Fairie and Mortal Time

In those days, despite the brave efforts of the human mind, the world was full of uncertainties. It was not just the unknown wilderness that frightened mortals - the uncharted seas that lapped the land, the looming mountains and the forests that encroached on field and village and castle. The natural world was dangerous enough, to be sure. But even greater uncertainties lay close at hand. Mortal time and mortal space were seamed with cracks that served as doorways to places where human rules were meaningless.

It is not surprising, then, that mortals set great store by definition. Because things could be easily understood in terms of what they were not, people thought about their world in terms of pairs of opposites. The seasons, for instance, were winter, when nature slept, and summer, when the earth bloomed, correspondingly, the hours separated easily into dark night and bright day.

But what of the times that were neither one thing nor the opposite, and thus free of the bonds of classification? What of dawn and dusk, which were neither night nor day? What of noon and midnight? What of the nights between two seasons - October 31^st, or Samain Eve (later called Allhallows Eve), and April 30^th, Beltane Eve (later called May Day Eve)? On those nights, the years most mysterious and wonder-filled, all mortal rules were suspended, and chaos reigned. They were the times when passage between the mortal world and other worlds was most free.

It was the same with space: Mortals liked to define it. They made countries and shires and townships and castle walls and farm fences, all in the interest of delineating the space they inhabited. The matter of boundaries was so important that throughout Europe, in a springtime ceremony called Beating the Bounds, all the known limits of local space were redefined, sometimes by whipping the borders of property with hazel twigs and sometimes by using the twigs on young boys as they were sent around the limits of a territory, thus passing on the knowledge of generations. But what of the dividing lines themselves: the streams that marked a territory, the shores of the sea, the verges of lakes, the fords of rivers, the crossroads, fences, walls and thresholds? These, being neither one place nor another, served as portals to the world of Faerie.

So people were alert and careful at borderline times and places, knowing that strange encounters were possible. The spirits of the dead roamed free, for one thing. An Irishman who ventured out on the Eves of Samain or Beltane never looked behind him when he heard the sound of footsteps, those were the footsteps of dead men, as he well knew. In Wales it was said that a ghost sat on every stile. (Stiles - sets of steps that allow people to climb over boundary fences where there is no gate - were inbetween, or borderline, places.) Witches flew on the borderline nights. And the future was revealed. Those who waited on English church porches might hear a voice recite the names of all who would die in the coming year. On the nights before the seasons changed, the fairies traveled abroad, the power at its peak. The trooping fairies rode in festive processions known as fairy rades. Often their purpose was benevolent. Scotland's Seelie Court rode forth to bless the mortals' crops, it was said.

An age would come when human feared what fairies might do on these borderline nights. But before the races drew apart, people stole into the fields on festival eves in hopes of seeing fairies dance on the greensward and hearing their seductive music, or of watching a door open in a hillside to reveal the gleaming lights of the kingdom within, or of witnessing a splendid procession. In those easy days, too, people did not hesitate, as they later would, to venture on journeys that took them into unknown territories and across borders they might not even recognize. Teigue's ocean voyage was a journey of that kind, and so was the venture of a Welsh lord named Pwyll, who went on a hunt that changed his life.