Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844. Various
Germanic writer—a native of Warwickshire—take Elf for equivalent, or nearly so, with Fairy.
Of his many-natured Teutonic wights and elves, then, but with glances darted around, northwards and westwards, and southwards and eastwards, Dr Grimm begins with speaking thus:—
“From the deified and half-divine natures [investigated by this author in several of his antecedent chapters] a whole order of other beings is especially herein distinguished, that whilst the former either proceed of mankind, or seek human intercourse, these form a segregated society—one might say, a peculiar kingdom of their own—and are only, by accident or the pressure of circumstances, moved to converse with men. Something superhuman, approximating them to the gods, is mingled up in them: they possess power to help and to hurt man. They are however, at the same time, afraid of him, because they are not his bodily match. They appear either far below the human stature, or misshapen. Almost all of them enjoy the faculty of rendering themselves invisible.”
You turn away your head, exclaiming that the weighty words of our puissant teacher are, for your proficiency, somewhat bewildering, and for your exigency by much too—Teutonic.
Have a care!
However, “Westward Hoe!” Put the old Rhine between the master of living mythologists and yourself, and listen to Baron Walckenaer unlocking the fountains of the fairy belief, and showing how it streams, primarily through France, and secondarily through all remaining Western Europe. “If there is a specifically characterized superstition, it is that which regards the fairies: those female genii,7 most frequently without name, without descent, without kin, who are incessantly busied subverting the order of nature, for the weal or the woe of mortals whom they love and favour without a motive, or, as causelessly, hate and persecute.”8
What, female only? Where are Oberon and Puck? Without a name? Where Titania?—Mab? Without a motive? Where the godmother of the sweet-faced and sweet-hearted Cinderella? Partial, and without a distinct type in your own recollections, you guessingly pronounce the characterization of the perpetual secretary too–French. Driven back, disappointed on all sides, you turn round upon your difficulties, and manfully project beating out a definition of your own; to which end, glancing your eye back affectionately, and now, needle-like, northwards across the Channel, you “at one slight bound” once more find yourself at your own fireside, and on your table The Midsummer Night’s Dream, open at the second scene of the first act.
Inquirer whosoever! A problem lies large before us—complicated, abstruse even, yet—suitably to the subject—a delicate one! To hunt down an elusive word, and a more elusive notion! It is to find a set of determinings which, laid together, shall form a circle fitted to confine that inconfinable spirit—a Fairy; or, if you better like plain English, to find the terms needed for signifying, describing, expounding the Thought which, lurking as at the bottom of your mind, under a crowd of thoughts, rises up, in all circumstances, to meet and answer the name–a fairy; the Thought, which when all accidental and unessential attributes liable to be attracted to the fairy essence have been stripped away, remains; the substrate, absolute, essential, generic notion, therefore—a fairy; that Thought, which whencesoever acquired, and held howsoever, enables you to deal to your satisfaction with proposed fairies, acknowledging this one frankly;—this, but for a half-sister; shutting the door upon another. You may distinguish these terms at your pleasure, by sundry denominations: for example, you may call them Elements of the notion—a fairy—or circumscriptive Lines of such a notion, or indispensable Fairy-marks, or elfin Criteria, or by any other name which you may happen to like as well or better; but when found, call them as you will, they must reveal in essence, the thing which we look for—the answer to the question with which we first started, and to which we have as yet found no satisfactory solution.
As for the process of the finding. This notion is to be tracked after widely, and in intimate recesses; more hopefully, therefore, according to a planned campaign than a merely wild chance expatiation. The chase ranges over a material and an intellectual ground. Of either—a word.
I. The material—is a geographical—region, and may be called, summarily—The western half of Europe. Let us regard it as laid out by languages at this day spoken. Here is a map, roughly sketched:—
1. North-Western CELTS.—Ireland, Highlands of Scotland, and the interjacent Isle of Man.
2. South-Western CELTS.—Wales, Britanny, and the, till lately, Celtic-speaking Cornwall.
3. Northern GERMANS, or Germans beyond the Eider, or Scandinavians.—Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland.
4. Southern GERMANS, or Germans below the Eider, or Teutons.—Netherlands, the German empire, Switzerland.
1. Italy.—Sicily.
2. Spain.
3. Portugal.
4. Latin-speaking France, distinguishing Normandy.
1. England.
2. Scottish Lowlands.
II. From all this tangible territory, we are to sweep up—what? An overlying intellectual kingdom, videlicet—The Kinds of the Fairies, rudely marked out, perhaps, as follows:—
1. The community of the Fairies, monarchal or republican:—The Fairy folk; Fairies proper.
2. The solitary domestic serviceable Fairy.
3. In the mines, under the water; a Fairy folk.
4. The solitary water Fairy.
5. The Fairy-ancestress.
6. The Fairy, tutelary or persecuting, of the chivalrous metrical romance.
7. The Fairy, tutelary or persecuting, now giving and now turning destinies, of the fairy tale proper.
We have then to ask what are the terms, marks, common traits, or by whatsoever name they are to be called, which are yielded by a comparison of such seven kinds. Something like the following eight will possibly arise:—
First, A Fairy is a subordinate spirit.
Secondly, Is attracted to the surface of our planet.
Thirdly, At once seeks and shuns mankind.
Fourthly, Has a body.
Fifthly, Is attenuate.
Sixthly, Is without proper station and function in the general economy of the universe; or is mythologically displaced.
Seventhly, Is endowed with powers of intelligence and of agency excelling human.
Eighthly, Stands under a doom.
To these eight criteria, taken in the nature of the thing enquired, the reflective inquirer will perchance find himself led on to add two furnished from within himself, as that—
First, Acknowledging, as in these latter days our more delicate psychologists have called upon us to do, the names fancy and imagination as designating two faculties, the fairies belong rather to the fancy.
Secondly, Accepting for a legitimate thought, legitimately and cogently signified, the High Marriage which one of these finer Metaphysicians9—instructed no doubt by his personal experience—prophesies to his kind, between the “intellect of man” and “this goodly universe,” we may say that, regularly, this marriage must have its antecedent possessing and agitating Love; that this love must, like all possessing agitated love, have its attendant Reverie. Now, might one venture to surmise that this reverie breathes into the creating of a fairy?
Does the jealous reader perchance miss in the above proposed eight several elements the unity of notion, which he has all along seemed to feel in his own spirit and understanding? Let him at once conceive, as intensely joined, the two permanent characters of tenuity and mythological displacement, and take this compound for
“
From Walckenaer’s Dissertation on the Origin of the Fairy Belief; last printed, in an abridged form, by Jacob, in his edition of the