Clap hands if you believe in fairies

Fairies were recast as demons (and people who liked them condemned as wicked) when the 15th century Church decided that belief in them was incompatible with basic Christian beliefs

Elf Queens and Holy Friars

Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church Richard Firth Green University of Pennsylvania Press 2016 Hb, 285pp, notes, bib, ind, £47.00, ISBN 9780812248432 “Hot, isn’t it?” said the elf-queen to Sir Launfal as she lay stripped to her waist in a jewelled pavilion. After sex, she gave him limitless riches and a place in the country. If this was what fairies were like, the Church was going to have a hard time persuading people they should be shunned. “Do you believe in fairies?” was one of the questions posed in the confessional, and shouting “Yes, oh yes!” to your clerical Tinkerbell was not wise.

Richard Firth Green has traced the darkening of the European mind as thinkers rejected the idea of a middle rank of spirits, neither saved nor damned. His title comes from a passage in Chaucer: where once the elf-queen danced, now all that can be found is a friar busily exorcising the spirits that he has stigmatised as demons. In particular, Green deals with three aspects of fairy tradition to which the Church gave a new, more sulphurous explanation. These were the belief that fairies could marry people and have offspring of mixed race, that fairy changelings could be substituted for human children, and that people could be carried away to Faerie and live forever in that undetermined country. These beliefs were incompatible with basic Christian understandings of the world, and something had to be done about them.

But imposing a blackand-white theology on the ambiguities of popular tradition was never going to be easy. The clergy were a literate minority in an oral world where knowledge about fairies was taken for granted. A good preacher should decry the superstitions of the rich as well as the poor, but in practice they didn’t like to curse the hands that fed them. And if the aristocracy believed in an Otherworldly realm, it was often for the best of reasons; in 1359 Bertrand du Guesclin, the Constable of France, married a fairy called Tiffany. She was famous for her good advice, but then that was to be expected; fairies had the best of everything.

So what was it that made the European Church of the 14th and 15th centuries so determined to wipe out opposition? They could have adopted a live-and-let-live policy, as happened in Islam, where the djinn are seamlessly integrated into cosmology. And the clerisy didn’t always stick to the script; one Bishop of Winchester used to reminisce about the afternoon he spent with King Arthur, come from Færie for a bit of hunting. But bit by bit, the theologians ironed out all pluralistic notions. There were only angels and devils. And fairies were not angels, so…

This intellectual solution led to theories just as bizarre as the beliefs they were meant to replace. Consider the icky mechanism of the incubus – demon makes ærial female body, body has sex with a man, demon flies through air with sperm bank, demon makes ærial male body, body has sex with woman, and finally woman has baby. This is nothing if not elaborate, but it is consistent with contemporary knowledge in a way that fairy lovers were not. The doctors of Paris wanted a world which would be understood through one

“The Constable of France married a fairy called Tiffany, famous for her good advice”

totalising frame of explanation. Substitute science for theology, and this ambition sounds very contemporary.

Fairies were phantastici, things of the imagination, and that made them suspect. The distinction between illusion and reality was gradually superseded by a dichotomy between the demonic and godly. By the 15th century, the clerisy had moved from its earlier position (fairies don’t exist and you’re silly to think they do) to one which presaged the witchcraft trials (fairies do exist, and you’re wicked if you like them).

And yet this opposition was all one way. The Church might denounce fairies, but we have it on the authority of the romances that fairies themselves were quite happy to go to Mass and swear by the Virgin. Nor were the boundaries between fairy enchantment and Latin learning as clear-cut as they might seem; Tiffany had been to college. Poetry knows no boundaries. Though romancers might be writing about Færie, or Avalon, or the Terrestrial Paradise, they drew on a common rhetoric of pleasant places. All these locations are cut from the same narrative cloth, and it is no surprise to find Morgan la Fée resident on the same mysterious island as the prophet Enoch.

Gradually the literary elite woke up to these inconsistencies. Some began to construct a literary theory of the suspension of disbelief, the recognition that stories could be appreciated as stories, and not as if they were true. Some simply suppressed all those aspects of a tale which might prove embarrassing. In many romances, where the hero was said to have elfin blood, the later redactions simply edit out his fairy ethnicity – a sort of theological Aryanisation. Other writers followed the clerical lead, and retained all the supernatural elements in their stories but recast the fairies as demons.

None of this seems to have surprised ordinary believers, who could accommodate metaphysical inconsistencies without strain. They knew that a bridge as sharp as a sword connected two worlds, and did not mind if it spanned life and eternity, or the forest and the fairy castle. Who was it that heard that marvellous bird, whose singing made centuries pass by? In the earliest versions, it is a monk; in the later ones, a man entranced by fairy music.

So it’s not just the case that ordinary men and women had a jolly time believing in fairies until those nasty priests came along and spoiled all the fun. Religious and secular story-telling were not so very distinct. And not all of the fun was so obvious at the time. What about people at the sharp end of elfin caprice, the ones who suffered strokes or had crippled changeling children? Might they not have welcomed a few friars sloshing holy water about, if it promised relief from their pain?