From Simon's British Mythology:
In the last five hundred years there have been periods of enthusiasm
for fairies among writers and, more usually, generations of indifference
and disdain (the ‘deserts’ of the title). Looking back at the years
since the Reformation, a juicy half millennium of British history, I can
identify three periods when fairies were important in national British
culture. The first might be called ‘Elizabethan plus’ and stretches from
about 1570 to the English Civil War: in this period playwrights and
poets could not shut up about fairies. Indeed, no twee rhyme was
complete/ without a fairy feat (see what I did there?) The second
stretches through most of the nineteenth century. British folklore
collectors tried their best, at this time, to scribble down everything
they could about the ‘hill folk’ and their deeds. This peaked perhaps in
the 1880s or 1890s. By the Great War it was most certainly over. Then
the third period of enthusiasm started about thirty years ago… I am
writing in the middle of it. It too, of course, will end.
Fairylore
did not alter very much in the first four hundred years. Compare
Elizabethan fairylore (and we have two extraordinary books) with
nineteenth-century fairylore (where we don’t have any great books).
If you do so you will see that fairylore remained essentially the same
out in the British countryside. Fairies had not vanished there. They
were part of the old order: the grim grind of surviving in a landscape
which dated back to the Neolithic. The fairy enthusiasms and the periods
of disdain (which turned on and off like a faulty bulb) were the
inconsequential fashion choices of a relatively small literate class.
The Elizabethan and Caroline scribblers particularly seem to have had no
influence on rural fairylore. As a historian I find this
counter-intuitive. I expect things to mutate: I probably also have the
prejudice deep inside me that intellectual elite matter outside
intellectual elites. But what has impressed me in a decade and a half in
supernatural studies is that rural folklore is extraordinarily
conservative and extraordinarily resilient. The reason that these
periods of fashion matter is that when the light bulb comes on we see
the fairies in our sources. (Read more.)
The Isles of the Blessed. From The Library of Lewis and Tolkien:
One of the most stirring elements of Tolkien’s mythology glimpsed in The Lord of the Rings is
the recurring allusions to a distant and enchanted island — an island
of the elves — that lies far out in the Western seas. The tantalizing
knowledge of this mysterious realm frames the narrative itself: we hear
of this remote region early on, in the second chapter of the book, when
the narrator mentions (almost in passing) that “past the old towers
beyond the western borders of the Shire” lie “the Grey Havens, from
which at times elven-ships set sail, never to return.” And at (nearly)
the end of the book, Frodo, wounded, bereaved, and restless, journeys
there to be healed, and with Frodo we glimpse it at last, the “white
shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
In
between, allusions to the lands across the western sea recur all
throughout the book. The elves hold it in memory, they sing of it, here
and there they speak of going back one day; and the shadow of what the
elves’ return to this land — their eventual departure from Middle-earth —
forebodes hangs over the whole narrative: we know that something
irreplaceably good and beautiful will have gone out of the world.
Meanwhile, the world of The Chronicles of Narnia also
features a mysterious and enchanted land that lies far, far out beyond
the sea, that lies indeed at the world’s very end: “Aslan’s country,”
the homeland of the Great Lion himself. Our first indication that Aslan
comes to Narnia — like Tolkien’s Elves to Middle-earth — from beyond the
sea comes from one of Aslan’s epithets when we first meet him in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: he is “the son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.”
And as with the end of The Lord of the Rings, in the final chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we
catch a glimpse of Aslan’s country: a vast mountain range lying beyond
the world, “warm and green and full of forests and waterfalls however
high you looked.” (But in Lewis’ world the enchanted land beyond the
waves lies not in the West, but in the East, the direction of the
sunrise.)
It is striking that both Narnia and Middle-earth
contain stories of remote and enchanted lands situated across the sea,
lands of great beauty and goodness that lie across the waves and beyond
the mortal world. This image — and the ache of longing evoked by it —
was clearly one that both authors felt deeply. (A shared sensibility
that they no doubt discussed with one another as well.) Where does the
image of such a land come from, and why did both men respond so
powerfully to it? (Read more.)
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