'þese wonderful bestes beþ dyuerse': Faeries and Faeryland in the Literature and Culture of the Late Middle Ages

Many modern critics, such as Derek Brewer and Erec Auerbach, suggest that the

literary value of medieval romances is undermined by the presence of the marvelous.1 In

Mimesis, a work largely responsible for promulgating this view, Auerbach argues that the

medieval courtly romance has no interest in verisimilitude, but instead opts for ‘an escape

into fable and fairy tale’.2 He interprets ‘fairy’ merely as a device employed by romance

writers to provide an escape from reality, concluding that the marvelous elements of these

romances had an ‘unfavorable’ effect on the development of ‘a literary art which should

apprehend reality in its full breadth and depth’.3 This analysis, however, suffering from

generalized and anachronistic expectations, fails to account for the complexities of the

intellectual and cultural milieu in which these romances were written. Where Auerbach

sees a sharp distinction between ‘reality’ and the ‘legendary, fairy tale atmosphere’,4 the

medieval mind saw an amalgam. Gurevich argues for this assimilation of the marvelous

into the medieval paradigm, proposing that marvelous phenomena were an ‘inseparable

part of reality’ during the Middle Ages, where the medieval mind was ‘predisposed to

believe in wonders’, and the collective consciousness was characterized by a ‘willingness

to accept any kind of fantastic news, [and an] inclination to believe in the supernatural’.5

Le Goff reiterates this, proposing that what is most disturbing about medieval marvels is

1 Brewer, Tradition and Innovation, p. 140; Erec Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard B. Trask (Princeton, 1968), p. 138.2 Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 138.3 Ibid, p. 142.4 Ibid, p. 133.5 Aron Gurevich, Medieval popular Culture: Problems of belief and Perception (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 11, 23-4.

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‘precisely the fact that they merge so easily with the everyday life that no one bothers to

question their reality’.6

This belief in marvelous phenomena, the place it occupied in both the popular and

learned cultures of the late Middle Ages, and the conceptions of the marvelous these

cultures bequeathed to their literature, is the topic of this paper. A methodological note

here may be necessary. Some studies of folklore are concerned primarily with the

genealogy of beliefs, with the transformation of gods into faeries, and though it is a

legitimate and interesting field, the question of origins is of little relevance here. For this

reason the work of Roger Loomis offers little help, for though his remarks have great

anthropological interest, they do not tell us anything significant about faery beliefs as

they were comprehended by the medieval mind.7 Accordingly, in order to better

understand its place in literature, this paper will focus specifically on the place of the

marvelous in medieval thought. It intends to demonstrate that these beliefs were by no

means uniform, nor did they remain static over time. Instead, medieval attitudes toward

the marvelous were characterized by a long-standing tradition of scholastic debate and a

continuum of evolving popular conceptions that generated a complex system of beliefs.

In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries marvels were a source of controversy

among scholastics. Aquinas argues that marvelous occurrences, excluding those worked

directly by God, were the doings of demons, who frequently employed magicians as their

human intermediaries. In addition to demonic forces, Aquinas contends, the occult virtues

of physical objects, sometimes in conjunction with the influences of the stars, were the

cause of these magical occurrences.8 For this reason Isidore of Seville condemns the 6 Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London, 1985), p. 33. 7 Roger Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (New York, 1927).8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ (ed. and trans.) T. C. O’Brien (London, 1975), 14: 83-87. Also see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1923), 2: 603-4.

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practice of magic, but at the same time he ‘saw no harm in holding that certain stones

possess astonishing powers, that the dog-star afflicts the body with disease, and that the

appearance of a comet signifies pestilence, famine, or war’.9 John of Salisbury, on the

other hand, condemns all magical practices, which, in his Polycraticus, he associates with

‘disreputable mathematica’, and sees them occurring out of a familiarity of men with

demons.10 These writers, though not uniform in their attitudes toward the marvelous,

constitute mainstream approaches to such occurrences, condemning magic for its

demonic affiliations, but regarding it as an integral facet of their reality.

Others, though, had begun to doubt the reality of such marvels. Roger Bacon’s

enormously popular mid-thirteenth century Opus Maius roundly rejects the existence of

magic, stating:

What men ought to believe toughing Figures, Charmes and such stuff, I shall deliver my opinion. Without doubt there is nothing in these days of this kind…Experimental science…alone, therefore, knows how to test perfectly what can be done by nature…so that all falsity may be removed and the truth alone of art and nature may be retained. This science alone teaches us how to view the mad acts of magicians, that they may not be ratified but shunned, just as logic considers sophistical reasoning.11

That both Bacon and Isidore of Seville were highly popular and influential in the same

period should dispel any simplistic notions of medieval ignorance or ingenuity regarding

the marvelous, a fact, as Finlayson points out, worth keeping in mind when making

assertions about the effect of the marvelous in medieval literature.12 To complicate

matters further though, we may well remind ourselves of Bacon’s comments on dragons:

It is certain that Ethiopian sages have come into Italy, Spain, France, England and these Christian lands where there are good flying dragons,

9 Lynn Thorndike, The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe (New York, 1905), p. 16.10 Thorndike, History, 2: 158.11 Roger Bacon, Opus Maius, (ed. and trans.), R. B. Burke (Philadelphia, 1928), 2: 587.12 Finlayson, ‘Marvelous in Middle English Romance’, p. 368.

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and by an occult art that they possess, excite the dragons from their caves. And they have saddles and bridles ready and they ride the dragons.13

Finlayson cites this passage as evidence that even a ‘scientific’ man in the Middle Ages,

such as Bacon, inhabits a paradigm much different than our own, further problematizing

any simplistic readings of literary marvels written in an age in which someone may

disbelieve in magic, but believe in flying dragons.14

When speaking of ‘the marvelous’, however, there is a danger of creating the

illusion of a cohesive set of phenomena. To this point, the term ‘marvelous’ has been

used to denote both ‘magic’ and ‘faery’, but a distinction here is necessary. In the Middle

Ages marvelous phenomena were subdivided into three categories: 1) mirabilis, the

unexplained, unmotivated, and inexplicable, corresponding to our current notion of the

marvelous; 2) magicus, that is, the marvelous controlled by man; 3) miraculosus, that is,

the marvelous controlled by God.15 This third category, miracles, is outside of the scope

of this present study, and the second category, the magical, will be addressed further in a

later chapter,16 but the first class, the mysterious, is the category in which medieval

faeries find their place.

The word ‘faery’ denotes a distinct set of marvelous beings. Martianus Capella

calls them ‘Pans, Fauns, Fones, Satyrs, Silvani, Nymphs, Fatui and Fatuae’,17 while the

twelfth century scholastic Bernardus Silvestris describes similar creatures as a class of

sub-lunar spirits who assume bodily existence and inhabit the earth. He calls them

‘Silvans, Pans, and Nerei’, their bodies being of ‘elemental purity’, having a longer life

13 Thorndike, History, 2: 657.14 Finlayson, ‘Marvelous in Middle English Romance’, p. 369.15 Ibid, p. 30. Stevens proposes a similar set of subdivisions in his discussion of Middle English romance. See Stevens, Medieval Romance, pp. 100-1.16 See chapter five.17 Martianus Capella, The Seven Liberal Arts Volume II: The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, (ed. and trans.), William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson (New York, 1977), pp. 54-5.

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than our own.18 Later, John Trevisa, in his widely popular 1399 translation of

Bartholomaeus’ mid-thirteenth century encyclopedia, calls them fauni, satiri, incubi, and

fatui, saying that ‘þese wonderful bestes beþ dyuerse’, some assuming the ‘likenesse and

schappe of men’, while others ‘han crokede noses, and hornes in þe forhede, and like to

gete in here feet’.19 These creatures limned the boundary between the known and the

unknown, marking the outermost edges of the natural world. To call them ‘supernatural’,

though, may be misleading. They were, as C. S. Lewis points out, more ‘natural’ than

other creatures, ‘liberated from the beast’s perpetual slavery to nutrition, self-protection,

and procreation, and also from the responsibilities, shames, and melancholy of man’.20

Gervase of Tilbury, in the early years of the thirteenth century, makes a similar

distinction, saying: ‘we call marvels those phenomena that surpass our understanding

even though they be natural’.21

These beings occupied a liminal and often times indefinite position in the

medieval world. Like all marvelous and monstrous creatures they occupied the margins

of the known world, and like all liminal personae (‘threshold people’), they were

necessarily ambiguous, eluding or slipping through the network of classifications that

normally locate states and positions in cultural space.22 Herein, though, lies their

imaginative and poetic value. As a result of their liminality they were betwixt and

between the positions traditionally assigned and arrayed by custom and convention,23

18 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, (ed. and trans.), Winthrop Wetherbee (London, 1973), p. 108.19 John Trevisa, On the Properties of Things (ed.), M. C. Seymour (Oxford, 1975), 2: 1199.20 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 133-4.21 ‘Mirabilia vero dicimus quae nostrae cognitioni non subjacent etiam cum sint naturalia’. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, (ed. and trans.) S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), pp. 558-9. Auqinas makes a similar distinction. See Aquinas, Summa, 14: 79-83; Thorndike, History, 2: 602-3.22 Turner, Ritual Process, p. 95.23 Ibid.

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their presence intruding upon dominate discourse, producing mystery and inspiring

imaginative responses.

A look at the peripheral regions of the late thirteenth century Hereford map

illuminates a series of monstrous races, removed both geographically and ideologically

from the centralized regions Western Europe,24 while the immensely popular fourteenth

century text Mandeville’s Travels illustrates these monstrosities in vivid detail. The

monstrous bodies described are themselves liminal: fixed in transitory states, grotesque,

yet oddly humanoid. Among them hermaphrodites, skiopods (people with a single leg),

Cynocephali (humans with dog’s heads), Cyclopes, and pygmies.25 Though not faeries,

the descriptions of these monstrous races epitomize the liminal spaces allocated to, and

the liminal physicalities imagined for the ambiguous creatures in the medieval paradigm.

So ideologically similar were faeries and these monstrous races that John Trevisa groups

them together under the same encyclopedic headings, ‘De faunis’, and later ‘De pilosis’,

saying that both types of creatures, despite their differences, are similar in that they both

have ‘nought resoun of mankynde’, though they ‘beþ like to mankynde in voice and in

many dedes’.26

Faeries occupied liminal zones geographically closer to home, making them more

palpable, more easily realized in the folkloric imaginations of western Europeans. They

could be encountered if one strayed too far from the village, too far into the darkness of

the forest, their meetings being sometimes amorous, sometimes dangerous, and

24 See Scott Westrem, The Hereford Map (Turnhout, 2001).25 John Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels, (ed.) Malcolm Letts (London, 1953), 1: 113, 141-3. Various accounts and descriptions of the monstrous races existed in the Middle Ages. See especially Giraldus Cambrensis, The History and Topography of Ireland, (ed. and trans.), John O’Meara (New York, 1951); Saint Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, (ed. and trans.), Eva Mathews (London, 1965), 5: 43-5.26 Trevisa, Properties, 2: 1199.

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sometimes an ambiguous mixture of both. Capella tells us that faeries crowded the spaces

of the earth, ‘inaccessible to men…the woods and forests, the groves, lakes, springs and

rivers.’27 Bernardus Silvestris locates them in similar spaces, saying they may be

encountered on a ‘green hill’, or a ‘flowery mountainside’, and that they inhabit rivers,

and any site ‘clothed in woodland greenery’.28 Trevisa echoes Capella and Silvestris,

though without the later’s floral imagery:

And suche bestes beþ ful lecherous, in so moche þat þey sleeþ women in þe dede of lechery if þey takeþ hem walkynge in woodes.29

Trevisa calls these faeries ‘satiri’, and later ‘faunum ficarium’ and ‘incubi’, reminding us

of one of the most common and popular characteristics of faeries in the Middle Ages.

These faeries were notorious for, as Trevisa put it, ‘doynge þe dede of generacioun’ with

unsuspecting women.30

Probably the most well known sorcerer in the late Middle Ages, Merlin, is the

offspring of such a union. He is half human, half faery, and as C. S. Lewis notes, never

shown practicing magic as an art.31 In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum

Britannie, Maugantius quotes Apuleius’ De deo Socratis in explaining this phenomenon

to Vortigern:

In the books written by our sages…and in many historical narratives, I have discovered that quite a number of men have been born this way. As Apuleius asserts in the De deo Socratis between the moon and the earth live spirits which we call incubus daemons. These have partly the nature of men and partly that of angels, and when they wish they assume mortal shapes and have intercourse with women.32

27 Capella, Seven Liberal Arts, p. 54. 28 Silvestris, Cosmographia, p. 108.29 Trevisa, Properties, 2: 1199.30 Ibid, 2: 1236.31 Lewis, Discarded Image, p. 130. See chapter five for a more thorough discussion of Merlin’s relationship with magic and faery. 32 ‘In libris philosophorum nostrorum et in pluribus historiis repperi multos hominess huiusmodi procreationem habuisse. Nam, ut Apulegius de deo Socratis perhibet, inter lunam et terram habitant spiritus

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Geoffrey’s account of incubi epitomizes the liminality ascribed to such faeries. Like the

monstrous races, they possessed liminal physicalities, being between men and angels, or

as Apuleius says, they maintained a ‘middle nature’ partly ‘aërial’, partly ‘animal’ in

body. Gervase of Tilbury cites Augustine in making a similar assertion, saying that God

‘allows demons to put on illusory and spectral bodily shapes, the shapes as it were of

lares, that is of household spirits, so that they can present a familiar appearance’.33 These

faeries occupy spatially liminal regions as well, as they were not restricted solely to the

earth, as they are in Capella, Silvestris and Trevisa, but inhabit the liminal sphere

between the moon and the earth.34

The popular thirteenth century South English Legendary furthers this conception

of incubi, proposing an origin of such faeries well couched in Christian apocrypha. When

‘þe maister dragoun Lucifer’ was cast out of heaven, ‘monye hulde faste wiþ him’, but

these angels were not ‘alle of one lore’, and, accordingly, the distance they fell from

heaven paralleled their participation in Lucifer’s rebellion. Some of these angels fell to

the sublunary sphere, and in accordance with the faery tradition, they roamed ‘in wode

and eke in mede’.35 There, ‘mankunne to bitraie’, some assumed the form of men and

quos incubos demones appellamus. Hii partim habent naturam hominum, partim uero angelorum, et cum uolunt assumunt sibi humanas figuras et cum mulieribus coeunt’. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, (trans.), Lewis Thorpe (London, 1969), p. 146; Neil Wright, (ed.), Historia Regum Britannie (Cambridge, 1985), p. 73. See also Apuleius, ‘The God of Socrates’, in Thomas Taylor (ed. and trans.), Apuleius’ Golden Ass and Other Philosophical Writings (Wiltshire, 1997), pp. 234-55.33 ‘ita et demons corporum formis fantasticis et laruatis, quasi larium, hoc est domorum, familiaritatem in figura tenentibus indui sustinet, ut quod mandatum in bonis operator ad bonum, hoc eius pacientia mali operentur ad nostre infirmitatis illusionem ac penam’. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, pp. 726-7. See also Augustine, City of God, 8: 16.34 Apuleius, ‘The God of Socrates’, pp. 242-3. 35 The mid-thirteenth century secular clerk Walter Map relates a similar account, saying that some angels, ‘without abetting or consenting to the crime of Lucifer, were foolishly and unthinkingly carried away in the train of his accomplices’, and as a result, ‘the Lord allows them to suffer their penalty in either the solitude of the desert or in inhabited places, depending on the degree of their transgressions’, their names being ‘Wood-men, Dryads, Oreads, Fauns, Satyrs, Naiads…’. Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, (ed. and trans.), M. R. James (Oxford, 1983), p. 321.

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‘liggeþ ofte bi wymmen · as hi were of fleiss and blode’. In addition to this, though, some

of these fallen angels assumed the ‘forme of woman · aday and eke ni[gh]t / Hi leteþ men

hom ligge bi · and bitraieþ hom outri[gh]t’. These angels, however, had a perilous effect

on their partners, causing their ‘membres toswelleþ somme…And somme fordwineþ al

awei · forte hi be[o] ibro[gh]t to deþe’.36

These faeries who assume womanly form appear again in the early fifteenth

century treatise Dives and Pauper. After a discussion as to the practicalities of an ethereal

spirit engaging in coitus with a human, in which Pauper informs Dives that these ‘fendys’

are capable of making a ‘body of þe eyr in what lycnesse God suffryth hym’, Pauper

explains that these beings can transfigure into the ‘lyknesse of man or of woman’,

explaining further:

And þe fendis þat temptyn folc to lecherie ben mest besy for to aperyn in mannys lycnesse & womannys to don lecherye with folc & so bryngyn hem to lecherie, & in speche of þe peple it arn clepyd eluys. But in Latyn whan þei aperyn in þe lycnesse of man it arn clepyd incubi, and whan þey aperyn in þo lycnesse of woman it arn clepyd succuby.37

Aside from distinguishing between incubi and succubi, this passage also illuminates

another significant distinction between Latin and the ‘speche of þe peple’. Here,

underpinning this scholastic treatise is a hint at a vast folkloric tradition, where it is elves

who are the source of such ‘lecherie’. This, however, should not surprise us, for, as

Gurevich notes, folklore in the Middle Ages cut across class boundaries, being as much a

part of learned culture as it was for popular culture.38

The eleventh century medical miscellany Lacnunga takes many of its

prescriptions from popular culture, being more a collection of folk remedies than a 36 Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna Hill (ed.), The South English Legendary, EETS 236 (London, 1956), pp. 408-10.37 Priscilla Barnum (ed.), Dives and Pauper, EETS 280 (London, 1980), p. 118.38 Gurevich, Medieval popular Culture, p. 21.

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coherent treatise on medicine. It locates the mischief of elves as one of the most recurrent

sources of illness, giving cures for ‘elf-shot’, a disease caused by the invisible but

apparently traceable attack of these elves.39 Exorcisms were also employed to combat

these malevolent elves. These rites often involved a complex mixture of liturgical and

folkloric elements. There was, as Richard Kieckhefer notes, no firm distinction between

official exorcisms used by the higher clergy and popular exorcisms devised by lower

clergy or even laypeople.40 One such exorcism begins by conjuring out ‘elves and all

sorts of demons’, while another calls on all of God’s saints to cast the ‘accursed elves’

into the eternal hellfire prepared for them.41 An exorcism of this kind occurs in the

‘Miller’s Tale’, where John, believing Nicholas to be entranced, performs his ‘nyght-

spel’:

‘What! Nicholay! What, how! What, looke adoun!Awak, and thenk on Cristes passioun!I crouche thee from elves and fro wightes’.Therwith the nyght-spel seyde he anon-rightesOn foure halves of the hous aboute,And on the thresshfold of the dore withoute:‘Jhesu Crist and Seinte Benedight,Blesse this hous from every wikked wight,For nyghtes verye, the white pater-noster!Where wentestow, Seinte Petres soster?’42

This exorcism demonstrates the mixture of Christian and folkloric elements characteristic

of such a rite, and remembering John’s social position as a carpenter illuminates the fact

that rites such as these were, at least in Chaucer’s eyes, a part of popular folkloric culture.

Not all faeries in medieval popular culture, however, were unequivocally

malevolent. Gervase of Tilbury gives an account of Portunes, the English equivalent of

39 Edward Pettit (ed. and trans.), Lacnunga (Lewiston, 2001).40 Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 72-3.41 British Library, MS Sloane 962 and 963. Quoted from Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, p. 73.42 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1987), p. 72.

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Scottish Brownies. These faeries belong to the class of friendly house-spirits, along with

Nisses, Kobolods, and Hobgoblins. Gervase associates them with the lower classes of

medieval society, hinting at their popular folkloric roots, saying:

When peasants stay up late at night for the sake of domestic tasks, suddenly, though the doors are closed, they are there warming themselves at the fire and eating little frogs which they bring out of their pockets and roast on the coals. They have an aged appearance, and a wrinkled face; they are very small in stature, measuring less than half a thumb, and they wear tiny rags sewn together. If there should be anything to be carried in the house or any heavy task to be done, they apply themselves to the work, and accomplish it more quickly than it could be done by human means.43

Gervase goes on to explain that it is a law of their nature not to cause harm to the

peasants they appeared to, but uncertainty arises in their relationship with humans when

he notes a way in which they could be something of a nuisance:

when on occasions Englishmen ride alone through uncertain shadows of night, a Portune sometimes attaches himself to the rider without being seen, and when he has accompanied him on his way for some time, there comes a moment when he seizes the reigns and leads the horse into some nearby mud. While the horse wallows stuck in the mud, the Portune goes off roaring with laughter.44

It is important to note that both these accounts are set in darkness, the former occurring

‘late at night’, and the later in the ‘uncertain shadows of night’. This is highly significant,

as medieval faeries are always associated with either literal or symbolic darkness, an

ambiguous state associated with sleep and dreams; with the palpable recognition of the

subconscious, and also with the liminal horizon between the known and the unknown,

43 ‘cum nocturnas propter domesticus operas agunt uigilias, subito | clausis ianuis ad ignem calefiunt, et ranunculas e sinu proiectas, prunes impositas, comedunt. Senili uultu, facie corrugata, statura pusilli, dimidium pollicis non habentes, panniculis consertis induuntur; et si quid gestandum in domo fuerit aut honerosi operas agendum, ad operandum se ingerunt, cicius humana facilitate’. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, pp. 676-7.44 ‘Cum enim inter ambiguas noctis tenebras Angli solitarii quandoque equitant, portunas nonnumquam inuisus equitanti se copulat, et cum diucius comitatur euntem, tandem loris arreptis equum in lutum ad manum ducit; in quo dum infixus uolutatur, portunus exiens cachinnum facit’. This passage exemplifies the trickster personae widespread in popular depictions of medieval faeries, a characteristic adopted by later English authors, represented most famously by Shakespeare’s Robin-Goodfellow. Ibid.

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where wonders are likely to occur, and where fears and superstitions are more easily

realized in the folkloric mind.

The 1127 entry of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, without calling them faeries, gives

an account of such creatures likewise shrouded in darkness and mystery:

Let it not be thought remarkable, the truth of what we say, because it was fully known all over the land, that immediately after [the earl of Normandy] came there…many men saw and heard many huntsman hunting. The huntsmen were black and huge and loathsome, and their hounds all black and wide-eyed and loathsome, and they rode on black horses and on black he-goats. This was seen in the very deer-park of the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods there were from that same town to Stamford; and the monks heard the horns blow that they blew in the night. Honest men who kept watch in the night said that it seemed to them there might well have been about twenty or thirty hornblowers. This was seen and heard from when he came there, all that Lenten-tide right up to Easter.45

These creatures are a perfect example of what are now classified as ‘hunting faeries’ or

‘trooping faeries’, to which strange noises heard in the shadows of the forest were often

attributed, as were sudden gusts of wind, which were supposed to be caused by their fast

riding. Hunting faeries of this kind appear later in the early fourteenth century Middle

English romance Sir Orfeo, in which King Orfeo’s wife Herodis is taken underground by

the faery king to the brightly illuminated and lavishly arrayed realm of faery. Orfeo then,

opting to dedicate his life to searching for his abducted wife, abdicates his throne, and

while wandering the forest, he encounters:

Þe king of fairy wiþ his rout45 Eall þet he mihte taken wiðinnen, wiðuten, of læred of læwed, swa he sende ouer sæ; na god þær ne dide ne na god ðær ne læuede. Ne þince man na sellice þet we soð seggen; for hit wæs ful cuð ofer eall land þet swa radlice swa he þær com…þa sægon herdon fela men feole huntes hunten. Đa huntes wæron swarte micele ladlice, here hundes ealle swarte bradegede ladlice, hi ridone on swarte hors on swarte bucces. Þis wæs segon on þe selue derfald in þa tune on Burch on ealle þa wudes ða wæron fram þa selua tune to Stanforde; þa muneces herdon ða horn blawen þet hi blewen on nihtes. Soðfeste men heom kepten on nihtes; sæidon, þes þe heom þuhte, þet þær mihte wel ben abuton twenty oðer þritti hornblaweres. Þis wæs sægon herd fram þet he þider com eall þet lente[n]tid onan to Eastren. Cecily Clark, (ed.), The Peterborough Chronicle: 1070-1154 (Oxford, 1958), pp. 51-2; M. J. Swanton (trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (London, 1996), p. 258.

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Com to hunt him al aboutWiþ dim cri and bloweingAnd houndes also wiþ him berking;Ac no best þai no nome,No never he nist whider þai bi-come.And oþer while he mi[gh]t him seAs a gret ost bi him te,Wele atourned, ten hundred kni[gh]tes,Ich y-armed to his ri[gh]tes,Of cuntenaunce stout and fersWiþ mani desplaid baners,And ich his swerd y-drawe hold—Ac never he nist whider þai wold. (281-96)46

Walter Map gives an account of King Herla, whose tale shares affinities with both

the report of faries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and with the faeries depicted in Sir

Orfeo. According to Map’s tale, Herla, ‘a king of the most ancient Britons’, went

underground with the king of Faery, and after an interval of darkness, arrived in

faeryland, a brilliantly illuminated kingdom ‘as comely in every part as the palace of the

sun described by Naso’. After a lavish wedding feast, Herla was laden with precious

gifts, as well as a small bloodhound, and escorted out of faeryland under the instructions

that no member of his retinue may dismount unless the hound jumps down from the lap

of Herla. The story holds that the hound remained in the lap of the king, who, after

hundreds of years, ‘still holds on his mad course with his band in eternal wanderings’.47

The similarities between the occurrence in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the motifs

ascribed to faeries and faeryland in Sir Orfeo, and Map’s account of King Herla, suggest

a close relationship between popular faery beliefs and their representations in literature.

In quoting Likhachev, Gurevich makes a similar assertion, saying: ‘however different

folklore and literature were in the Middle Ages, they had many more points of contact

46 A. V. Schmidt and Nicolas Jacobs (ed.), Medieval English Romances: Part One (London, 1980), pp. 160-1.47 Map, De Nugis Curialium, pp. 26-31.

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than in modern times.48 Le Goff argues that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the

marvelous made its most prominent appearance in high culture,49 and it is not surprising

that the literature of this period echoed this phenomenon. By this time romance had

become the dominate popular form, in which marvelous elements were both essential and

ubiquitous.50 Accordingly, the historic romances of Geoffrey of Monmouth, as we have

already seen, made full use of the faery element, along with those of Wace and Layamon,

while the French Arthurian romances of Chrétein likewise abound in marvelous

phenomena.

This trend continued into the fourteenth century: the Gawain-Poet’s Green Knight

may be the most famous medieval faery, while C. S. Lewis notes that Gower’s ‘fairy way

of writing’ exceeds that of any other medieval English court poet.51 Furthermore,

romances during this time maintained their popular appeal. The Auchinleck Manuscript,

a mid-fourteenth century miscellany that Chaucer may have had in his possession at one

time, contains a number of romances, such as Sir Orfeo, that frequently make use of

faeries, faeryland, and other marvelous phenomena, providing evidence for both the

widespread popularity of these romances during this period and the ubiquity of their

employment of the faery element.52

48 Gurevich, Medieval popular Culture, p. 21.49 Le Goff, Medieval Imagination, p. 29.50 Finlayson, ‘The Marvelous in Middle English Romance’, p. 365451 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford, 1936), p. 210.52 Though there is ample evidence to support this, no proof is possible, and all that can be ultimately said, as Pearsall notes, is that both Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript were in London at the same time. Derek Pearsall, ‘Introduction’, in Derek Pearsall and I. C. Cunningham (ed.), The Auchinleck Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates’ MS. 19.2.1 (London, 1979), p. xi. Laura Hibbard Loomis provides the most convincing argument for Chaucer’s familiarity with the Auchinleck Manuscript. See Laura Hibbard Loomis, ‘Chaucer and the Auchinleck MS: Thopas and Guy of Warwick’, in Laura Hibbard Loomis (ed.), Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York, 1940), pp. 111-28; ‘Chaucer and the Breton Lays of the Auchinleck MS’, Studies in Philology 38 (1941): 14-33; ‘The Auchinleck Manuscript and a Possible London Bookshop of 1330-1340’, PMLA 57 (1942): 595-627.

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According to Le Goff, however, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a major

intellectual and cultural shift, the ‘aestheticization of the marvelous’, in which the

marvelous ceased to hold a significant place in the medieval paradigm and became

increasingly employed merely as a literary and artistic ornament.53 Initially, this

hypothesis seems highly plausible; a look at the Canterbury Tales shows all of Chaucer’s

marvels either spatially or chronologically removed from his fourteenth century England.

The ‘land fulfild of fayerye’ (859) in the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ occurs ‘manye hundred

yeres ago’ (863), and the ‘contree of fairye’ (719) in ‘Sir Thopas’ is found ‘In Flaundres,

al biyonde the see’ (803), while the ‘Merchant’s Tale’, with the king and queen of

‘fayerye’, takes place in ‘Lumbardye’. Likewise, the marvelous events of the ‘Squire’s

Tale’ occur in the exotic east, while the ‘magic’ of the ‘Franklin’s Tale’ takes place in

‘Britayne’. These associations, however, may be more complex than they initially seem.

John’s aforementioned reaction to Nicholas’ feigned illness in the ‘Miller’s Tale’ must be

kept in mind, as should the fact that the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Squire, the

Franklin, and even ‘Chaucer’ himself all tell tales of marvelous occurrences demonstrates

the ubiquity of the presence of the marvelous in the popular folkloric minds of the

Canterbury pilgrims, who themselves are traveling to a shrine rich with marvelous

affinities.

Le Goff’s ‘aestheticization’, moreover, is a dangerously simplistic tool for

apprehending the presence of the marvelous tradition in the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries. While a movement towards aestheticization may have been present during this

period, marvels, especially faeries, still maintained a significant position in both learned

and popular cultures. The Catholicon Anglicum, an English-Latin wordbook of 1483

53 Le Goff, Medieval Imagination, p. 29-30, 40.

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gives Latin equivalencies for both ‘Elfe’ and ‘Elfe Lande’,54 while in the fourteenth

century, the Lusignan family boasted a ‘water-fairy’ among its ancestresses.55

Additionally, in her 1431 trial, evidence against Joan of Arc included allegations of

dancing around a ‘fairy tree’, to which, in a public session on 24 February, she answered:

Yes, near to Domrémy there was this tree. They called it the Tree of the Mistresses or sometimes the Tree of fairies. Nearby was a spring. Sick people are supposed to go there to scoop up water to drink, in order to get well. I have seen that myself…I often amused myself there with the other girls…My brother told me that in Domrémy they said: ‘Joan received her commission under the Fairy Tree’.56

This testimony can tell us much about Joan’s belief in faeries, but more importantly, it

can also tell us much more about the beliefs of her English inquisitors.

Faeries in the fourteenth century then, were not merely literary motifs, ornaments

issued simply for the sake of style, but like literary representations of faeries in the

twelfth and thirteenth centuries, their place in literature echoed from their deep-seated

position in the popular and intellectual cultures from which their representations were

derived. These faery beliefs were neither homogenous nor consistent, for while

scholastics debated over the presence, attributes, and function of faeries in the medieval

cosmic view, popular beliefs were characterized by ever evolving conceptions and

attitudes. This however, seems highly appropriate, for faeries always inhabited and

embodied liminal states. As ambiguous beings they occupied the margins of the known

world, their presence intruding upon dominate discourse, producing mystery and

inspiring the imagination, and though we are often only given glimpses of their existence,

these glimpses are of great worth, as they provide paths into otherwise uncharted terrains.

54 Sidney Heritage (ed.), Catholicon Anglicum, EETS 75 (London, 1881), p. 113.55 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades (Cambridge, 1957), 2: 424.56 W. S. Scott, (ed. and trans.), The Trial of Joan of Arc (London, 1956), p. 27.

16

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