Abstract
As beings neither angelic nor demonic, fairies constitute the ambiguous supernatural in romance. From their first literary appearances in the Old French Lais to their representations in the early printed romances of the late sixteenth century, fairies are portrayed as ontologically unique figures who possess the ability to do things that are unexpected, unprecedented, and otherwise impossible. They come from the Otherworld (distinct from the worlds of ordinary humanity and orthodox theology), and on account of these supernatural origins they are free not only from the physical laws of normal time and space, but also from the standard laws of logic, and from the moral strictures of ordinary human interaction. It is these qualities, above all, that give fairies their unique narrative interest and their imaginative depth. Romance authors recognized this creative potential, and in a fully fictional form that allowed for, and even privileged, the presence of marvels and the supernatural, these authors used fairies to explore issues and achieve narrative effects that could not be accomplished in any other way. This book traces these functions, examining how fairies are represented and used across romance to fit different audience expectations and aesthetic purposes. A study of fairies in romance, however, cannot only be about the fairies themselves.
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Notes
Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1986)
Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)
Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Lubomír Dolezel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
See Claude Bremond, “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities,” New Literary History 11 (1980): 387–411; Ronen, Possible Worlds, esp. pp. 5–16; also.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 106–97.
See Nicholas Rescher, “The Ontology of the Possible,” in Logic and Ontology, ed. Milton Munitz (New York: New York University Press, 1973), pp. 213–28. Rescher notes the indispensability of language in the creation of these mental constructs.
David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978): 37–46.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964), p. 23 [3–81].
Gillian Beer, The Romance (London: Methuen, 1970), p. 8.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 33.
It is also, as Thomas of Erceldoune illustrates, a realm distinct from the three afterlife realms of medieval Christian theology. Thomas of Erceldoune, ed. J. A. H. Murray, EETS o.s. 61 (London: N. Trübner, 1875), pp. 6–7.
Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 173–74.
See Ryan, Possible Worlds, pp. 54–57; also, Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. pp. 57–69. The concept of minimal departure also points to both the problems and the possibilities of considering representations of fairies in their romance text-worlds in relation to conceptions of fairies in the actual world. Indeed, it seems there is some sort of continuity, as the folklorists insist, between fairies in romance and fairies in folkloric culture (if it is possible to take, for instance, the accounts of Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury, and Thomas Walsingham as evidence of fairy beliefs and/or ideas in their respective cultures at large). But even if we could reconstruct these beliefs or ideas, they could only tell us so much about how fairies operate in romance, since romances are under no compulsion to abide by the postulates of these beliefs.
See Umberto Eco, “Report on Session 3: Literature and Arts,” in Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences: Proceedings of Nobel Symposium 65, ed. Sture Allén (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), p. 352 [343–55].
For a general study of Anglo-Saxon elves, see Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007).
Sidney Herrtage, Catholicon Anglicum, EETS o.s. 75 (London: N. Trübner, 1881), p. 113
Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 424–25
Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and trans. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 154–61 and 344–45
Etienne de Rouen, “Epistola Arturi Regis ad Henricum Regum Anglorum,” in Latin Arthurian Literature, ed. and trans. Mildred Leake Day (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2005), pp. 248–49 [236–57].
Alaric Hall, however, argues for a greater degree of continuity between pre- and post-conquest beliefs in/conceptions of elves, though the evidence is too sparse to consider how, in pre-conquest England, they might have been engaged with imaginatively. See Hall, Elves, esp. pp. 75–95; also, Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Spenser, of course, treated his fairies very seriously, though it seems he can get away with this in large part because he allegorizes them. For a study of fairies in renaissance England, especially Spenser’s, see Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in the Faerie Queene: Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan Myth-Making (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004);
Minor White Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930).
Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Age: Morgane et Mélusine: La Naissance des Fées (Paris: Libraire Honoré Champion, 1984), pp. 372–73.
Lucy Allen Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance: Enlarged by a Survey of Scholarship on the Fairy Mythology Since 1903 and a Bibliography by Roger Sherman Loomis, 2nd ed (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960)
J. A. MacCulloch, Medieval Faith and Fable (London: George G. Harrap, 1932)
John Revell Reinhard, The Survival of Geis in Mediaeval Romance (Verlag: Max Niemeyer, 1933).
Lucy Allen Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance: Enlarged by a Survey of Scholarship on the Fairy Mythology Since 1903 and a Bibliography by Roger Sherman Loomis, 2nd ed (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960)
J. A. MacCulloch, Medieval Faith and Fable (London: George G. Harrap, 1932)
John Revell Reinhard, The Survival of Geis in Mediaeval Romance (Verlag: Max Niemeyer, 1933).
C. S. Lewis, “The Anthropological Approach,” in C. S. Lewis: Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 301–12.
C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964), esp. pp. 122–38.
See Corinne Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2010), p. 4.
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© 2011 James Wade
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Wade, J. (2011). Introduction: Internal Folklore. In: Fairies in Medieval Romance. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119154_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119154_1
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