Of Fairy Raids and Mortal Missteps
Before the time of towns and highways, in the days when the stone strongholds of Irish cheiftains towered beside the fairy hills of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mortal woman was stolen from her kinsfolk and taken to live in the underground palace of an elfin King. This is what happened:
The woman, whose name was Ethna, was the flower of Ireland. She was lily fair, with hair of red-gold, and she was the bride of a young lord of Connacht. His delight in her was such that he celebrated the marriage with weeks of merrymaking. By day, hunting parties coursed the woods and meadows beyond his castle walls; by night, the torches blazed high, the goblets brimmed with bright wine and harpers played leaping melodies for the dances of the court. In the center of the dancers whirled Ethna the bride, surrounded by the clouds of silk that made her wedding dress. Each evening she danced thus, until one midnight her hand slipped suddenly from her partner's and she crumpled to the flagstones. The harps fell silent and the courtiers drew back to let the young lord kneel beside his bride. He spoke her name, but never a word did Ethna reply. Her rosy blush had died, her breath was as shallow as a kitten's and her eyes were closed. She was borne to her chamber, and all through the night her husband watched at her bedside.
When the morning sun slanted across her counterpane, Ethna opened heavy-lidded eyes and spoke, but her husband understood little of what she said, and that little did not still his unease. In a faraway, toneless voice, Ethna told him that while she slept she had dreamed of the palace of a mighty King. The sun never shone in that place, she said, but the halls gleamed with their own radiance, and the music that drifted through them vanquished every mortal care. All that Ethna now desired was to sleep and to dream of that world once more.
And sleep she did, all through the day, pale and still as a figure carved on a tomb. No one could wake her. When the shadows lengthened into night, her childhood nurse was sent to watch over her so that her husband could rest. The old woman nodded and dozed and woke shivering in the small hours. The chamber was cool and still. A moment later, the woman's wail echoed down the palace corridors. Ethna's bed lay white and empty in the moonlight. Only the dimpled sheets showed where she had rested.
The remainder of that long night was spent in anxious and angry conference, and at the first gleam of dawn, the young bridegroom rode out with a company of his retainers, setting a fast pace for the hill called Knockma. The grassy swell of that hill concealed the underground palaces of Finvarra, King of the Tuatha in Connacht and long a friend and adviser of the young lord; if anyone could find the missing bride, it surely would be he.
The green surface of the mound at Knockma gave no hint of the underground splendor in which the King dwelled. But as the riders emerged from the woodland fringing the rise, a busy twittering filled the air, as if a flock of finches had settled in the trees. The riders paused and listened, and at last a single voice grew intelligible. The lord began to understand the words, and his features became grim. Finvarra had betrayed his trust: The twitter was the sound of fairy voices in the air, and its subject was the King's great joy in his new mistress, the Lily of Ireland, whom Finvarra had seduced from her kinsfolk and taken in thrall.
The lord barked orders, and messengers wheeled their horses and galloped off, eager to do his bidding. Before long a column of peasants, carrying scythes and spades on their shoulders, emerged from the woods and fell to the task their lord had set: to dig down to the Fairy King's hidden realm and rescue the captive mortal bride. All through that day, while the husband watched from his saddle, the peasants worked, and by nightfall, a great dark cleft gaped on one flank of the grassy rise. The laborers rested, well satisfied.
In the morning, however, the work camp awakened to discover a discouraging sight: The pit they had dug had vanished, and the knoll's mantle of turf spread unbroken over the site of yesterday's toil. Invisible and silent, Finvarra had exercised his powers. For three days the peasants labored in vain as, night after night, Finvarra confounded their efforts. The workers grumbled among themselves, and the young lord grieved.
Then disembodied voices fluted above the mound once more, and the husband heard them.
"If salt is spread on the broken earth, the mortal's work will be safe," said a whisper on the wind.
Salt was known for its power over fairies. The lord dispatched riders to every corner of Connacht to buy salt at any price - for salt was a rare commodity in those days. And after another day's digging, and a night's waiting, the salt proved its worth: The excavations of the day before were untouched. The white layer of salt crystals that covered the broken earth was undisturbed.
Now the laborers worked willingly, and by afternoon a deep glen gashed the fairy hill. Those who dug could hear movement and voices behind the wall of earth, and the voices were no longer musical and gay but shrill and fearful. If the light of day shone upon fairy halls, the voices said, those halls would crumble. At last a single voice rang out through the earthen barrier, clear and commanding:
"Stop your work at once, mortal men. Lay down your spades, and at sunset the bride will be given back to her husband."
The Fairy King had spoken. The men left their work, and at sunset the lord waited alone at the head of the glen, his face turned toward his own woodlands. He heard a gentle footfall, turned and beheld his Ethna, solemn and lovely, clad in the same gossamer in which she had been taken prisoner. But the girdle around her waist, intricately embroidered and elaborately knotted, was new.
The lord had little joy in his triumph, for Ethna's spirit remained distant. As the weeks merged into months and winter silvered the land, Ethna sat listless and waxen in her chamber or drifted wraithlike through the echoing corridors. She did not speak, nor did she seem to hear the words of those she had once known and loved. The courtiers whispered among themselves, saying with sadness that the bride had eaten fairy food and thus had lost her soul. The young lord brooded over his puppet wife, and he kept apart from the others.
A full year after Ethna's return, the lord was out riding alone when he heard the fairy voices one last time. Again, a faint fluting in the air swelled and resolved itself into a conversation. One voice said that Ethna's spirit dwelled still with the fairies. A second voice replied that what bound her was the embroidered girdle. If the husband took the girdle from Ethna's waist and burned it, and if he removed the pin that adorned the girdle and buried it, the mortal bride would rejoin her kind.
The lord lost no time in returning to Ethna's chamber. He knelt at her side and plucked at her girdle with nervous fingers. It was knotted with fairy cunning, but at last it came free in his hands, and he withdrew the jeweled pin. As Ethna watched dully, he burned the cloth on the hearth. Next, he gathered the ashes and scattered them outside the castle walls. Then he dealt with the pin.
Even as he tamped the last spadeful of earth into the place over the fairy pin, the lord heard running feet and laughter within the castle walls and knew that the spell had lifted. He returned to the hall to see Ethna, flushed and bright-eyed and chattering of the dream she had had. The sojourn with the fairies seemed to her no more than a single night. Her husband smiled and did not reply. Instead, he called for music and food and wine. The wedding revels began anew, and it was as if that year of sorrow had never been.
As the memory of those events was passed down through generation of storytellers, details disappeared: With time, the name of the young lord and even the year of Ethna's abduction were lost. But centuries later, wherever the tale was told - before smoky peat fires in poor peasant huts or in front of opulent blazes in baronial halls - it still drew nods of recognition from its listeners. For the people of that era were well acquainted with the threat and allure of fairyland from their own lives and adventures, and from events near at hand.
In those days, the lives of toiling peasant and leisured noble alike were governed by custom and ritual, but the world was more fluidly defined than it later would be. The year was shaped by the round of the seasons and by the daily cycle of devotion and the annual cycle of festivals established by the Church.
It was in the formal definitions of time that the ambiguity of the age showed the most. A year, for instance, did not necessarily have 365 days. In some countries, Easter began a year. Easter is a movable feast - falling each year on a different Sunday between March 22nd and April 25th, the date determined by the full of the moon and the day of the vernal equinox - and in those countries, a year could contain eleven, twelve or thirteen months. During that same era, other countries began their years on March 1st, following Roman custom; on March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation; or on December 25th.
The hours of the day were similarly flexible. Formally, each day was divided into twelve hours of day and twelve of night, which were quartered into three-hour periods. The first hour of the day - called Prime - was dawn, the next marked time was the third hour, Tierce; Sixte was the sixth hour; the ninth, Nones; and at last, Vespers (from the Latin word for evening), which was also the first hour of night. The divisions of time were determined by the Church and announced to everyone by its bells, for no one had clocks to tell the hours.
But the length of an hour changed from day to day. Only at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes are day and night equal in length. At the winter solstice, for instance, daylight might last only six hours, but it still was divided into twelve hours, each thirty minutes long. Even the definitions of the hours changed. Monks were allowed to break their fast at Nones, the ninth hour, which in summer fell at about three o'clock in the afternoon. Driven by hunger, the monastics pushed the ninth hour back to midday, which is why midday came to be called noon.
To the shiftness of definition was added the uncertainty of life, for the seemly pageant of the ecclesiastical year was played out against a background of chaos, of rude forces that struck at the orderly surface of existence. Hailstorms destroyed harvests and condemned while countries to winters of want, wars flared on the slimmest of pretexts and left the world in ruins, pestlences savaged the populations at unpredictable intervals.
Given the thinly veiled disorder of the world, it is not surprising that the ungovernable realm of Faerie remained powerful and intrusive and that people observed it with wariness. In its kingdoms and courtly pleasures, Faerie mirrored the mortal world, but it was a realm where time was even less defined. An hour there might last a year in human terms. Change, with its attendant phenomena of growth, fertility and death, was almost unknown: Faerie stood apart from the sorrow and struggle of mortal existence. Yet its inhabitants were endlessly fascinated with humans. Inevitably, the fairies penetrated the world of mortals, disrupting its fragile semblance of order.
Fairy tricks and charms could cast doubt on the most basic certainties. A wanderer who tarried on a Highland moor to listen for a few moments as a hidden songbird trilled a haunting melody might return to his home to find that centuries had passed. Or a farmer's wife, hefting a wheel of cheese to take to market, might find that during the night it had grown as light as a bundle of feathers, its health-giving substance - but not its outward form - charmed away by the fairies.
There were other breakdowns of the natural order in those days, at once more shocking and more intriguing: Unexplained disappearences, fits and seizures that left the victim's body intact but abstracted the spirit, babies who changed overnight from pictures of apple-cheeked health and innocence to scrawny imps, as wrinkled as old men, their eyes glittering with a fevered and knowing light. In all of these assaults on the fabric of life, people detected the influence of fairies.
Mortals were not entirely helpless in the face of this uncanny peril. Against kidnapping, a common form of fairy mischief, prudent behavior gave a measure of protection. It was inadvisable, for instance, to step within a circle formed by bent stalks of grass. These were fairy rings, marking the boundaries of the other world. It was also unwise to nap on any grassy knoll, for if by chance the hill covered a fairy dwelling, the fairies might swarm out and carry the sleeper to their underground domain.
Ordinary properties were also a hedge against fairy abduction, somehow, those mortals who placed themselves at odds with their own society by quarreling or plotting evil deeds were more likely to be snatched into the fairy realm. And, of course, at borderline days and hours - times not even nominally defined for mortals - it was well to be wary.
The consequences of even the most casual brush with fairies could be ruinous, as is shown in the Welsh tale of Taffy ap Sion. Taffy, a shoemaker's son, was a dreamy lad, and when work in his father's shop slackened, he often wandered out among the barren hills and boulder-littered meadows beyond his village, desiring nothing more than to be alone with the clouds and the cries of the rooks. His father warned him to stay clear of fairy rings. But Taffy's glance was rarely fixed on the ground, and one blustery afternoon as he wandered, he was startled when the day seemed to brighten suddenly. The next instant, he was deafened by a skirl of high-pitched pipes.
About the Welshman wirled a crowd of men in coats of bottle green and woman in gowns of scarlet and white. They were small and comely creatures, and in the searing brightness that enfolded them, they shone like jewels. Banqueting tables stood in their midst, laden with fruit, roast meat and goblets that brimmed and shimmered with ruby wine. All around these tables the flood of merrymakers surged and eddied.
Beyond the circle of brilliance, the mountains and meadows seemed distant and ghostly, as if a heavy mist had descended. Taffy did not care; he had no wish to escape from so carefree and lovely place. Instead, he clasped his hands with two of the revelers and was swept up in the dancing throng.
After five minutes, or perhaps ten, Taffy stumbled and plunged headlong from the fairy ring. He sat on the grass for a moment, his head whirling, marveling that he could neither see nor hear the fairy merrymakers. Then he jumped to his feet. The landscape was transformed. The skyline of crags and ridges was familiar, but where Taffy remembered tussocky grass and hump-backed boulders, the uplands were quilted with verdant fields, edged with stone walls and threaded with lanes. It was some trick of the fairies, Taffy was certain, but he was uneasy as he set off for home, clambering over the unfamiliar and moss-grown walls.
He rounded the hill that shadowed his father's cottage. The house stood where he remembered it - that much was a comfort - but from a hut with a thatched roof and a dusty yard it had grown into a sturdy, slate-roofed farmhouse, shaded by two tall pines. A dog he did not know loped from the doorstep to sniff and bark, and the man who came out to quiet the animal was not Taffy's father, or any neighbor of his kinsfolk.
The farmer, studying the wild-eyed and strangely dressed lad, at first thought the boy was deranged. When Taffy told his story, however, the farmer guessed the truth. He decided to consult an aged woman of the village who knew the lore of the days when the region was sparsely settled - long before the farmer's family had arrived. But as the man led Taffy down the hillside toward the town, the boy's footsteps grew faint, and the man heard a deep sigh. The farmer turned at the sound, and as he watched, Taffy's features blanched and froze, his figure became as tenuous as a ghost's, and then he vanished. A fine shower of black ash filtered to the ground.
It was as the farmer suspected. Minutes had passed within the fairy ring that Taffy danced so happily in, but centuries had rolled by in the mortal world. When Taffy rejoined his fellows and the weight of those years settled at last on his shoulders, he had simply crumbled away. As the old village woman explained to the shaken farmer later, more than 300 years had passed since a shoemaker's son named Taffy ap Sion vanished on the barren mountainside.
The fairies who danced away the centuries with Taffy had made no effort to ensnare him, and they did no try to stop him when he stumbled from their midst. Malice played no part in his downfall, but the realm of the fairies was by nature hostile to the world of mortals, with its inexorable march of hours and days and years. Even the fairies' best intentions could not shelter a human from the cruel consequences of elvish time.
Yet, like everything to do with Faerie, the passage of time there was capricious. Mortals who entered the fairies' world did not necessarily stay for centuries. Peasants talked of captives who were released or rescued from fairy thrall after a year and a day of mortal time, or after seven years - periods that marked likely reopenings of the curtain dividing Fearie from the mortal world. But few who sojourned among the fairies returned unchanged. So complete a break with the order of nature was bound to leave its mark, most often in the form of a consuming desire to return to the alien realm.
A Welsh farm hand named Rhys fell victim to the yearning shortly after he was rescued from a fairy ring. This is how Rhys came to dance with the fairies: One evening, he and his friend Llevellyn were trudging home from a distant field they had been plowing. Rhys turned to Llewellyn and said that he heard the tinkle of harps. The melody was so faint, he told his friend, that it might have been no more than the memory of a song - although he could not say where he had heard it before. It drew him, however, and he left the track for a meadow nearby, telling Llewellyn to go on without him.
Rhys did not return to his village that night or for long afterward, and searches found no trace of him. A murmur rose in the village that Llewellyn had murdered him and hidden the body. Llewellyn sturdily protested that he was innocent, and finally a villager asked the man to lead him to the spot where Rhys had heard the strange music.
Searching for landmarks in the meadow, Llewellyn discovered among the blackberry bushes a flattened patch of grass. Gingerly he placed one foot on the spot, and at once he found himself on the fringe of a brilliant whirl of fairies, dancing in a cocoon of light. In the center of the ring was Rhys, loose-jointed as a scare-crow, twitching and flailing to the frenzied beat. Keeping one foot planted firmly outside the circle, Llwellyn snagged Rhys's coattails and hauled him from the revels. His village companion was astonished: All he had seen was Llewellyn's curious stance, Rhys seemed to have been pulled out of the air.
Rhys, who believed that he had danced no longer than five minutes, and who heartily resented the interruption, could not resume his old life. He quarreled with friends. He did not work in the fields but wandered alone on the wind-swept uplands, thirsting for the wild music and hearing only the moan of the wind. Weeks passed this way. Rhys grew gaunt and listless, and one day his solitary figure was no longer seen ranging the hills. At last, a hunter found him dead.
The yearning that afflicted mortals who had tasted the pleasures of Faerie had a counterpart among the fairies, especially in the later centuries of their existence, when the race was dying. They were entranced by mortal vitality and fecundity. In their desire to bring human quickness into their world, they resorted to kidnapping. Their favorite targets were children: sturdy lads, fresh young girls and - most coveted of all - babies.
There is no greater assertion of life than a human infant, and villagers were well aware of the fairy threat to their children. An unbaptized child - having no name to define him and tie him to his world - was at greatest risk, and during the perilous days before christening, a mother might hang from the cradle an opened pair of scissors, meant to play on fairy fears of iron and of the Cross, which the joined blades resembled. The father's trousers, laid inside out across the cradle, could also forestall a fairy raid, So could potent herbs, such as rowan and garlic, tied in little bunches to the sides of the cradle.
No protection against the fairies was guaranteed to work, however. And the worst of it was that a kidnapping might go unnoticed for a while, for the fairies left behind not an empty cradle but a changeling - one of their own number, enchanted briefly into the likeness of the stolen infant. By the time the parents discovered that there was somthing amiss, the fairies were safe in their own land, chittering over their prize.
No fairy changeling could feign the vitality of a child for long. Deception was hampered all the more by the fact that the substitute was usually an aged memeber of the fairy tribe, happy to be pampered by a mortal mother but unable to permanently conceal his scrawny and mottled hideousness. And the common people had an arsenal of tests for a suspected changeling. Many were cruel ordeals. The infant might be placed on a shovel and held over a fire, or it might be left on a dunghill all day, exposed to the weather.
If the child was indeed a fairy in disguise, the outcome was happy: The instant that torture was threatened, the elf would shed its mortal likeness, cackle and vanish, while from the cradle would come the cry of the mother's true baby, whom the fairies always returned when their deed was revealed. But if the child was no changeling - and babies who failed to thrive or were transformed overnight by illness often fell under suspicion - the effect of a trial by fire or exposure could be tragic. Fortunately, there were gentler ways to unmask a changeling, and they were effective, as an Irish tale shows.
A certain woman was awakened one morning by an unfamiliar clamor: Her baby boy, until that day robust and placid, was hoarse with sobbing. She hurried to his craddle, then drew back in shock. His cheeks, full the day before, had withered and fallen, his skin was as papery as an old man's, and every bone started from his tiny ravaged form. She called her neighbors, and although some thought a fever had wasted her child druing the night, most agreed that this was an instance of fairy mischief.
The traditional village remedies were harsh. Sear the imp over the flames, they said, or cast it into a snowbank: The fairy changeling will disappear at once and before long your proper child will be given back to you. The woman could not bring herself to follow their advice. Squall as it might, the creature did look like a ghost of her own baby.
A wise neighbor had more measured counsel:
"There is a way to learn the truth without doing harm," she said.
The mother, eager for help, still could not keep her eyes from widening as the old woman described her remedy.
"You want to give him a little surprise," she advised. "Set a cauldron of water on the fire to boil; then get a dozen new-laid eggs, break them and throw away all but the shells. When the water begins to steam, toss in the eggshells and say that you are brewing ale from them, and then you will know whether the child in the cradle is your boy or a fairy. If it is fairy," she added casually, "you can slip a red-hot poker down its throat, and that fairy will trouble you no more."
Soon the mother was seated at her hearth, a pot of water at a merry boil on the turf fire and a basket of eggs by her side. For once, the cradle was silent. She picked up the eggs one by one and cracked them, pouring the liquid into a bucket and arranging the shells in a row on the hearth. She dropped the shells into the pot, then she heard the cracked voice of an old man behind her.
"What are you doing, Mammy?" it asked.
The mother turned to meet eyes that were glittering and alien. The wizened infant sat bolt upright in the cradle. Her doubts fast dissolving, the woman trust the poker into the fire.
"I'm brewing, my son," she answered.
"And what are you brewing, Mammy?"
"Eggshells, my boy," she said, with a glance at the poker.
"Oh," shrieked the imp, rising to its feet in the wildly swinging cradle, "I'm fifteen hundred years old, and I never saw a brewery of eggshells before."
The woman could not wait, the still-cool poker could bludgeon if it could not burn. She seized it and made for the fairy, but when she reached the cradle she saw that a soft, round form swelled the covers. Her own child was there safe and sound, without so much as a scratch.
Some authorities guessed that the fairies' delight in healthy infants arose not just from fascination with the vigor of humankind but also from a concrete need: To bolster the frail and ancient lineage with an infusion of human stock. Whatever the truth of the matter, it was certain that the fairies had specific uses for the strengths and talents of mortal adults. Midwives often were briefly summoned to assist in fairy births, and wet nurses were carried off to suckly fairy children - for if fairy mothers gave milk at all, it must have been thin and unwholesome stuff. The fairies also abducted humans for domestic servants, to cook and carry and clean.
Mortals who were rescued from fairy servitude rarely suffered the deadly longing that afflicted those who danced and feasted with the fairies as equals. It was as if only the willing participation in fairy delights bound a mortal to fairyland. Unwilling visitors to Faerie often discovered that the glittering visitors to Faerie often discovered that the glittering surface of some fairies' lives was no more than an illusion covering a reality that was dust and ashes. Mortals whose vision pierced the illusion - commonly known as fairy glamor - felt no desire to remain in the other world. Like purloined children, captive adults generally returned from fairy bondage with their spirits unscathed.
But their rescue was a daunting task, for the elfin kidnappers of an adult rarely left behind a changeling. At most, the fairies placed in the bed of the victim a so-called stock, a wooden likeness of the prisoner that was animated, for a few days, with a magical semblance of life. When the fairy glamour wore off and the stock grew still and rigid, relatives usually assumed that their loved one had died, never suspecting the fairy ruse.
Providing the kidnapping was detected, there always remained the hope of rescue. But, as was the case with an Irish farmer who lost his wife to the fairies, luck tended to play a role. The farmer was a sound sleeper, and he first learned of his wife's disappearence when he was roused in the morning by his baby as it wailed for milk from its cradle at the foot of the bed. The man reached over to wake his wife. He found her place empty and cold. At the door of the bedroom stod two older children, wide-eyed and fearful, for they had witnessed their mother's departure.
In the depths of the night, they had been awakened by light that spilled from the door of their parents' bedroom. The children had crept to the door and had seen their mother gliding toward them as if in a trance, treading in a pool of light amid a crowd of men who glowed like shards of stained glass. The brother and sister called to their mother, but she passed them without turning.
After hearing this account, the farmer left his weeping children and went around his village, questioning each of his neighbors. It was as he had expected: None had seen his Molly, and all supposed that she was with the fairies. During the days and weeks that followed, the heartsick farmer could only wait and hope.
One morning the village midwife came to him with news. The night before, she said, a dark gentleman had rapped at her door, agitated as any prospective father. At moments like that, she said, she asked no questions. She had simply gathered her things into a bundle and mounted behind the man on his glossy black horse.
As the horse lunged into a gallop, the midwife held on tight and closed her eyes. The journey was short, and when the midwife opened her eyes, she found herself in a sumptuous chamber, hung with tapestries and warm from the blaze leaping on the hearth. At the center of the chamber stood a vast, canopied bed, and almost lost beneath the covers lay a delicate lady, with features of chiseled beauty twisted by the pain of labor.
The midwife's skilled hands soon held a baby boy, purple and bawling, and the dark man came in with a pot of ointment for her to rum into the infant's skin. After she had finished her work, she brushed her right eye with a greasy finger. At once it seemed as if the sight of that eye had dimmed. The splendid chamber had dwindled to an oozy cave, the bed to a shelf of rock covered with straw, and the blazing logs to a mound of smoldering turf. Then she knew that she had attended the birth of a fairy child.
The midwife had heard before of fairy ointments that endowed a mortal eye with fairy sight. It startled her, nonetheless, to see the fairies so withered and sharpfaced. A baby as scrawny as a plucked chicken rested on its mother's flaccid breast. And the ointment revealed another surprise: In the shadows, where a great candelabra had stood, waited buxom Molly, gesturing anxiously.
The fairy father left the chamber for a moment, and the midwife hurried to Molly's side. Molly said that she had been captured to suckle the fairy infant and thought never to see home again. But now she sensed a chance of rescue, made possible by the midwife's accidental gaining of fairy sight.
"Wait with my husband at the edge of town next Friday, just before midnight," she told the midwife. "You will see the fairies pass in procession, with me among them. Guide my husband to me, and if he holds me tight no matter what, he will have me back again."
The fairy father announced that he would convey the midwife back to her village. His horse, formerly a beautiful animal, looked like a ragwort stalk to her, but she feared to betray her new-found fairy sight, so she mounted obediently. Through the blackness and tumult of the night, she was spirited to her doorstep. So ended the midwife's tale. She gave the farmer a penetrating look and said:
"Now you know what you must do.
Accordingly, that Friday night the husband and the midwife waited at the edge of the village. As midnight approached, the midwife tightened her grip on the farmer's arm. The pebbles on the lane began to stir and rattle under the tread of feet invisible to the farmer but not to his companion. The farmer heard garments nistle like the wind through dead leaves. Then the midwife shoved him. The farmer lurched forward and closed his arms around a soft, familiar form.
At once he was beset by phantoms. The moonlit landscape vanished behind curtains of flame, and the roar of a conflagration sounded in his ears. The leaping flames divided themselves into glowing arrows that soared high into the blackness and then plunged earthward. They lanced the ground at the farmer's feet, and from the wounded earth poured a glistening black mass of malignant creatures, impossible to identify in the gloom. They hopped and quivered toward the farmer's legs, and he shut his eyes and steeled himself for the poisonous touch. But it did not come. The form stirred within he embrace, and when he opened his eyes the terrors had vanished, and he saw beside him his Molly, blinking as if awaking from a long sleep.
Only the midwife met fairies again. In the market of her village, she was startled to see, through her right eye, the same wizened fairy who had summoned her to the birth of his son. He was stepping lightly through the ground, casually pilfering cheeses and sausages from the stalls. She shouted angrily at him, and he looked up in surprise. Then he walked over to her, and all the way around her, trying to determine which eye it was that saw him. At last he was sure, and he jabbed his finger, its nail as sharp as a rose thorn, into the midwife's right eye, blinding it.
Courage came naturally to Molly's husband, for he loved his wife. But he had a model for his steadfastness. Storytellers in villages like the farmer's told of an earlier time - the days of Ethna and of the Tuatha De Danann - when man of heroic stature walked the earth, and the fairies too, were wreathed in a glory that the world has not seen since. Their beauty was no false product of glamour, but innate, and they were as bold and passionate as any human knight. The fairy kings who abducted mortal women at that time took them not as servants and nurses but as wives or lovers, or to add to the splendor of their domains. Many other knight besides Ethna's husband had to wrest his lady from a fairy challenger. It was these brave and loving mortals, perhaps, that the farmer recalled as he waited that night by the moonlit lane. He may have known, as many people know, the tale of Orfeo.
In later times, those who heard of Orfeo and his journey to fairyland were stirred by his triumph as if it had been their own. For in his tale they saw mirrored their own fears of the fairy realm and its cruel intrusions into the world of mortals. Yet, if Fairyland was a threat for most of humankind, a few mortals, set apart from their fellows by godlike maiden, found in the fairy domain of refuge from death.
Among these fortunate few - a legend veiled company said to include King Arthur - was Thomas the Rhymer, a poet and dreamer of Scotland.
Fairies - Content | Myths and Legends