The Erlking

         It’s time again for a fantasy poem, and today I’ve picked one that I think of as wintry, with its cold winds, dry leaves, and rising mists.  This is an English translation (by Edgar Alfred Bowring) of the very famous German poem written in 1782 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Germany, 1749-1832).  Goethe’s version was inspired by a traditional Danish ballad.  I’ve changed the punctuation and formatting slightly because there are three characters with speaking roles and it can be a little hard to tell who’s talking when.  I’ve put the father and son simply in quotation marks, while the Erlking is also in italics.

Who rides there so late through the night dark and drear?
The father it is, with his infant so dear;
He holdeth the boy tightly clasp'd in his arm,
He holdeth him safely, he keepeth him warm.

“My son, wherefore seek'st thou thy face thus to hide?”

“Look, father, the Erl-King is close by our side!
Dost see not the Erl-King, with crown and with train?”
“My son, 'tis the mist rising over the plain.”

"Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me!
For many a game, I will play there with thee;
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold."

“My father, my father, and dost thou not hear
The words that the Erl-King now breathes in mine ear?”
“Be calm, dearest child, 'tis thy fancy deceives;
'Tis the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.”

"Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there?
My daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care;
My daughters by night their glad festival keep,
They'll dance thee, and rock thee, and sing thee to sleep."

“My father, my father, and dost thou not see,
How the Erl-King his daughters has brought here for me?”
“My darling, my darling, I see it aright,
'Tis the aged grey willows deceiving thy sight.”

"I love thee, I'm charm'd by thy beauty, dear boy!
And if thou'rt unwilling, then force I'll employ."
“My father, my father, he seizes me fast,
For sorely, the Erl-King has hurt me at last.”

The father now gallops, with terror half wild,
He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child;
He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread,

The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.

        There are a couple of interesting elements in this poem.  For one thing, it wouldn’t have to be read as fantasy at all, since we’ve got an unreliable narrator.  Some people argue that the son is delirious with illness, the father’s interpretations of natural phenomena are the truth, and there is no supernatural element at work.  I, of course, prefer to read the son’s version as correct, while the father just can’t see it.  And if that’s the case, the next interesting question is who or what the Erlking is.  Many English translations use “Elfking,” and the original Danish ballad also features elves (specifically the Elven king’s daughter, rather than the king himself.)  But the German “Erl” should really be translated “alder tree.”  Some scholars theorize that the German was simply a mistranslation from the Danish, which is certainly always possible.  But it also doesn’t seem implausible to me that the Alder King would be a powerful magical figure in folklore, and if so the name could have been chosen deliberately for the German translation.  Alders are often associated with the faeries, as well as with secrecy and all manner of charms, both protective and dangerous.

        Because of the fame and popularity of Goethe’s poem (including an English translation by Sir Walter Scott), not to mention the darkly dramatic combination of mystery and pathos, there are lots of illustrations.  The ambiguity in the ballad gives artists plenty of creative leeway.  Does the Erlking look like a skeleton representing death, or more like a tree, or just a mysterious mist?  Is he hard and solid, or semi-transparent and ethereal, or perhaps there is no Erlking visible at all?  Do you emphasize the creepy nighttime landscape, or the characters and their expressions?  This isn’t a story I have any desire to illustrate, but I do appreciate the different ways these artists have approached the challenge.  How would you do it?

        Finally, if you wish to hear Goethe’s poem set to music by Franz Schubert and animated by Ben Zelkowicz, check out this short.

[Pictures: The Erl-King, etching and aquatint by Letterio Calapai, 1950 (Image from The Old Print Shop);

Fear, etching by Odilon Redon, 1866 (Image from The Met);

The Erlking, lithograph by Harry Brodsky, before 1982 (Image from Smithsonian);

Erlkönig, woodcut by Hans Knipert, first half 20th century (Image from Dallas Museum of Art);

The King of the Woods, painting by Juli von Klever, c. 1887 (Image from Heritage Images);

Król Olch, painting by Jan Kazimierz Olpinski, before 1936 (Image from Connaisseur Kraków).]

F is for Faerie

         (My A-Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Mythical and Imaginary Places.)

        The Realm of Faerie is the place inhabited by fairies, of course, but that can mean different things to different people in different times and places.  There is the modern fantasy aimed at children which sees Fairyland as a sort of magical paradise, where everything is sweet and pretty — but let’s set that aside and look deeper.  Many cultures have a concept of a world inhabited by supernatural beings, but the archetypal version of Faerie is that of Celtic mythology, where it is a realm both everywhere and nowhere, both beautiful and perilous.

        Although Faerie is sometimes thought of as existing over there somewhere, where its borders could possibly be drawn on a map, more often it is seen as superimposed on our own geography.  It could be encountered anywhere, although there are usually specific liminal places where the realms come close and the borders are more permeable.  Caves, the wilderness, and the ocean are all possible places for encounters with Faerie, as well as mysterious places such as prehistoric mounds and megaliths, and mushroom rings.  Sleep, too, is often a time when a person can move between the mortal world and Faerie.  Faerie is often imagined as being underground, although once you get there it certainly doesn’t seem dark or enclosed like it’s inside a cave.

        In addition to that amorphous geography, time is also different in Faerie, so that a day spent there can be a year in the mortal world, and a person can spend a few years in Faerie, only to return to their own home and discover that a hundred years have passed and all their friends and family are dead and gone.  Moreover, a visit to Faerie can be perilous not only because of the dangers of time travel, but also because of the dangers of the fairies themselves.  These beings were traditionally viewed not as the cute and sparkly little things of much children’s media today, but as powerful, soulless beings who might be benevolent, but were more often amoral, and could be downright malicious.  However, their realm was usually seen as beautiful, eternally fertile and summery, and dazzling to the ordinary human.  Occasionally all this beauty was attributed to glamours which turn out to be cruel illusion, but often there is a tension between the allure of the perfect Faerie paradise, and the love of home and family with all their flaws.  My current work in progress, inspired by the legend of Tam Lin, explores many of these themes.

        Like Eden, most of the earlier visual illustrations of Faerie are merely the setting in which famous characters are placed, such as Titania and Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  As such, they don’t always show any particular sense of magic in the place.  Today’s first illustration is an illustration of Titania, but includes weird and wonderful arches of bats and imps to mark this scene as somewhere clearly magical and not normal.  The second piece illustrates the idea of fairies as diminutive, so that the Realm of Faerie is hidden from view because it’s small and therefore easily overlooked.  Fairies retain their connection with wilderness, however, in being found primarily in nature, even though in the modern imagination that nature may be a cultivated garden.

        The third piece is an unusual one by Turner, who’s usually a terribly serious landscape artist.  To be honest, I’m not usually much of a Turner fan because I dislike the smudgy lack of detail he cultivated as his trademark.  However, I think it actually works in this piece, which depicts “Queen Mab’s Cave,” Mab being another famous fairy.  Turner’s style evokes the disorienting brilliance, hazy mystery, and almost hallucinogenic light of Faerie.  It’s impossible to get a grasp on these fairies, or pin down this strange, ethereal place.  I still don’t really like it, but it makes sense to feel uncomfortable with the otherness of Faerie.

        That association of mist and disorientation with Faerie is also present in the next piece, in which we see only a human man looking lost and puzzled.  The title of the piece tells us that he’s just seen a fairy (specifically a Norwegian huldra).  So this illustrates the quality of Faerie that it is here and not here, glimpsed and then lost again, leaving the one who sees it forever changed.

        Because northern European ideas of Faerie associate it so closely with nature and wilderness, I thought it was interesting to include this Persian miniature that illustrates a fairy’s palace garden, meticulously groomed and maintained with artificial pavilions and water features amid the architecture.  On the other hand, I’ve also included a painting that isn’t supposed to depict Faerie at all; it’s simply a landscape picture of a stone arch on Mackinac Island, Michigan.  This place was called Fairy Arch, and I think it counts as a good illustration of Faerie because of the way the painter has composed his view so that the arch becomes a natural, mysterious portal to a bright world glimpsed beyond.  (Alas, the arch was destroyed in the mid-2oth century, so you can no longer get to Faerie that way.)

        And my final illustration for you today is a map of Fairyland imagined as the place where all magical, mythical, and imaginary stories take place: a sort of "Land of Make-Believe."  It includes locations associated with Greek myths, traditional fairy tales, Arthurian legend, and such modern (at the time) children’s stories as Peter Pan and The Water Babies.  This also brings us to the idea of Fairyland as a fit place for children, despite the sex and violence that were so much a part of the original myths of Faerie.

        I have a number of previous posts that might be of interest: if you’re curious about the etymology and the different connotations of different spelling variants (and are looking for a little more Words of the Month action), check out Fairy vs Faerie.  If you want some poetry about Faerie, look at my posts on La Belle Dame Sans Merci and The Stolen Child.

        The MORAL of Faerie: Eternal happiness can really be kind of sad when you’re alone. 

              OR:  If you believe in fairies, wave your handkerchief and clap your hands… and carry cold iron at all times.

        So, if you were invited to visit Faerie, would you go?

[Pictures: Titania Sleeping, painting by Richard Dadd, mid-19th century (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Under the Dock Leaves, drawing by Richard Doyle, 1878 (Image from The British Museum);

Queen Mab’s Cave, painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1846 (Image from Tate);

Huldra Forsvant (The Fairy that Disappeared), painting by Theodor Kittelsen, c.1900-1910 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

The Youth of Rum is Entertained in a Garden by a Fairy and her Maidens, illustration from Amir Khusrau, 1597-98 (Image from The Met);

Fairy Arch, Mackinac Island, painting by Henry Chapman Ford, 1874 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

An anciente mappe of Fairyland, by Bernard Sleigh, 1917 (Image from Leventhal Map & Education Center).]

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

        Written by John Keats in 1819, this is one of the most famous, most referenced fantasy poems to come out of the Romantic movement.  (There are two versions, by the way.  I give you  here the original.)  It is written in ballad form, and uses a question and response format to set the scene and then allow the knight to tell his tragic tale.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 

       Alone and palely loitering? 

The sedge has withered from the lake, 

       And no birds sing. 

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 

       So haggard and so woe-begone? 

The squirrel’s granary is full, 

       And the harvest’s done. 

I see a lily on thy brow, 

       With anguish moist and fever-dew, 

And on thy cheeks a fading rose 

       Fast withereth too. 

I met a lady in the meads, 

       Full beautiful—a faery’s child, 

Her hair was long, her foot was light, 

       And her eyes were wild. 

I made a garland for her head, 

       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; 

She looked at me as she did love, 

       And made sweet moan 

I set her on my pacing steed, 

       And nothing else saw all day long, 

For sidelong would she bend, and sing 

       A faery’s song. 

She found me roots of relish sweet, 

       And honey wild, and manna-dew, 

And sure in language strange she said— 

       ‘I love thee true’. 

She took me to her Elfin grot, 

       And there she wept and sighed full sore, 

And there I shut her wild wild eyes 

       With kisses four. 

And there she lullèd me asleep, 

       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— 

The latest dream I ever dreamt 

       On the cold hill side. 

I saw pale kings and princes too, 

       Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; 

They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci 

       Thee hath in thrall!’ 

I saw their starved lips in the gloam, 

       With horrid warning gapèd wide, 

And I awoke and found me here, 

       On the cold hill’s side. 

And this is why I sojourn here, 

       Alone and palely loitering, 

Though the sedge is withered from the lake, 

       And no birds sing.

        The plot is pretty straightforward: the noble knight is destroyed by the femme fatale.  (A little more background depth is added by the biographical note that at the time of writing this poem, Keats was himself madly in love.  It was requited by the lady, but he was by then dying of tuberculosis.)  Keats took the phrase “la belle dame sans merci” from a fifteenth century French poem in the courtly love genre, and for those who don’t know the French, it means “the beautiful woman without mercy.”

        As I mentioned, this poem gets quoted and alluded to a lot, and needless to say, artists have loved portraying it.  Mostly it seems to be an excuse to show a beautiful woman, with relatively little emphasis on the subsequent misery of the knight.  Feel free to do a search for all the paintings on the theme, too.

        From a feminist point of view, there’s plenty we could say about the trope of the belle dame sans merci: the demonization of any woman deemed too promiscuous, and the simultaneous demonization of any woman who refuses the advances of the man telling the story.  But I’m here to look at things from the fantasy point of view, and I find this poem interesting as a portrayal of fairy.  This fairy is not cute and sparkly and good.  Keats is describing a being that is very non-human: beautiful, seductive, addictive, strange, other…  One could debate whether she is actively cruel or merely utterly amoral, but certainly she does not care what becomes of all the humans with whom she has dallied.  She belongs to the tradition in which fairies are creatures without souls.  This is the version of fairies that I am working with in my current work in progress, by the way, and this poem is one that I’m quoting in chapter headings.

[Pictures: Illustration by R. Gardner from Lamia, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, & c by John Keats, 1900(?) (Image from MrMorodo);

A Woman Embracing a Man (for La Belle Dame Sans Merci), wood engraving by Michael Renton, 1986 (Image from Roe + Moore);

Illustration by Lancelot Speed from The Blue Poetry Book, 1891 (Image from Project Gutenberg);

Illustration by Robert Anning Bell from Poems by John Keats, 1897 (Image from Internet Archive).]

Cold Iron

        One of my current works-in-very-little-progress involves conflict between humans and the faery, so I’ve been looking at what one can do to repel the Fair Folk.  One of the most common and basic substances that faeries hate is iron, or “cold iron.”  In a fantasy set in the modern world, this leads to all kinds of difficulties.  Iron, usually in the form of steel, is everywhere in the modern world.  Houses are riddled with beams, nails, edges, appliances, tools, silverware, pots and pans…  How would a faery even be able to enter a human building without excruciating discomfort or debilitating loss of magic?  My story centers around a changeling, but how do you replace a human with a faery and expect it to pass in a world of steel?  So modern fantasy has to come up with some refinement on what exactly it is that makes a substance count as efficacious iron.

        I’ve seen some stories in which “iron” counts but “steel” doesn’t, but this really doesn’t hold up.  Steel is almost entirely iron and it makes no sense that mixing as little as 1% of carbon or other elements would render the iron harmless - especially as worked iron has had these “impurities” for the past 4,000 years.  So what about the idea that hand-worked wrought iron is obnoxious to the Fair Folk, but not factory mass-produced metals?  Or what about adopting the phrase “cold iron” as the relevant substance?  That, of course, calls for a definition of what makes a particular iron “cold.”

        One possible definition is that “cold iron” is simply a poetical epithet for any kind of iron, but that gets us nowhere.  An 1811 dictionary defined cold iron as “a sword, or any other [presumably iron or steel] weapon for cutting or stabbing.”  In other words, it’s edged metal that’s at issue.  This would be a useable distinction in a story, but doesn’t explain centuries of tradition, such as the use of horseshoes to repel evil spirits or the iron fence around a cemetery to contain ghosts.  Some modern authors have chosen to define cold iron as meteoric iron, which certainly has had wonderful properties attributed to it in cultures around the world, but again fails to account for the apparent efficacy of more ordinary old-fashioned iron objects.  There is such a thing as “cold forging,” in which the metal is worked at room temperature, but this is rare for iron or steel, which are usually heated above the recrystallization temperature to be worked.

        It seems logical to go to the root of the problem: What exactly is it about iron that pains supernatural creatures?  At root it seems to be that iron tools are of the human world, representing humans’ dominion over nature.  But if that’s the problem, surely the faery would hate plastic and other synthetics even more, thus making any interaction of faeries in the human world even more difficult.  And if the faery can never go anywhere near anything of human manufacture, I don’t have much of a story, do I?

          So, what’s a fantasy author to do with all this?  I still haven’t figured it out.  As of now I’ve given one character iron hardware on her front door and a wrought iron coat rack in the front hall, but of course I could change that if I changed the rules of my universe.  Another character wants to test for the presence of a faery, and was planning to do so with an iron object.  Having reached this point I need to be very clear about exactly what sort of iron would bother the faery, and what wouldn’t.  What do you think?

[Pictures: Illustration by Helen Stratton from Songs for Little People by Gale, 1896 (Image from British Library);

Di Spada e Pugnale, wood block print from Opera nova… de l’arte de l’Armi by Achille Marozzo, 1536 (Image from MDZ Digitale Bibliothek);

Two smiths making a horseshoe, wood block print by Jost Amman from Das Ständebuch, 1568 (Image from Wikimedia Commons).]

Come Away...

        I had been working on a book about a changeling - a somewhat darker story for somewhat older readers - and I'm planning to have a few lines of poetry about fairies at the head of each chapter.  These are not to be nice fairies, not cute fairies, not pretty fairies, but rather they are beings of a world that is beautiful, terrifying, seductive, and cruel.

        I say I had been working on it, because T kept asking me about it and what I'd written and when she could read it, and I knew that it would be a few years before she'd be old enough for this book.  That's when I realized that, rather than fight the battle of refusing to let her read it, it might just be better to work on my other current idea instead, since that will be appropriate for kids P and T's age.  So I've turned my focus away from the fairies for now… But in honor of them, here's an excerpt from a poem that I've always found deeply evocative.

        Written by William Butler Yeats in 1886, it presents fairies somewhat ambiguously.  As described by the verses they seem mischievous, but small - Little People.  As implied by the refrain they appear almost more in the role of angels calling the innocent child beyond the pain of this mortal realm.  But in the last verse Yeats gives us the poignant reminder that there is sorrow in the loss of the world, even when it is a world full of weeping, and that home, with all its tears, may be better than exile in a land without sorrow.

        I give you only the last two verses.  To read the whole thing you can look here.

     from The Stolen Child

Where the wandering water gushes

From the hills above Glen-
     Car,

In pools among the rushes

That scarce could bathe a
     star,

We seek for slumbering
     trout

And whispering in their
     ears

Give them unquiet
     dreams;

Leaning softly out

From ferns that drop their
     tears

Over the young streams.

Come away, O human
     child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,

The solemn-eyed -

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal chest

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand

From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

[Picture: woodcut by Stephen Bone, first half of the 2oth century.
(Sorry to have so little info on this piece.  I found it, along with a small amount of information on the artist, here.)]

Words of the Month - Fairy vs Faerie

        Picture a supernatural being of diminutive human form and possessing magical powers.  What do you call this magical personage?  A fairy?  Or perhaps you favor faerie?  What about fay or fey?

        Each of these words has a slightly different history, with different connotations in fantasy now.  We'll start with the basic fairy.

        fairy - This word entered modern English around 1250-1300 from Middle English faierie, (They sure didn't stint on vowels, did they?) which was borrowed from Old French, and which ultimately derived from Latin Fata, fate.  Its first usage, now obsolete, was "enchantment," as in "Don't believe your eyes; all that you see is fairy."  The next twist to the meaning, now archaic, was "the realm of magic and magical beings, fairyland."  And finally the word came to mean the little people themselves, which is how it's used now.

        How little are the Little People really?  That has varied widely from legend to legend and throughout history.  Sometimes the fairies are tiny, sometimes taller than humans, sometimes so insubstantial or illusory that their size is mere appearance without reality.  But generally speaking, I think fairies tend to be small, while faeries are more human-sized.

        faerie, faery - The primary definition of these variants is given as "fairyland," and the second usage is as an adjective describing the magical land or its denizens.  "A supernatural being" is a more minor definition.  We have Edmund Spenser to thank for this spelling being in use at all.  While spelling variations certainly occurred throughout the early history of the word, it was Spenser who deliberately chose these spellings in the late 1500's for The Faerie Queene, his masterpiece of shameless flattery for Queen Elizabeth I.  The faeries in Spenser's poem have little to do with the fairies of folklore, and his use of the alternate spelling has left a legacy of different connotations for the different spellings.  I think of fairies as being diminutive sprites, wilder, more mischievous, probably cuter…  While faeries are more noble and courtly, but possibly also more powerful and dangerous.  However, I also tend to see this spelling as rather pretentious and faux Ye Olde - which, perhaps ironically, may have been exactly how Spenser intended it when he chose it back in 1580.

        fay - Again, this word was originally an adjective and is only recently shifting to include a noun definition.  It appeared in English around 1350 - 1400 from Middle French feie or fee, but ultimately from the same Latin root for fate, as in a spirit in control of the future, and hence any sort of magical spirit.  I think of a fay fairy or fairyland as being particularly wild and unpredictable.

        fey - Defined as "whimsical, strange, supernatural, enchanted," I assumed this word was just another one of the spelling variations in the family.  Surprise!  It's a much older word, and from a completely different root.  Fey was in English before 900, deriving from Old English faege, meaning "doomed to die."  The ultimate derivation of the word is unclear, but its development seems to have moved from weakness and timidity through visions and premonitions, to suffering from enchantment, to a sort of etherial insanity.  When used for the people of Faerie, however, I think fey retains its connotations of strangeness, otherness, and danger.

        Which spellings do you prefer?  What different connotations do the different variants evoke for you?

[Pictures: "Mama slipped a berry under each fairy," colored pencil by AEGN, illustration from Kate and Sam to the Rescue, 2008;

The Fairies' Home, lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1868, from the Library of Congress Digital Collection.]