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Romans elect Fabii as military tribunes.
# 562
Treachery of three sons of Fabius Ambustus against Celts.
# 562
(faht'na) The giant, King of Ulster. Nessa, his wife; father of Conor; succeeded at death by his half-brother, Fergus. Chief physician of Eochaid Airem.
# 166 - 562
Arthur's grandson, son of Arthur's illegitimate son, Tom a' Lincoln.
# 156
The sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spencer used Fairyland, as many lesser writers were afterwards to do, for the material of moral allegory. His fairyland adjoined Arthurian Britain, and the elfin and Arthurian knights moved to and fro across the borders. By a double symbolism, Fairyland was also contemporary Britain. Poor Spencer, in his unhappy exile in Ireland, might well feel that England was a fairyland. The moral pattern of the allegory is firmly and clearly traced. Its object is to illustrate the Twelve Vitues of Man, as laid down by Aristotle. There were to have been twelve books, each consisting of twelve cantos. Only six of these were completed, of which the first three were separately published in 1590. Even so, it is a monumental work. Each book has a hero, with his lady, engaged on a quest in the course of which he will perfect one virtue. The hero of the whole is Prince Arthur, who brings help to the heroes in each episode. He is destined to be himself the hero of the last tale and illustrates the crowning quality of magnanimity, in which all other virtues are contained. In the end he will gain the hand of Gloriana, the Fairie Queene. The first book is about Holiness; its hero is St George, the Red Cross Knight, his companion and lady is Una, or Truth, and his quest is to slay the Dragon Error and save Una's land from devastation. The hero of the second book is Guyon, who stands for Temperance, Alma is his lady. Guyon's quest is to defeat Acrasie, or Lust, and destroy her. The third book is about Chastity, and the warrior princess Britomart represents that virtue, with her irresistible spear. The subject of the fourth book is Friendship, represented by the two young knights, Campbell and Triamond, with their two ladies, Canacee and Cambina, sisters to the two knights respectively and both skilled in magic. It is by a magic draught given by Cambina that the two knights are knit in friendship. The fifth book is about Justice, with Artegall as its hero and an iron man, Talus or Punishment, as his page. His lady is Britomart. He has been sent to free Irene from Grantorto. The virtue of the sixth book is Courtesy, with Sir Calidore as its hero, whose quest is to defeat the Blatant Beast (False Report) and whose lady is Pastorella. The political application of the allegory is less clear. Queen Elizabeth is both Gloriana and Belphoebe, possibly also Britomart. Prince Arthur is probably Leicester, Artegall Lord Grey, under whom Spencer served in Ireland, Timias Sir Walter Raleigh and Calidore Sir Philip Sidney. The good characters in the allegory are perpetually deceived, waylaid and persecuted by a wicked magician, Archimago, a false witch, Duessa, and a variety of giants, hags, dragons and malevolent ladies. Both good and bad characters have a variety of magical instruments at their disposal: a magic mirror, an irresistible spear, a shield of adamant, a magic draught, a ring which saves the wearer from loss of blood, the Water of Life and the Tree of Life. We hear of fairy changelings, of shape-shifting and glamour of all sorts, and at least one English fairy tale, the story of Mr Fox (which may be found in Jacob's ENGLISH FAIRY TALES) is referred to. There is a profuse mixture of fairy types, for we have a number of references to Arthurian legend, particularly to Merlin, but there are even more classical references, and much of the machinery is drawn from Ovid and Homer. It is something of a feat to read the book straight through, though there is a compulsiveness about it which leads one on, and it is full of passages of particular beauty.
# 100 - 338 - 614
Son of the Dwarf King, Hreidmar. Loki killed his brother Otr and had to cover him with gold in recompence. This caused dissension between Fafnir and another brother, Regin. Fafnir turned himself into a dragon in order to keep the gold. He was later slain by the hero Sigurd.
# 166 - 664
John Aubrey was one of the most loveable of antiquarians. If it wasn't for him many old customs and fairy anecdotes would have been lost to the world. The passage below, probably from the now lost volume of HYPOMNEMATA ANTIQUARIA, is brought in: Briggs, THE ANATOMY OF PUCK. In the year 1633-4, soone after I had entered into my grammar at the Latin Schoole at Yatton Keynel, (near Chippenham, Wilts), our curate Mr Hart, was annoy'd one night by these elves or fayries. Comming over the downes, it being neere darke, and approaching one of the fairy dances, as the common people call them in these parts, viz, the greene circles made by those sprites on the grasse, he all at once sawe an innumerable quantitie of pigmies or very small people, dancing rounde and rounde, and singing, and making all maner of small odd noyses. He, being very greatly amaz'd, and yet not being able, as he sayes, to run away from them, being, as he supposes, kept there in a kind of enchantment, they no sooner perceave him but they surround him on all sides, and what betwixt feare and amazement, he fell down scarcely knowing what he did; and thereupon these little creatures pinch'd him all over, and made a sorte of quick humming noyse all the time; but at lenght they left him, and when the sun rose, he found himself exactly in the midst of one of these faiery dances. This relation I had from him myselfe, a few days after he was so tormented; but when I and my bedfellow Stump wente soon afterwards, at night time to the dances on the downes, we saw none of the elves or fairies. But indeede it is saide they seldom appeare to any persons who go to seeke for them. This passage is very characteristic of Aubrey's style and contains much that is characteristic of the fairies of that period, their love of dancing, their habit of pinching those that displeased them and their curious, indistinct manner of speech.
# 41 - 100
See: TYLWYTH TEG.
Woman who nurtured many of the Fianna.
# 562
This word derives from 'Fays' meaning Fates, and thought to be a broken form of Fatae. The classical three Fates were later multiplied into supernatural ladies who directed the destiny of men and attended childbirths. 'Fay-erie' was first a state of enchantment or glamour, and was only later used for the fays who wielded those powers of illusion. Although latterly fairies have been understood as diminutive beings inhabiting flowers etc., their true stature, both actual and mythical, is considerably greater. The term 'fairy' now cover a large area, from the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian elves to the British version of the Irish SIDHE dwellers, and the TYLWYTH TEG of Wales, are they bestowing gifts of prophecy and music, living in bliss in their own fairy hills. According to oral tradition, they originate from the angels of the Fall or are children of Adam by Lilith, the elder brethren of humanity who are neither divine nor human, but none the less immortal.
# 100 - 166 - 370 - 441 - 711
The earliest of the medieval romances clearly mark their characters as fairy people. Sir Launfal is a Fairy Bride story, with the Taboo enforced by Tryamour, though to a less fatal issue than usual; King Orfeo makes the connection between the fairies and the dead as explicit as it is in many later accounts of the origin of the fairies. The German LANZELET is equally explicit about the fairy nature of the LADY OF THE LAKE and the Tir Nan Og fairyland which she inhabits. As the French sophisticated writers with their chivalric subtleties took over the primitive matter of Celtic legends, the fairy ladies became more of enchantresses and the magically-endowed knights lost their god-like powers. One true fairy-tale, SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, appears, late in time and treated with great subtlety but with full supernatural quality. Here we have the Celtic story of the beheading match, with the supernatural wizard appearing as challenger. Here we have Morgan Le Fay as a full evil fairy, able even to assume a dual form as the old hag and the tempting lady simultaneously. This story too shows a primitive form in giving a full heroic stature to Sir Gawain. But if the shape of the story is primitive, the style of the poetry is most accomplished. The northwest had a poet of quality in the anonymous author of SIR GAWAIN and THE PEARL.
# 100
From the time of Chaucer onwards, the fairies have been said to have departured or to be in decline, but still they linger. Some 200 years later, Bishop Richard Corbet pursues the same theme:
Farewell rewards and fairies, Good housewives now may say; For now foul sluts in dairies Do fare as well as they. And though they sweep their hearths no less Than maids were wont to do, Yet who of late for cleanliness Finds sixpence in her shoe?A little later Aubrey has a story of a fairy driven away when Bells were hung in Inkberrow Church. He was heard lamenting:
'Neither sleep, neither lie, Inkberrow's ting-tang hangs so high.'Some two centuries later, Ruth Tongue picked up a similar story in Somerset, to be found in COUNTY FOLK-LORE VOL.VIII. It was about the farmer of Knighton Farm on Exmoor, who was on very friendly terms with the Pixies. They used to thresh his corn for him and do all manner of odd jobs, until his wife, full of good-will, left suits of clothes for them, and of course, like Brownies, they had to leave. But they did not lose their kindly feeling for the farmer, and one day, after the Withypool bells were hung, the pixy father met him. 'Wilt gie us the lend of thy plough and tackle?' he said. The farmer was cautious - he'd heard how the pixies used horses. 'What vor do 'ee want'n? he asked. 'I d'want to take my good wife and littlings out of the noise of they ding-dongs.' The farmer trusted the pixies, and they moved, lock, stock and barrel over to Windsford Hill, and when the old pack horses trotted home they looked like beautiful two-year-olds.
Those were only partial moves, not total evacuations, but they illustrate one of the factors that were said to drive the fairies out of the country. Kipling's 'Dymchurch Flit' in PUCK OF POOK'S HILL is probably founded on an actual Sussex folk tradition. Somewhere at the beginning of the 19th century, Hugh Miller recorded what was supposed to be the final departure of the fairies from Scotland at Burn of Eathie. It is to be found in THE OLD RED SANDSTONE as a footnote in Chapter ii.
On a Sabbath morning... the inmates of this little hamlet had all gone to church, all except a herd-boy, and a little girl, his sister, who were lounging beside one of the cottages; when, just as the shadow of the garden-dial had fallen on the line of noon, they saw a long cavalcade ascending out of the ravine through the wooded hollow. It winded among the knolls and bushes; and, turning round the northern gable of the cottage beside which the sole spectators of the scene were stationed, began to ascend the eminence toward the south. The horses were shaggy, diminutive things, speckled dun and grey; the riders, stunted, misgrown, ugly creatures, attired in antique jerkins of plaid, long grey cloaks, and little red caps, from under which their wild uncombed locks shot out over their cheeks and foreheads. The boy and his sister stood gazing in utter dismay and astonishment, as rider after rider, each one more uncouth and dwarfish than the one that had preceded it, passed the cottage, and disappeared among the brushwood which at that period covered the hill, until at length the entire rout, except the last rider, who lingered a few yards behind the others, had gone by. 'What are ye, little mannie? and where are ye going?' inquired the boy, his curiosity getting the better of his fears and his prudence. 'Not of the race of Adam,' said the creature, turning for a moment in his saddle: 'the People of Peace shall never more be seen in Scotland.' Aberdeenshire is in the Northern Lowlands; the Highlanders would not so easily bid the fairies farewell. Indeed, in all the Celtic parts of Britain living traditions still linger. Even in the Midlands, in Oxfordshire, A. J. Evans, writing about the Rollright Stones in the FOLK-LORE JOURNAL of 1895, gives the last recorded tradition of the fairies. An old man, Will Hughes, recently dead when Evans wrote, claimed to have seen them dancing round the King Stone. They came out of a hole in the ground near it. Betsy Hughes, his widow, knew the hole: she and her playmates used to put a stone over it, to keep the fairies from coming out when they were playing there.
Yet, however often they may be reported as gone, the fairies still linger. In Ireland the fairy beliefs are still part of the normal texture of life; in the Highlands and Islands the traditions continue. Not only in the Celtic areas, but all over England scattered fairy anecdotes are always turning up. Like the chorus of policemen in THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE, they say, 'We go, we go,' but they don't go.
# 39 - 100 - 164 - 368
The fairies appear to have an independent existence of their own, to lead their lives in subterranean or subaqueous countries, or on enchanted islands across the sea. They ride, revel, dance and hold their fairy markets, they pursue their own crafts, spin weave, make shoes and labour in the mines; and yet from time to time we come across extraordinary examples of their dependence upon humanity. The commonest stories about them are of their thefts of human babies and their periodic need of a human midwife to the fairies. It is possible that these last may be for the human brides stolen, but here again we see the fairy independence. Mortal blood seems needed to replendish the fairy stock. Sometimes it is needed literally: in the Isle of Man it was believed that if water was not left out for the fairies to drink, they would suck the blood of the sleepers in the house. This was reported by Evans Wentz in THE FAIRY-FAITH IN CELTIC COUNTRIES. The other most obvious example of dependence was on human food. Again and again we are told of fairy thefts of grain, milk or butter, or of them carrying away the Foyson or goodness of food or cattle and leaving only a simulacrum behind. In some of the stories, such as the medieval tale of Malekin, the explanation might be that it was a human changeling who wished to return to the world again and so refrained from fairy food, but the instance are too frequent to allow of that as the sole explanation. In the friendly intercourse of fairy borrowing, they sometimes beg for a suck of milk from a human breast for a fairy baby, or a loan of human skill to mend a broken tool such as a broken ped. In Ireland in particular human strength is needed to give power to the fairy arms in faction fights or in hurling matches. Evans Wentz gives a report of this. Kirk suggests that many of the spectacles seen among the fairies are imitations or foreshadowings of human happenings, as some of the fairy funerals are supposed to be. Indeed however much the fairies may seem to resent human prying and infringements of fairy privacy, it would appear that the affairs of humanity are of more importance to them than they would wish us to suppose.
# 100 - 370 - 711
The first very small traditional fairies that we know are the portunes recorded by Gervase of Tilbury. They were probably carried on in the stream of tradition by the fairies' connection with the dead, for the soul is often thought of as a tiny creature which comes out of a sleeping man and wanders about. Its adventures are the sleeper's dreams. By this means or others the tradition continued, and came up into literature in the 16th century. The first poet to introduce these small fairies into drama was John Lyly in ENDIMION. They are brought in for a short time, to do justice on the villain by the pinching traditional to the fairies. They punish not only the wrong done to Endimion, but the infringement of fairy privacy. Corsites has been trying to move the sleeping Endimion when the fairies enter, and pinch him so that he falls asleep. They dance, sing and kiss Endimion:
'Pinch him, pinch him, blacke and blue, Sawcie mortalls must not view What the Queene of Stars is doing, Nor pry into our Fairy woing.'The Maides Metamorphosis, published the same year as A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, has a scene reminiscent of Bottom's introduction to Titania's elves, and their song makes their tiny size apparent:
1 Fay: 'I do come about the coppes
Leaping upon flowers toppes;
Then I get upon a Flie,
Shee carries me abouve the skie,
And trip and goe.'
2 Fay: 'When a deaw drop falleth downe
And doth light upon my crowne,
Then I shake my head and skip
And about I trip.'
Drayton's Nimphidia is quite a long narrative poem, a parody of
a courtly intrigue in miniature. The fairies in it are among the
tiniest in the poetry of the period, but not strictly to scale.
The Queen, Pigwiggen and all her ladies of honour take refuge
in a cowslip bell, but the ladies ride a cricket, about ten times
the size of their room, and the Queen's coach is a snail's shell.
Neither the King nor the Queen has the powers that belong to Shakespeare's
OBERON and TITANIA, not even the power of swift motion; the witch-fairy
Nimphidia is the only potent one among them, and she relies on
herbs and charms which might be used by mortal witches. The chief
charm of the poem is in the littleness of the actors, the stampede
of tiny ladies-in-waiting, the preparation of Pigwiggen for the
tourney:
'When like an uprore in a Towne, Before them every thing went downe, Some tore a Ruffe, and some a Gowne, Gainst one another justling: They flewe about like Chaff i' th' winde, For hast some left their Maskes behinde; Some could not stay their Gloves to finde, There never was such bustling... And quickly Armes him for the Field, A little Cockle-shell his Shield, Which he could very bravely wield: Yet could it not be pierced: His Speare a Bent both stiffe and strong, And well-neere of two Inches long; The Pyle was of a Horse-flyes tongue, Whose sharpnesse naught reversed.'With PUCK we get back on to the plain road of folklore, Hobgoblin with his shape-shifting tricks:
'This Puck seemes but a dreaming dolt, Still walking like a ragged Colt, And oft out of a Bush doth bolt, Of purpose to deceive us. And leading us makes us to stray, Long Winters nights out of the way, And when we stick in mire and clay, Hob doth with laughter leave us.'William Browne of Tavistock belonged to the same set as Drayton and was one of the group who called themselves the 'Sons of Ben Jonson'. He and Drayton were both lovers of antiquities and both wrote long poems on the beauties of England, Drayton Polyolbion and Browne the delightful, unfinished Britannia's Pastorals, which incorporates a rambling narrative in his topography. The fairies play an important part in it. They are a little larger than Drayton's fairies, riding mice instead of insects, and a little more of folk fairies, having their fairy palace underground and to be seen through a self-bored stone as the Selkirkshire lassie saw Habetrot and her spinners. Like Habetrot, they too were great spinners and weavers, but do not seem to have been deformed by it. Robert Herrick's fairy writings may be sampled in an extract from Oberon's Feast and in The Fairies. The first is full of fanciful turns, and the second is straightforward folklore.
# 100 - 109 - 193 - 246
Like elves, the fairies were originally the souls of the pagan dead, in particular those matriarchal spirits who lived in the preChristian realm of the Goddess. Sometimes the fairies were called Goddesses themselves. In several folk ballads the Fairy Queen is adressed as 'Queen of Heaven.' Welsh fairies were known as 'the Mother's Blessing.' Breton peasants called the fairies Godmothers, or Fates, from which comes Fay (la fée), from the Latin Fata.
# 701 p 245
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