fuzzyKatharine Gripp
Professor Foster
English 289 – Ind. Study
20 December 2011
A Discour of Faeries in Elizabethan England:
Celtic Sources and Literary Reprentations
Typically, stories, books, and tales that are re-read and re-told through multiple generations are named as “classics.” In a n, then, fairy tales and legends are the most “classic” of any story you might find in the “great literature” ction of Barnes and Noble, becau they have remained popular for hundreds or even thousands of years, reworked and reworded for audiences of every imaginable age, class, and gender. In the modern English-speaking world, there is a tendency to relegate fairy tales and legends to stories for children or “escapist” entertainment. Most of us overlook the way that the well-known stories, characters, and themes continue to shape our understanding of and interaction with
the world, especially in an age where science and logic are more highly prized; but ask people whether they know more about Cinderella or economics and a different picture begins to emerge.herion
One of the difficulties involved with associating legends and fairy tales with a fringe audience of non-rious readers – children, “nerds,” etc. – is that this practice instills and perpetuates the notion that such stories can contribute no edifying experience to a reader, listener, or viewer. Fairy tales get shunted off to the realm of kitsch entertainment – or, at best, simplistic moralizing. But one must ask, if this is the truth: why do we still know and relate to fairy tales? Why are they one of the first things we teach our children? And why are they reworked into versions for adults at all?
In Elizabethan England, stories of fairies – or “faeries” or “feyries” – were much more prevalent in the adult culture. What many people would call “superstitious” beliefs today were then taken for granted as practical faith in forces and beings that operated in the world on a level different than humans’. Though many faery legends, especially in the Celtic culture, pre-dated Christianity, there was little conflict between the two belief syste
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ms: faeries were said to be anything from imps and witches to angels thrown out of heaven after the Fall of Lucifer. The Elizabethan era, however, marks the beginning of a new treatment of faery lore which revolutionized its place in the English language: it was not just included in offbeat religious tracts, nsational news stories of the supernatural, and colloquial oral tradition, but gained popularity through great literary and theatrical works like Edmund Spenr’s The Faerie Queene and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The texts brought the long-standing faery tradition into the limelight of the English cultural imagination and, particularly drawing from the oft-overlooked Celtic sources, created a particular image of the “fairy” that the country could claim as its own. In fact, certain scholars have emphasized the idea that “the modern English conception of the fairies is different from the conceptions prevalent in other countries” (Sources 35) specifically becau of the translation from oral and superstitious beliefs to a consolidated reprentation in drama and literature that occurred in this period. The image of faeries prented by Spenr, Shakespeare, and other authors of the English Renaissance helped create the fairy tale as we know it today, and has remain
ed at the core of a fascination with the Otherworldly which all – readers, writers, children, and adults – to a greater or lesr extent enjoy.
Amidst the overwhelming avalanche of scholarship treating the meanings and origins of the Faerie Queene and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a great emphasis is placed on classical and Continental texts as the ancestors and inspirations behind the authors’ works. While both Spenr and Shakespeare drew freely from the provenances – Spenr’s “Fairyland”, for example, is in some respects strikingly similar to the Elysian Fields, for example (Rathborne 157); and Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania owe their namesakes to the French romance Huon of Bordeauxfossils and an epithet of Diana in Ovid, respectively (Sources 35-36) – the uniqueness of their depictions of the Fey ultimately emanates from the prevalence of indigenous Celtic influences. A clor rearch of anthropological or cultural attitudes towards faeries in Britain and Ireland affords us an alternative inroad to studying why Elizabethan reprentations of the supernatural beings were so celebrated and why they continue to influence popular literature and entertainment today. As W. Y. Evans-Wentz comments in his study on the still-prevalent “f
airy-faith” in regions heavily influenced by a cultural Celtic background: “Books too often are written out of other books, and ldom from the life of man … For us it is much less important to know what scholars think of fairies than to know what the Celtic people think of fairies” (7). Artistic products of a civilization fu realistic details of everyday life and edifying visions of a common imagination that provide us with an invaluable picture not only of how a specific group of people conduct their lives, but also how they view the unen forces that influence their surroundings. The stories also provide examples of how their audiences and creators perceive the moral implications of what happens when the two worlds collide.
Celtic influences greatly impacted the creation of lore, legend, and literature in the medieval period; English writers and Irish scribes were leaders in scholarship and created a surprising (for the time) number of non-biblical manuscripts and texts, denoting the importance that pre-Christian “folk” beliefs still retained in a Celtic culture. Unfortunately, the long ries of invasions – from the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066 to the subquent English occupations and annexations of Ireland, Wales, and Scotland
– resulted in a vehement suppression of Celtic customs that lasted well into the nineteenth century. Recent historiographers have often noted the significance of “a n of nationality, bad on culture, rather than nationalism, bad on political cau” (Crowley 2) in their studies between the links of language, literature, and social identity. The animosity towards the products of Celtic communities – including indigenous laws and customs as well as languages and story traditions – was an integral part of the effort to subdue the Celts and assimilate them into the new (Norman) British society. While this endeavor to eradicate Celtic influences ems to have been more successful in England than in any of the other Celtic regions, the early traditions left an indelible imprint on the English identity. In the late 1800s a renewed interest in the importance of Celtic cultural and mythological roots was revived, but has dropped off again in the wake of economic and technological revolutions that have downplayed the importance of such backgrounds.
Thus many of the resources still extant that treat Celtic faery lore and beliefs as a legitimate topic for scholarly discussion are clo to a hundred years out-of-date. While their studies remain relevant and provide a uful springboard to delve into the world of C
eltic storytelling and traditions and their continued impact on the artistic world, the field would benefit from more modern perspectives. From 1907 to 1909 Evans-Wentz travelled through the “Celtic countries” – Britain, Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany – studying the religious, ethnographic, archaeological, and anthropological aspects of the still-surviving “fairy-faith,” bringing a hitherto-unthought-of scientific approach to the consideration of the Celtic people’s traditions. He es the indelible perpetuation of faery “folklore” as “offer[ing] the scientific means of studying man” (Evans-Wentz 6), or a route to discovering how belief systems and storytelling reveal what lies at the heart of what it means to be human, and why we inherently posss the notion that there is more to the world than we are able to perceive. He propos the idea “that the belief in fairies often anthropomorphically reflects … the social condition of the people who hold the belief” (Evans-Wentz 9) and insists that the “folk-imagination” contains an “inherent” and important “piece of heredity” (38) that is esntial to the study of the Celtic origins of English culture.
For a more specific example of faery tradition capturing the esnce of a community of
people, we can turn to W. B. Yeats and his treatment of Irish legends. A contemporary of Evans-Wentz, Yeats was able to assume more of an “insider’s” point of view to the oral tradition of faery stories that lives on in (particularly the rural regions of) Ireland, a prime Celtic country. In the introduction to his collection of “fairy and folk tales of the Irish peasantry,” Yeats blames the skeptical “Spirit of the Age” (xvii) as responsible for the lack of importance with which, by and large, the tales are wont to be treated. Though the cynical ntiment towards faery stories still, for the most part, prevails, Yeats’ efforts to reintroduce them into the public eye as a topic “to be referred to by learned scholars, or to be given a place in poems of rious poets” (Latham 14) continued the work that was, consciously or no, begun by Spenr and Shakespeare: dispersing the faery figure of Celtic myth to a wider audience, and entrenching it as a staple of literary works in the English language. “Every one is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough,” Yeats insists; “But the Celt is a visionary without scratching” (xviii). He and Evans-Wentz held differing opinions on the importance of faery stories, however; while the latter was convinced that the fairy tradition is most applicable when manifest as a religious “faith,” Y
eats recognized that, on an artistic and intellectual level, faeries are reprentations of ideal yet realistically ambivalent aspects of humanity. “The folk-tales … are the literature of a [people] … who have steeped everything in the heart: to whom everything is a symbol” (Yeats xx). He recognizes that the “symbols” of fairy lore inhabit the core of the cultural imagination and capture “the very pul of life” (Yeats xxii).
Spenr’s u of faery legends and Arthurian mythology as his allegorical medium in The Faerie Queene, as oppod to a more conventional classic tting begins to make more n in this context. Writing an epic poem in the English language celebrating the British queen, Spenr realized the potential of the indigenous Celtic story traditions as the perfect, and as-yet unud, vehicle for making his mark on literature. After all, “nothing is more remarkably certain than the clo and constant association in mediaeval lore of the fairies and the fairy-world with the Arthurian cycle of romance” (Sources 57); and Elizabeth could technically claim to be a descendent from the Arthurian figure Helyas (“Knight of the Swan”) through her ancestor Godfrey of Bouillon (Rathborne 174). While such a connection might em tenuous or absurd to a modern reader, tho in Spenr’s
time were at least open to the idea that faery lineage was possible. As late as 1575, there were eyewitness to a suppod sighting of Melusine, the “fairy ancestress of the Lusignan family,” at the Lusignan castle (Rathborne 167-169).
However, some scholars have expresd doubt regarding Spenr’s intentions in his choice of subject matter. According to A. C. Hamilton, Spenr “recognizes that the general end of his poem could be achieved only through fiction … he address his readers not by teaching them didactically but through delight” (Introduction 7). This concept of “delight” is ambiguous but highly suggestive; it stems from the assumption that readers will enjoy Spenr’s poem becau they have an automatic way of engaging with the text – their familiarity with the myths that he employs. However, it also assumes that all of his readers will take for granted that all of his characters are purely “fictional.” Minor White Latham also questions Spenr’s u of faery lore and characters, noting the negative correlations between faeries, witches, and ghosts at the time (35). In Discovery of Witchcraft, published in 1584, Reginald Scot describes faeries as “jocund and facetious spirits” and “the illusion of devils” who amu themlves by “tumbling and fooli
ng with rvants and shepherds in country hous, pinching them black and blue” and stealing and ducing women to ride with them at night (134).
Rather than portraying faeries as evil or mischievous, however, Spenr choos to focus on the graceful, beautiful, and noble aspects attributed to the fey race in some Celtic sources – though he retains an element of witchcraft for his antagonist characters. Living in Ireland for nearly twenty years as an assistant to the Lord Deputy, Spenr became more familiar with Celtic faery lore than most of his highly educated English contemporary writers (Hamilton 4). Rathborne believes that “the tradition of a beneficent and protective fay … may well have been primitive. The fear and loathing inspired by the fairies is probably due at least in part to a Christian preaching which identified them with devils” (171). In some ways, faeries filled the classical role of nymphs or dryads in English folklore – and the character of the Faerie Queene that of Diana (Rathborne 161). Spenr endeavored to “disassociate his good fairies” from their connotations with supernatural tricksters and to “prent them as virtuous men and women of ‘antique times’ who deeds were immortalized in history for the instruction of later ages” (Rathbo
rne 173). In the poem, the character of Duessa reprents the conception of “wicked” faerie women attributed with the ability to command physical changes in the natural world and to “alter men’s minds to inordinate love or hate” (Scot 133). For example, when she and the Red Cross Knight encounter the tree-forms of Fidessa and Fradubio, it is revealed how they had been transformed by the “ever fal Duessa,” described as a “fal sorceres” and “wicked witch” (Spenr 1.2.34-38). Her manipulation of a “hellish science” to conjure up “a foggy mist, that overcast the day, / And a dull blast, that breathing on her face, / Dimmed her former beauties shining ray” aligns with Scot’s asrtion that faeries are creatures who “can rai and suppress lightning and thunder, rain and hail, clouds and winds, tempests and earthquakes” or even “pull down the moon and the stars” (133). The character of Gloriana or the Faerie Queene, on the other hand, typifies Spenr’s association of good faeries with an ancient and noble race of beautiful ancestors of respected human lineages. In Book II he describes
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A goodly creature, whom he deemd in mynd
To be no earthly wight, but either Spright,
Or Angell, th; author of all woman kind;
Therefore a Fay he her according hight,
Of whom all 广州培训机构排名榜Faryes spring, and fetch their lignage right. (Spenr 2.10.71)
The image of both the evil yet deceptively beautiful faery enchantress and the pre-humanity race of noble, highborn elfin beings has persisted in reprentations of fairies in the modern culture, from Dungeons and Dragons to Lord of the Rings.
However, becau The Faerie Queene has acquired such a reputation of an icon of difficult, advanced English class and abstru scholarship that many students and scholars turn to Shakespeare’s conception of faeries as the root of their perception in English literature and imagination since the Elizabethan era. “Even today,” some argue, “it is not easy to shake off the inherited impression that the fairies are only what Shakespeare shows them to be” (dateofbirthSources 35). Both in Mercutio’s fanciful speech on Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet四级考场查询 (1.4.57-99) and in the antics of Oberon, Titania, and Puck (or Robin Goodfellow) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a correlation to the “mischievousness” of faeries is noted. The Mab character is a direct derivation of an icon
of Celtic mythology, one of “a race of beings, who … continue to appear, with characteristics that remain the same in esnce, and under a designation that may be heard … today, through ten centuries of [Celtic] tradition and literature” (Sources 59). In a story collected by Yeats, Queen Mab is described as the leader of a group of “wee folk, good folk,” who enjoy dancing, music, the beautiful countryside, and stealing young Christian children away to amu themlves (4). Of cour, when dealing with reprentations of faeries in the Elizabethan period, “the question of the size … shows that a confusion existed between the fays of romance with the elves of folk-superstition” (Sources 62), and Shakespeare’s vision of faeries is, oppod to Spenr’s, as very small creatures. “I rve the fairy queen … the cowslips tall her pensioners be,” claims the fairy Puck encounters in Act II (Shakespeare, Midsummer, 2.1.8-10); “I must go ek some dewdrops here / and hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear” (2.1.14-15). However, even within this convention Shakespeare makes the idea of the tiny fairies his own; becau, while his text may paint a picture of the flower-sized fairy, the actors onstage are still human-sized. “Thus we e,” according to some scholars, “… that the fairy-super
stition and the elf-superstition were melted together in the popular pre-Shakespearean mind, and that Shakespeare himlf, making a new division of the characteristics of the two, yet re-welded the whole into one realm” (Sources 64).
There is no doubt that the image of Celtic and English faeries has lingered on in the literature and storytelling, the art and writing, of the English-speaking world. However, rather than being a fit subject merely for children and quickly-dismisd science fiction, the stories offer us a chance to study human perceptions of good and evil, beauty and deception, and cultural evolution through a medium that is both edifying and entertaining. Legends and fairy tales are a link to our past, an interpretation of our prent, and a wish for the future. In the English language tradition, the literature of Elizabethan England provides an excellent example to look both backward to the roots of some of the pervasive tales and forward to the way that they continue to shape our understanding of the world even today.
Works Cited
Crowley, Tony. Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537-2004. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. 1911. Lexington: Forgotten Books, 2007. Print.
Hamilton, A. C. Introduction. The Faerie Queene. By Edmund Spenr. 1590-1596. 2nd ed. London: Pearson, 2007. Print.
Latham, Minor White. The Elizabethan Fairies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1930. Print.
Rathborne, Isabel E. The Meaning of Spenr’s Fairylandebu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1937. Print.
Scot, Reginald. Discovery of Witchcraft. 1584. Republished in The Sources of a Midsummer Night’s Dream. New York: Duffeild, 1908. Print.
Shakespeare Library. bulletThe Sources of a Midsummer Night’s Dream. New York: Duffeild, 1908. Print.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1990. Print.
Spenr, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. A. C. Hamilton. 2nd ed. London: Pearson, 2007. Print.
Yeats, W. B., ed. A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, and Folklore. New York: Gamercy Books, 1986. Print.
