mythology of the Goths, as well as Celts, to furnish the modern
attributes ascribed to Satan in later times, when the object of painter
or poet was to display him in his true form and with all his terrors.
Even the genius of Guido and of Tasso have been unable to surmount this
prejudice, the more rooted, perhaps, that the wicked are described as
goats in Scripture, and that the devil is called the old dragon. In
Raffael's famous painting of the archangel Michael binding Satan, the
dignity, power, and angelic character expressed by the seraph form an
extraordinary contrast to the poor conception of a being who ought not,
even in that lowest degradation, to have seemed so unworthy an
antagonist. Neither has Tasso been more happy, where he represents the
divan of darkness in the enchanted forest as presided over by a monarch
having a huge tail, hoofs, and all the usual accompaniments of popular
diablerie. The genius of Milton alone could discard all these vulgar
puerilities, and assign to the author of evil the terrible dignity of
one who should seem not "less than archangel ruined." This species of
degradation is yet grosser when we take into consideration the changes
which popular opinions have wrought respecting the taste, habits,
powers, modes of tempting, and habits of tormenting, which are such as
might rather be ascribed to some stupid superannuated and doting ogre of
a fairy tale, than to the powerful-minded demon who fell through pride
and rebellion, not through folly or incapacity.
Having, however, adopted our present ideas of the devil as they are
expressed by his nearest acquaintances, the witches, from the accounts
of satyrs, which seem to have been articles of faith both among the
Celtic and Gothic tribes, we must next notice another fruitful fountain
of demonological fancies. But as this source of the mythology of the
Middle Ages must necessarily comprehend some account of the fairy folk,
to whom much of it must be referred, it is necessary to make a pause
before we enter upon the mystic and marvellous connexion supposed to
exist between the impenitent kingdom of Satan and those merry dancers by
moonlight.
LETTER IV.
The Fairy Superstition is derived from different sources--The
Classical Worship of the Silvans, or Rural Deities, proved by Roman
Altars discovered--The Gothic Duergar, or Dwarfs--Supposed to be
derived from the Northern Laps, or Fins--"The
Niebelungen-Lied"--King Laurin's Adventure--Celtic Fairies of a
gayer character, yet their pleasures empty and illusory--Addicted to
carry off Human Beings, both Infants and Adults--Adventures of a
Butler in Ireland--The Elves supposed to pay a Tax to Hell--The
Irish, Welsh, Highlanders, and Manxmen held the same belief--It was
rather rendered more gloomy by the Northern Traditions--Merlin and
Arthur carried off by the Fairies--Also Thomas of Erceldoune--His
Amour with the Queen of Elfland--His re-appearance in latter
times--Another account from Reginald Scot--Conjectures on the
derivation of the word Fairy.
We may premise by observing, that the classics had not forgotten to
enrol in their mythology a certain species of subordinate deities,
resembling the modern elves in their habits. Good old Mr. Gibb, of the
Advocates' Library (whom all lawyers whose youth he assisted in their
studies, by his knowledge of that noble collection, are bound to name
with gratitude), used to point out, amongst the ancient altars under his
charge, one which is consecrated, _Diis campestribus,_ and usually
added, with a wink, "The fairies, ye ken."[22] This relic of antiquity
was discovered near Roxburgh Castle, and a vicinity more delightfully
appropriate to the abode of the silvan deities can hardly be found.
[Footnote 22: Another altar of elegant form and perfectly preserved,
was, within these few weeks, dug up near the junction of the Leader and
the Tweed, in the neighbourhood of the village of Newstead, to the east
of Melrose. It was inscribed by Carrius Domitianus, the prefect of the
twentieth legion, to the god Sylvanus, forming another instance how much
the wild and silvan character of the country disposed the feelings of
the Romans to acknowledge the presence of the rural deities. The altar
is preserved at Drygrange, the seat of Mr. Tod.]
Two rivers of considerable size, made yet more remarkable by the fame
which has rendered them in some sort classical, unite their streams
beneath the vestiges of an extensive castle, renowned in the wars with
England, and for the valiant, noble, and even royal blood, which has
been shed around and before it--a landscape ornamented with the distant
village and huge abbey tower of Kelso, arising out of groves of aged
trees--the modern mansion of Fleurs, with its terrace, its woods, and
its extensive lawn--form altogether a kingdom for Oberon and Titania to
reign in, or any spirit who, before their time, might love scenery, of
which the majesty, and even the beauty, impress the mind with a sense of
awe mingled with pleasure. These silvans, satyrs, and fauns with whom
superstition peopled the lofty banks and tangled copses of this romantic
country, were obliged to give place to deities very nearly resembling
themselves in character, who probably derive some of their attributes
from their classic predecessors, although more immediately allied to the
barbarian conquerors. We allude to the fairies, which, as received into
the popular creed, and as described by the poets who have made use of
them as machinery, are certainly among the most pleasing legacies of
fancy.
Dr. Leyden, who exhausted on this subject, as upon most others, a
profusion of learning, found the first idea of the elfin people in the
Northern opinions concerning the duergar, or dwarfs.[23] These were,
however, it must be owned, spirits of a coarser sort, more laborious
vocation, and more malignant temper, and in all respects less propitious
to humanity, than the fairies (properly so called), which were the
invention of the Celtic people, and displayed that superiority of taste
and fancy which, with the love of music and poetry, has been generally
ascribed to their race, through its various classes and modifications.
[Footnote 23: See the essay on the Fairy Superstition, in the
"Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," of which many of the materials were
contributed by Dr. Leyden, and the whole brought into its present form
by the author.]
In fact, there seems reason to conclude that these duergar were
originally nothing else than the diminutive natives of the Lappish,
Lettish, and Finnish nations, who, flying before the conquering weapons
of the Asæ, sought the most retired regions of the North, and there
endeavoured to hide themselves from their Eastern invaders. They were a
little, diminutive race, but possessed of some skill probably in mining
or smelting minerals, with which the country abounds. Perhaps also they
might, from their acquaintance with the changes of the clouds, or
meteorological phenomena, be judges of weather, and so enjoy another
title to supernatural skill. At any rate, it has been plausibly supposed
that these poor people, who sought caverns and hiding-places from the
persecution of the Asæ, were in some respects compensated for
inferiority in strength and stature by the art and power with which the
superstition of the enemy invested them. These oppressed yet dreaded
fugitives obtained, naturally enough, the character of the German
spirits called Kobold, from which the English goblin and the Scottish
bogle, by some inversion and alteration of pronunciation, are evidently
derived.
The Kobolds were a species of gnomes, who haunted the dark and solitary
places, and were often seen in the mines, where they seemed to imitate
the labours of the miners, and sometimes took pleasure in frustrating
their objects and rendering their toil unfruitful. Sometimes they were
malignant, especially if neglected or insulted; but sometimes also they
were indulgent to individuals whom they took under their protection.
When a miner, therefore, hit upon a rich vein of ore, the inference
commonly was, not that he possessed more skill, industry, or even luck,
than his fellow-workmen, but that the spirits of the mine had directed
him to the treasure. The employment and apparent occupation of these
subterranean gnomes or fiends, led very naturally to identify the Fin,
or Laplander, with the Kobold; but it was a bolder stretch of the
imagination which confounded this reserved and sullen race with the
livelier and gayer spirit which bears correspondence with the British
fairy. Neither can we be surprised that the duergar, ascribed by many
persons to this source, should exhibit a darker and more malignant
character than the elves that revel by moonlight in more southern
climates.
According to the old Norse belief, these dwarfs form the current
machinery of the Northern Sagas, and their inferiority in size is
represented as compensated by skill and wisdom superior to those of
ordinary mortals. In the "Niebelungen-Lied," one of the oldest romances
of Germany, and compiled, it would seem, not long after the time of
Attila, Theodorick of Bern, or of Verona, figures among a cycle of
champions over whom he presides, like the Charlemagne of France or
Arthur of England. Among others vanquished by him is the Elf King, or
Dwarf Laurin, whose dwelling was in an enchanted garden of roses, and
who had a body-guard of giants, a sort of persons seldom supposed to be
themselves conjurers. He becomes a formidable opponent to Theodorick and
his chivalry; but as he attempted by treachery to attain the victory, he
is, when overcome, condemned to fill the dishonourable yet appropriate
office of buffoon and juggler at the Court of Verona.[24]
[Footnote 24: See an abstract, by the late learned Henry Weber, of "A
Lay on this subject of King Laurin," complied by Henry of Osterdingen.
"Northern Antiquities," Edinburgh, 1814.]
Such possession of supernatural wisdom is still imputed by the natives
of the Orkney and Zetland Islands to the people called _Drows_, being a
corruption of duergar or _dwarfs_, and who may, in most other respects,
be identified with the Caledonian fairies. Lucas Jacobson Debes, who
dates his description of Feroe from his Pathmos, in Thorshaven, March
12, 1670, dedicates a long chapter to the spectres who disturbed his
congregation, and sometimes carried off his hearers. The actors in these
disturbances he states to be the _Skow_, or _Biergen-Trold_--_i.e._, the
spirits of the woods and mountains, sometimes called subterranean
people, and adds, they appeared in deep caverns and among horrid rocks;
as also, that they haunted the places where murders or other deeds of
mortal sin had been acted. They appear to have been the genuine northern
dwarfs, or Trows, another pronunciation of Trollds, and are considered
by the reverend author as something very little better than actual
fiends.
But it is not only, or even chiefly, to the Gothic race that we must
trace the opinions concerning the elves of the middle ages; these, as
already hinted, were deeply blended with the attributes which the Celtic
tribes had, from the remotest ages, ascribed to their deities of rocks,
valleys, and forests. We have already observed, what indeed makes a
great feature of their national character, that the power of the
imagination is peculiarly active among the Celts, and leads to an
enthusiasm concerning national music and dancing, national poetry and
song, the departments in which fancy most readily indulges herself. The
Irish, the Welsh, the Gael, or Scottish Highlander, all tribes of Celtic
descent, assigned to the Men of Peace, Good Neighbours, or by whatever
other names they called these sylvan pigmies, more social habits, and a
course of existence far more gay, than the sullen and heavy toils of the
more saturnine Duergar. Their elves did not avoid the society of men,
though they behaved to those who associated with them with caprice,
which rendered it dangerous to displease them; and although their gifts
were sometimes valuable, they were usually wantonly given and
unexpectedly resumed.
The employment, the benefits, the amusements of the Fairy court,
resembled the aerial people themselves. Their government was always
represented as monarchical. A King, more frequently a Queen of Fairies,
was acknowledged; and sometimes both held their court together. Their
pageants and court entertainments comprehended all that the imagination
could conceive of what was, by that age, accounted gallant and splendid.
At their processions they paraded more beautiful steeds than those of
mere earthly parentage--the hawks and hounds which they employed in
their chase were of the first race. At their daily banquets, the board
was set forth with a splendour which the proudest kings of the earth
dared not aspire to; and the hall of their dancers echoed to the most
exquisite music. But when viewed by the eye of a seer the illusion
vanished. The young knights and beautiful ladies showed themselves as
wrinkled carles and odious hags--their wealth turned into
slate-stones--their splendid plate into pieces of clay fantastically
twisted--and their victuals, unsavoured by salt (prohibited to them, we
are told, because an emblem of eternity), became tasteless and
insipid--the stately halls were turned into miserable damp caverns--all
the delights of the Elfin Elysium vanished at once. In a word, their
pleasures were showy, but totally unsubstantial--their activity
unceasing, but fruitless and unavailing--and their condemnation appears
to have consisted in the necessity of maintaining the appearance of
constant industry or enjoyment, though their toil was fruitless and
their pleasures shadowy and unsubstantial. Hence poets have designed
them as "_the crew that never rest_." Besides the unceasing and useless
bustle in which these spirits seemed to live, they had propensities
unfavourable and distressing to mortals.
One injury of a very serious nature was supposed to be constantly
practised by the fairies against "the human mortals," that of carrying
off their children, and breeding them as beings of their race.
Unchristened infants were chiefly exposed to this calamity; but adults
were also liable to be abstracted from earthly commerce, notwithstanding
it was their natural sphere. With respect to the first, it may be easily
conceived that the want of the sacred ceremony of introduction into the
Christian church rendered them the more obnoxious to the power of those
creatures, who, if not to be in all respects considered as fiends, had
nevertheless, considering their constant round of idle occupation,
little right to rank themselves among good spirits, and were accounted
by most divines as belonging to a very different class. An adult, on the
other hand, must have been engaged in some action which exposed him to
the power of the spirits, and so, as the legal phrase went, "taken in
the manner." Sleeping on a fairy mount, within which the Fairy court
happened to be held for the time, was a very ready mode of obtaining a
pass for Elfland. It was well for the individual if the irate elves were
contented, on such occasions, with transporting him through the air to a
city at some forty miles' distance, and leaving, perhaps, his hat or
bonnet on some steeple between, to mark the direct line of his course.
Others, when engaged in some unlawful action, or in the act of giving
way to some headlong and sinful passion, exposed themselves also to
become inmates of Fairyland.
The same belief on these points obtained in Ireland. Glanville, in his
"Eighteenth Relation," tells us of the butler of a gentleman, a
neighbour of the Earl of Orrery, who was sent to purchase cards. In
crossing the fields, he saw a table surrounded by people apparently
feasting and making merry. They rose to salute him, and invited him to
join in their revel; but a friendly voice from the party whispered in
his ear, "Do nothing which this company invite you to." Accordingly,
when he refused to join in feasting, the table vanished, and the company
began to dance and play on musical instruments; but the butler would not
take part in these recreations. They then left off dancing, and betook
themselves to work; but neither in this would the mortal join them. He
was then left alone for the present; but in spite of the exertions of my
Lord Orrery, in spite of two bishops who were his guests at the time, in
spite of the celebrated Mr. Greatrix, it was all they could do to
prevent the butler from being carried off bodily from amongst them by
the fairies, who considered him as their lawful prey. They raised him in
the air above the heads of the mortals, who could only run beneath, to
break his fall when they pleased to let him go. The spectre which
formerly advised the poor man continued to haunt him, and at length
discovered himself to be the ghost of an acquaintance who had been dead
for seven years. "You know," added he, "I lived a loose life, and ever
since have I been hurried up and down in a restless condition, with the
company you saw, and shall be till the day of judgment." He added, "that
if the butler had acknowledged God in all his ways, he had not suffered
so much by their means; he reminded him that he had not prayed to God in
the morning before he met with this company in the field, and, moreover,
that he was then going on an unlawful business."
It is pretended that Lord Orrery confirmed the whole of this story, even
to having seen the butler raised into the air by the invisible beings
who strove to carry him off. Only he did not bear witness to the passage
which seems to call the purchase of cards an unlawful errand.[25]
[Footnote 25: "Sadducismus Triumphatus," by Joseph Glanville, p. 131.
Edinburgh, 1790.]
Individuals, whose lives had been engaged in intrigues of politics or
stratagems of war, were sometimes surreptitiously carried off to
Fairyland; as Alison Pearson, the sorceress who cured Archbishop
Adamson, averred that she had recognised in the Fairy court the
celebrated Secretary Lethington and the old Knight of Buccleuch, the one
of whom had been the most busy politician, the other one of the most
unwearied partisans of Queen Mary, during the reign of that unfortunate
queen. Upon the whole, persons carried off by sudden death were usually
suspected of having fallen into the hands of the fairies, and unless
redeemed from their power, which it was not always safe to attempt, were
doomed to conclude their lives with them. We must not omit to state that
those who had an intimate communication with these spirits, while they
were yet inhabitants of middle earth, were most apt to be seized upon
and carried off to Elfland before their death.
The reason assigned for this kidnapping of the human race, so peculiar
to the elfin people, is said to be that they were under a necessity of
paying to the infernal regions a yearly tribute out of their population,
which they were willing to defray by delivering up to the prince of
these regions the children of the human race, rather than their own.
From this it must be inferred, that they have offspring among
themselves, as it is said by some authorities, and particularly by Mr.
Kirke, the minister of Aberfoyle. He indeed adds that, after a certain
length of life, these spirits are subject to the universal lot of
mortality--a position, however, which has been controverted, and is
scarcely reconcilable to that which holds them amenable to pay a tax to
hell, which infers existence as eternal as the fire which is not
quenched. The opinions on the subject of the fairy people here
expressed, are such as are entertained in the Highlands and some remote
quarters of the Lowlands of Scotland. We know, from the lively and
entertaining legends published by Mr. Crofton Croker--which, though in
most cases told with the wit of the editor and the humour of his
country, contain points of curious antiquarian information--that the
opinions of the Irish are conformable to the account we have given of
the general creed of the Celtic nations respecting elves. If the Irish
elves are anywise distinguished from those of Britain, it seems to be by
their disposition to divide into factions and fight among themselves--a
pugnacity characteristic of the Green Isle. The Welsh fairies, according
to John Lewis, barrister-at-law, agree in the same general attributes
with those of Ireland and Britain. We must not omit the creed of the
Manxmen, since we find, from the ingenious researches of Mr. Waldron,
that the Isle of Man, beyond other places in Britain, was a peculiar
depository of the fairy traditions, which, on the island being conquered
by the Norse, became, in all probability, chequered with those of
Scandinavia from a source peculiar and more direct than that by which
they reached Scotland or Ireland.
Such as it was, the popular system of the Celts easily received the
northern admixture of Drows and Duergar, which gave the belief, perhaps,
a darker colouring than originally belonged to the British fairyland. It
was from the same source also, in all probability, that additional
legends were obtained of a gigantic and malignant female, the Hecate of
this mythology, who rode on the storm and marshalled the rambling host
of wanderers under her grim banner. This hag (in all respects the
reverse of the Mab or Titania of the Celtic creed) was called Nicneven
in that later system which blended the faith of the Celts and of the
Goths on this subject. The great Scottish poet Dunbar has made a
spirited description of this Hecate riding at the head of witches and
good neighbours (fairies, namely), sorceresses and elves, indifferently,
upon the ghostly eve of All-Hallow Mass.[26] In Italy we hear of the
hags arraying themselves under the orders of Diana (in her triple
character of Hecate, doubtless) and Herodias, who were the joint leaders
of their choir. But we return to the more simple fairy belief, as
entertained by the Celts before they were conquered by the Saxons.
[Footnote 26: See "Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy."]
Of these early times we can know little; but it is singular to remark
what light the traditions of Scotland throw upon the poetry of the
Britons of Cumberland, then called Reged. Merlin Wyllt, or the wild, is
mentioned by both; and that renowned wizard, the son of an elf or fairy,
with King Arthur, the dubious champion of Britain at that early period,
were both said by tradition to have been abstracted by the fairies, and
to have vanished without having suffered death, just at the time when it
was supposed that the magic of the wizard and the celebrated sword of
the monarch, which had done so much to preserve British independence,
could no longer avert the impending ruin. It may be conjectured that
there was a desire on the part of Arthur or his surviving champions to
conceal his having received a mortal wound in the fatal battle of
Camlan; and to that we owe the wild and beautiful incident so finely
versified by Bishop Percy, in which, in token of his renouncing in
future the use of arms, the monarch sends his attendant, sole survivor
of the field, to throw his sword Excalibar into the lake hard by. Twice
eluding the request, the esquire at last complied, and threw the
far-famed weapon into the lonely mere. A hand and arm arose from the
water and caught Excalibar by the hilt, flourished it thrice, and then
sank into the lake.[27] The astonished messenger returned to his master
to tell him the marvels he had seen, but he only saw a boat at a
distance push from the land, and heard shrieks of females in agony:--
"And whether the king was there or not
He never knew, he never colde
For never since that doleful day
Was British Arthur seen on molde."
[Footnote 27: See "Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry."]