softly. The knight plucked wild flowers for her, and with nimble fingers, she fashioned them into garlands for her blazing hair. When the sun stood high in the heavens, she began to sing, weaving a net of melodies around the man who walked beside her. She leaned from the saddle and peered into his eyes with a look of such absorbing tenderness that he could not speak for longing.
At last, when the afternoon was well advanced, the lady spoke a word in her strange tounge, and the horse halted in a small elder copse. The knight lifted her from the saddle and looked again into her face. He saw inexpressible sadness. Tears glistened in the green eyes and glittered on the lashes. The knight kissed the fairy then, but she drew herself from his arms and once more began to sing. Light as morning mist, the voice coiled around him, and the young man's eyes grew heavy. He swayed and sank to the ground. He saw for a moment the rosy draperies of the lady and the bright tendrils of her hair, swinging as she bent to watch him, above her head, the canopy of leaves wheeled. He closed his eyes.
As he slept, he dreamed of darkness. He saw a line of men, knights like himself, but haggard and gray in death. Their dry lips were split over gaping block mouths, and shadows filled their empty eye sockets. The lips moved, and the knight realized that the ghostly figures were calling his name. Their bony fingers waved, summoned him. He awakened bathed in icy sweat, staring up through the leaves at the stars. He was alone. He sighed and closed his eyes and slept again.
Dawn came, and the knight's second waking, and with it a premonition of dreadful grief. The fairy was gone, having taken his heart from his breast. He knew that she had left him as surely as if he had seen her die. He knew that from then on, every hour would be achingly empty. His fate had come upon him - a life full of yearning that never would be satisfied, of calling and hearing no reply.
Sick with desire, he rose and searched. He hunted through the copse but found no sign of the fairy. He paced the meadows, following every path and byway, and still he found no sign.
So that first day passed and the next and the next. The flowers faded in the fields, the harvests were gathered in and the birds ceased their singing. Still the knight wandered, a gaunt figure silhouette against the winter sky, a man bereft of hope but not of longing. At last he could walk no farther. He lay down on the bracken. The final earthly sounds he heard were the moan of the wind and the hoarse cries of quarreling rooks. In that hour, he died.
The countrymen who found the wasted body said little, but their faces were set and grim. When they were safe in their homes again, they whispered of fairy enchantments and of the ranks of mortals who were victims of fairy love. They spoke with fear, as mortals often did when they talked of the powers of Faerie.
Yet, in those distant days, the current of love between the mortal and the fairy realms ran deep and strong. Impelled by longing, mortals and fairies both strove to breach the boundaries that separated them, and sometimes they suceeded. But not even passion and affection were sufficient to keep open the invisible walls between the worlds. Ever desiring, human and fairy were ever divided. The stories of their loves were almost always pervaded by sorrow and filled with the pain of loss.
Mortal customs did not help, for they were weighted against strangers and strangeness. Among mortals in those dangerous times, the only certain trust was in kinship. The names of their fathers or mothers identified men and women and showed their place in the hierarchy of a family. In Celtic countries, carefully recorded blood ties spread in ever-widening circles. The Welsh, for instance, understood relationships to the ninth degree - that is to say, to the position of third cousin once removed or of great-great-great-great-great-great-great-greatparent - and the Irish to the seventeenth. An outsider who injured one member of a family clan was answerable to all of its members to specified degrees, and all of them could exact appropriate vengeance.
The importance of blood kinship was such that marriage among mortals posed a special problem - that of safely admitting into a family a bride or groom who did not share its blood. In earliest times, the stranger was surrounded by all sorts of conditions that indicated his alien status. Wives might go through life forbidden to call their husbands by name, for instance, since the mention of it gave power to the speaker. Women used such epithets as 'My Master' instead. And in those places where husbands joined their wives' families, the grooms were hedged about with rules of behavior that set them apart. They might be forbidden to speak to their wives' relatives, or be required to live in the household in special, separate quarters.In later, safer times, of course, more comfortable arrangements prevailed, but throughout Europe, wedding customs continued to reflect the sense that a stranger entering a family carried about him something of a threat. In Ireland and Wales, weddings were celebrated with mock battles during which the groom's party - in the role of enemy, for the moment - attacked the party of the bride and spirited her away; the role of best man was originally that of groom's strong right arm in the abduction. (Among the Irish, the ride to the wedding feast that followed such a battle was referred to as 'dragging home the bride.') Or, in an echo of half-forgotten barriers, mock trials were set for the groom who desired a bride: In Brittany, relatives disguised themselves as the wished-for maiden; the prospective groom's task was to identify her properly. In Wales and Russia the trial was often the answering of riddles.
Given the distrust of outsiders, mortals' fear of fairy lovers was unsurprising. A fairy, after all, belonged to a separate race entirey, one whose nature was variable and even perverse. Entrancing in their beauty, fairies extended a powerful claim on the human heart - yet the love of some of them brough only death, as it did for the Kentish knight and the knights whom that fairy had ensnared before him.
Not all such death-bringers were as complex as the Kentish temptress, who wept at the fate her nature made inevitable. Among the Irish, for instance, there was a fairy called the leanan-side - or 'fairy mistress' - who drifted through villages and towns at night, battening on amorous young men. When they entered her embrace, however, life and breath drained from them, while the fairy grew bright and strong.
European countryfolk knew that forests, streams and pools sheltered appealing but destructive fairies such as the vile and the nixies. In Russia, infinitely desirable and infinetley dangerous fairies called rusalky inhabited rivers and lakes. They sat upon the shores, combing their hair in the moonlight and smiling secret and seductive smiles. No man, it was said, was proof against one. Even ascetic monks were found drowned in the waters where rusalky trailed their pretty fingers.
But fairies of both sexes might deal in fatal love. The water nixies of Germany, for example, had male counterparts. And from the British Isles came tales of elfin seducers whose power over women was very strong indeed.
The Irish, for instance, spoke of the Ganconer, a debonair elf who migh appear to maidens so unwise as to venture alone into the wild. The pipe that he smokes was his hallmark and a warning to women, but even those who knew of this were seduced by his gleaming black eyes and his caressing voice, speaking the sweet words that gave the elf his name - which meant 'Love Talker.' A woman who yielded to the Ganconer's whispers and kissed him was lost.
"Who meets the Love Talker," ran the Irish saying, "must weave her shroud soon." And it was true. After his interludes with mortal women, the elf would disappear, satisfied for a time. The mortals always pined and died.
Another such fairy - the subject of many a Scottish song - was an elfin knight known as the demon lover. He was once betrothed to a mortal but left her for seven years (why he did so is not known). Before he left, she promised fidelity. She married a mortal in his absence, however.
When the demon lover reappeared, he reproached the woman bitterly - and then seduced her. She deserted her husband and her infant children to follow the elf to a ship he had waiting for her, a fine galleon with sails of taffeta and masts of beaten gold. She could see no crew, but the fairy's thrall held her, and she followed him aboard. At once the wind rose, and the galleon skimmed across the sea. When it was three leagues from shore, the demon lover struck the topmast once and the foremast once. The beautiful ship cracked and sank, carrying the faithless woman to a grave on the ocean floor.
The demon lover's vengefulness, while harsh, was at least understandable in human terms. Throughout northern Europe, however, lived elfin knights who existed only to destroy. Maidens who crossed into their enchanted territories found themselves as helpless as the mortal vitim of the demon lover. Sometimes the knights only seduced the maidens - but the loss of a woman's honor was a serious fate in those days. More often, the elves murdered the mortals.
Still, if songs and tales from Germany, Scandinavia and Scotland are to be credited, the power of those elfin knights could be combated. One woman who refused to succumb was Isabel the Fair, who lived at her father's court in the north of Scotland long ago.
But the dwell on Isabel and her kind - or on the perils mortals faced in seeking fairy love - is to distort the story, for it ignores the mortals and fairies who sought each other not simply with amorous intent, but with steadfast and faithful love. They found - before they met the fate that goverened their loving - the perfect comfort of companioned hearts.
Thus it was with mortal men who fell in love with swans - birds so splendid that they were admired from the dawn of history and in every country of the world. The race of swans was held in such awe that in lands as far apart as Russia and Ireland, it was said that to kill one of them would bring death to the killer. For swans were beings of Faerie sojourning in the mortal world, as some mortals learned to their joy and sorrow. The tale about The huntsman and the swan can relate to this.
It was often so with the wilder elves. A tale was told in Shropshire of a knight who paid through many a long year for his capture of a fairy bride. His name was Edric.
Some fairies were less attached to their own world than Edric's bride. They loved mortals of their own free will and could be wooed and won. Nonetheless, conditions were imposed upon these marriages - conditions that served, like the symbolic rituals in marriages between unrelated mortals, to emphasize the alien character of man and wife. A mortal man who married a fairy woman, for example, might be forbidden to touch her with iron - always an anathema to fairies, for reasons no one knew - or, as with Edric's wife, to speak of her fairy origin, or to strike her, even lightly. And these conditions were no mere sybols. They were charged with power. The fairy's continued stay in the mortal world depended on the rigorous observation of them.
A lord of the castle of Argouges in France, for instance, loved a fairy who loved him in return and agreed to marry him, provided only that he never mention the word 'death' in her presence. This seemed an easy task, and the union was a happy one that lasted for many years and produced handsome children. One day, however, the fairy - who seems to have been somewhat frivolous - lingered long over her dressing. When, at length, she appeared in the great hall of the castle, her irritated husband snapped out a common proverb.
"Madam," he said, "You would be a fine messenger to summon Death, for you take a long time to finish your business."
At the word, his pretty wife wailed and disappeared. Her husband found no trace of her ever again, save for the print of her hand on the castle gate.
It was ever thus. The price of love that spanned two worlds - small as the price might be - seemed greater than mortals could pay. Even so, the joys of that love, however brief, were remembered for centuries, as a Welsh tale tells.
Near the Black Mountains of that country was a small lake called Llyn y Fan Fach. A farmer of the region used to graze his cattle close to its shores. Early one morning, he saw a strange sight indeed. A gleam of gold shone through the mist on the water's surface. As the sun rose and the mist burned away, the gleam became a real image. Sitting lightly on the surface of the water was a beautiful young woman. Head bent so that she could use the water as a looking glass, she was combing her golden hair. The farmer made a movement, and the maiden looked up at once. When she saw the tall young man on the bank, she gave a smile of piercing sweetness.
The farmer was enchanted. He knew her for a gwragedd annwfn, a lake fairy who, unlike the dangerous water spirits of other countries, was full of affection for mortals. Heart pounding and hands trembling - for her beauty was unearthly - the farmer stretched out his hands and entreated her to cross the water to him. He offered her the only gift he had to give - a loaf of bread, the staff of mortal life. She shook her head.
"Your bread is too hard," said the fairy.
But she smiled once more upon him before she sank into the lake, leaving only a golden nimbus on the water to mark the place where she had disappeared.
The farmer returned the following day and found the fairy drifting gently just above the ripples of the lake. He bore a loaf of unbaked bread dough, but this she would not take, saying it was too soft, and she sank once more beneath the surface.
The third day, the farmer brought the proper offering for a fairy: a lightly baked loaf that, being neither raw nor fully cooked, partook of the mystery of borderlines and of all things that escaped definition. The surface of the lake was empty when he arrived, but when he held out his gift, there rose from the depths of the water a tall old man with a flowing beard. He was flanked by two golden maidens. The old man regarded the farmer impassively and said;
"You may have the maiden you desire, if you can tell me which of my daughter is she."
This was like the riddle trials sometimes held before mortal weddings, but infinitely harder, for the young women who stood before the farmer were as alike as two pears.
He studied them, searching for a clue. He looked at their hair and their faces and their flowing gowns and found them exactly the same. His glance dropped to the surface of the water, where the hems of their skirts rippled. From the skirts of one maiden peeped two small shoes. The farmer recognized them and made his choice. There was a pause.
"You have chosen well," the old man said at last. "That is the maiden you love, and you may take her to wife. But treat her kindly. If you strike her as many as three causeless blows, I will have her back with me."
The farmer gave his word that he would cherish his wife, and the old man sank into the water, taking with him the gwragedd annwfn's sister.
Light as a dragonfly, the gwragedd annwfn skipped across the water and onto the shore. She ran straight into the farmer's arms, smiling her sweet smile. So the two were married, and they were happy indeed. As the years passed, the fairy bore her husband three fine sons, who in later life became physicians of otherwordly and intuitive skill.
But the gwragedd annwfn had curious ways, and these disturbed her husband, happy as he was with her. She fell sometimes into trances and sometimes conversed with beings he could not see. And she did other things as well.
The couple went to the christening of a neighbor's child, and the gwragedd annwfn wept throughout. To a fairy, a christening was a sad occasion: The conferral of a mortal name severed a human's inborn ties with the other world. But the farmer did not understand this, and in his shame at her behavior, he rebuked her with the lightest of taps on the arm.
"That is the first blow," was all the gwragedd annwfn said.
They went together to a wedding, and while those about her were joyful, the fairy wept. They went to a funeral, where she laughed. She understood that sadness and joy could go hand in hand on any occasion, and she lacked the fear of censure that governed much of mortal behavior. But her husband understood only that his wife had shamed him. After the wedding, he railed at her for weeping, and then he struck her.
"That is the second blow," the fairy said. "Take heed how you treat me if you would keep me." And she wept with sadness as she looked for the last time on her husband who had betrayed her.
The farmer understood then what he had done and what he must pay. Tears coursed down his cheeks as he watched the fairy leave his house and cross the meadows to the lake where he had found her. He saw his wife no more and lived alone the rest of his life, but it was said that while her sons were young, the gwragedd annwfn visited them and that she disappeared for the last time only after they were grown.
As it was with the lake fairy's husband, so it was with all mortal men - and women, too. The rules that governed elfin marriage always were broken by mortal spouses, through stupidity or curiosity or mistrust or carelessness. It was as if the condition of mortality demanded that sorrow follow joy. And as the history of the fairy Melusine showed, the sorrow engendered by a fairy marriage - unlike its joy - could last from generation to generation.
So, once more, an alien pairing failed to hold. Once more, a marriage between fairy and human ended in tragedy. It would not be the last time. As long as fairies showed themselves in human form, their love was avidly sought. And no wonder: Mortals, bound by rules and beset by mundane woes, saw the hope of immortal happiness in those bright beings, shining with gallantry and grace, and swathed in mystery. The rewards seemed worth the risk. Even at the end of their time, when fairies no longer sought to human company, glimpses of them added enchantment to the mortals' measured earth, spinning its stately way through the eternal heavens.
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