CHAPTER XII

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CONCLUSION.

Retrospect--The fairies of Celtic and Teutonic races of the same nature as the supernatural beings celebrated in the traditions of other nations--All superstitions of supernatural beings explicable by reference to the conceptions of savages--Liebrecht's Ghost Theory of some Swan-maiden myths--MacRitchie's Finn Theory--The amount of truth in them--Both founded on too narrow an induction--Conclusion.

We have in the preceding pages examined some of the principal groups of tales and superstitions relating to Fairies proper,--that is to say, the Elves and Fays of Celtic and Teutonic tradition.

Dealing in the first instance with the sagas found in this country, or in Germany, our investigations have by no means ended there; for in order to understand these sagas, we have found occasion to refer again and again to the _märchen_, as well as the sagas, of other European nations,--nay, to the traditions of races as wide apart from our own in geographical position and culture, as the South Sea Islanders, the Ainos, and the Aborigines of America. And we have found among peoples in the most distant parts of the globe similar stories and superstitions. Incidentally, too, we have learned something of the details of archaic practices, and have found the two great divisions of Tradition,--belief and practice,--inseparably interwoven.

I do not pretend to have touched upon all the myths referring to Fairies, as thus strictly defined; and the Kobolds and Puck, the Household Spirits and Mischievous Demons, have scarcely been so much as mentioned. Want of space forbids our going further. It is hoped, however, that enough has been said, not merely to give the readers an idea of the Fairy Mythology correct as far as it goes, but, beyond that, to vindicate the method pursued in the investigation, as laid down in our second chapter, by demonstrating the essential identity of human imagination all over the world, and by tracing the stories with which we have been dealing to a more barbarous state of society and a more archaic plane of thought. It now remains, therefore, to recall what we have ascertained concerning the nature and origin of the Fairies, and briefly to consider two rival theories.

We started from some of the ascertained facts of savage thought and savage life. The doctrine of Spirits formed our first proposition. This we defined to be the belief held by savages that man consists of body and spirit; that it is possible for the spirit to quit the body and roam at will in different shapes about the world, returning to the body as to its natural home; that in the spirit's absence the body sleeps, and that it dies if the spirit return not; further, that the universe swarms with spirits embodied and disembodied, because everything in the world has a spirit, and all these spirits are analogues of the human spirit, having the same will and acting from the same motives; and that if by chance any of these spirits be ejected from its body, it may continue to exist without a body, or it may find and enter a new body, not necessarily such an one as it occupied before, but one quite different. The doctrine of Transformation was another of our premises: that is to say, the belief held by savages in the possibility of a change of form while preserving the same identity. A third premise was the belief in Witchcraft, or the power of certain persons to cause the transformations just mentioned, and to perform by means of spells, or symbolic actions and mystical words, various other feats beyond ordinary human power. And there were others to which I need not now refer, all of which were assumed to be expressed in the tales and songs, and in the social and political institutions, of savages. Along with these, we assumed the hypothesis of the evolution of civilization from savagery. By this I mean that just as the higher orders of animal and vegetable life have been developed from germs which appeared on this planet incalculable ages ago; so during a past of unknown length the civilization of the highest races of men has been gradually evolving through the various stages of savagery and barbarism up to what we know it to-day; and so every nation, no matter how barbarous, has arisen from a lower stage than that in which it is found, and is on its way, if left to its natural processes, to something higher and better. This is an hypothesis which does not, of course, exclude the possibility of temporary and

## partial relapses, such as we know have taken place in the history of

every civilized country, any more than it excludes the possibility of the decay and death of empires; but upon the whole it claims that progress and not retrogression is the law of human society. The different stages of this progress have everywhere left their mark on the tales and songs, the sayings and superstitions, the social, religious and political institutions--in other words, on the belief and practice--of mankind.

Starting from these premises, we have examined five groups, or cycles, of tales concerning the Fairy Mythology. We have found Fairyland very human in its organization. Its inhabitants marry, sometimes among themselves, sometimes into mankind. They have children born to them; and they require at such times female assistance. They steal children from men, and leave their own miserable brats in exchange; they steal women, and sometimes leave in their stead blocks of wood, animated by magical art, or sometimes one of themselves. In the former case the animation does not usually last very long, and the women is then supposed to die. Their females sometimes in turn become captive to men. Unions thus formed are, however, not lasting, until the husband has followed the wife to her own home, and conquered his right to her afresh by some great adventure. This is not always in the story: presumably, therefore, not always possible. On the other hand, he who enters Fairyland and partakes of fairy food is spell-bound: he cannot return--at least for many years, perhaps for ever--to the land of men. Fairies are grateful to men for benefits conferred, and resentful for injuries. They never fail to reward those who do them a kindness; but their gifts usually have conditions attached, which detract from their value and sometimes become a source of loss and misery. Nor do they forget to revenge themselves on those who offend them; and to watch them, when they do not desire to be manifested, is a mortal offence. Their chief distinction from men is in their unbounded magical powers, whereof we have had several illustrations. They make things seem other than they are; they appear and disappear at will; they make long time seem short, or short time long; they change their own forms; they cast spells over mortals, and keep them spell-bound for ages.

All these customs and all these powers are asserted of the Fairies properly so called. And when we look at the superstitions of other races than the Celts and Teutons, to which our inquiries have been primarily directed, we find the same things asserted of all sorts of creatures. Deities, ancestors, witches, ghosts, as well as animals of every kind, are endowed by the belief of nations all over the world with powers precisely similar to those of the Fairies, and with natures and social organizations corresponding with those of men. These beliefs can only be referred to the same origin as the fairy superstitions; and all arise out of the doctrine of spirits, the doctrine of transformations, and the belief in witchcraft, held by savage tribes.

But here I must, at the risk of some few repetitions, notice a theory on the subject of the Swan-maiden myth enunciated by Liebrecht. That distinguished writer, in his book on Folklore, devotes a section to the consideration of the group which has occupied us in the last two chapters, and maintains, with his accustomed wealth of allusion and his accustomed ingenuity, that some at least of the Swan-maidens are nothing more nor less than ghosts of the departed, rescued from the kingdom of darkness for a while, but bound to return thither after a short respite here with those whom they love. Now it is clear that if Swan-maiden tales are to be resolved into ghost stories, all other supernatural beings, gods and devils as well as fairies and ghosts, will turn out to be nothing but spectres of the dead. A summary of his argument, and of the reasons for rejecting it, will, therefore, not only fill up any serious gaps in our discussion of the main incidents of the myth in question; but it will take a wider sweep, and include the whole subject of the present volume.

His argument, as I understand it, is based, first, on the terms of the taboo. The object of the taboo, he thinks, is to avoid any remark being made, any question being asked, any object being presented, which would remind these spirits of their proper home, and awaken a longing they cannot withstand to return. There is an old Teutonic legend of a knight who came in a little boat drawn by a swan to succour and wed a distressed lady, on whom he laid a charge never to ask whence he came, or in what country he was born. When she breaks this commandment the swan reappears and fetches him away. So the nightmare-wife, as we have seen, in one of the tales vanishes on being asked how she became a nightmare. Again, the fay of Argouges disappears on the name of Death being mentioned in her presence. A fair maiden in an Indian tale, who is found by the hero in the neighbourhood of a fountain, and bears the name of Bheki (Frog), forbids her husband ever to let her see water. When she is thirsty and begs him for water, the doom is fulfilled on his bringing it to her. A similar tale may be added from Ireland, though Liebrecht does not mention it. A man who lived near Lough Sheelin, in County Meath, was annoyed by having his corn eaten night after night. So he sat up to watch; and to his astonishment a number of horses came up out of the lake driven by a most beautiful woman, whom he seized and induced to marry him. She made the stipulation that she was never to be allowed to see the lake again; and for over twenty years she lived happily with him, till one day she strolled out to look at the haymakers, and caught sight of the distant water. With a loud cry she flew straight to it, and vanished beneath the surface.[240]

Liebrecht's next reason is based upon the place where the maiden is found,--a forest, or a house in the forest. In this connection he refers to the tavern, or drinking-shop, on the borders of the forest, where Wild Edric found his bride, and points to a variant of the story, also given by Walter Map, in which she is said, in so many words, to have been snatched _from the dead_.[241] The forest, he fancies, is the place of the dead, the underworld. Lastly, he gives numerous legends of the Middle Ages,--some of which found their way into the "Decameron," that great storehouse of floating tales, and other literary works of imagination, as well as into chronicles,--and instances from more modern folklore, wherein a mistress or wife dies, or seems to die, and is buried, yet is afterwards recovered from the tomb, and lives to wed, if a maiden, and to bear children. He supports these by references to the vampire superstitions, and to the case of Osiris, who returned after death to Isis and became the father of Horus. And, following Uhland, he compares the sleep-thorn, with which Odin pricked the Valkyrie, Brynhild, and so put her into a magic slumber, to the stake which was driven into the corpse suspected of being a vampire, to prevent its rising any more from the grave and troubling the living.

Now it may be admitted that there is much that is plausible, much even that is true, in this theory. It might be urged in its behalf that (as we have had more than one occasion in the course of this work to know) Fairyland is frequently not to be distinguished from the world of the dead. Time is not known there; and the same consequences of permanent abode follow upon eating the food of the dead and the food of the fairies. Further, when living persons are stolen by fairies, mere dead images are sometimes left in their place. These arguments, and such as these, might well be added to Liebrecht's; and it would be hard to say that a formidable case was not made out. And yet the theory fails to take account of some rather important considerations. Perhaps the strongest point made--a point insisted on with great power--is that of the taboo. The case of the lady of Argouges is certainly very striking, though, taken by itself, it is far from conclusive. It might very well be that a supernatural being, in remaining here, would be obliged to submit to mortality, contrary perhaps to its nature; and to remind it of this might fill it with an irresistible impulse to fly from so horrible a fate. I do not say this is the explanation, but it is as feasible as the other. In the Spanish story it was not the utterance of the name of Death, but of a holy name--the name of Mary--which compelled the wife to leave her husband. Here she was unquestionably regarded by Spanish orthodoxy, not as a spirit of the dead, but as a foul fiend, able to assume what bodily form it would, but bound to none. The prohibition of inquiry as to the bride's former home may arise not so much from a desire to avoid the recollection, as from the resentment of impertinent curiosity, which we have seen arouses excessive annoyance in supernatural bosoms. The resentment of equally impertinent reproaches, or a reminiscence of savage etiquette that avoids the direct name, may account at least as well for other forms of the taboo. Liebrecht suggests most ingeniously that assault and battery must strike the unhappy elf still more strongly than reproaches, as a difference between her present and former condition, and remind her still more importunately of her earlier home, and that this explains the prohibition of the "three causeless blows." It may be so, though there is no hint of this in the stories; and yet her former condition need not have been that of a ghost of the dead, nor her earlier home the tomb. By far the greater number of these stories represent the maiden as a water-nymph; but it is the depths of the earth rather than the water which are commonly regarded as the dwelling-place of the departed. Moreover, the correspondence I have tried to point out between the etiquette of various peoples and the taboo,--such, for instance, as the ban upon a husband's breaking into his wife's seclusion at a delicate moment in his family history,--would remain, on Liebrecht's theory, purely accidental. Nor would the theory account for the absence of a taboo in the lower savagery, nor for the totemistic character of the lady, nor, least of all, for the peltry which is the most picturesque, if not the most important, incident in this group of tales.

In fact, the only direct evidence for Liebrecht's contention is the variant of Wild Edric's legend alluded to by Map. His words are, speaking of Alnoth, Edric's son, a great benefactor of the see of Hereford: "The man whose mother vanished into air openly in the sight of many persons, being indignant at her husband's reproaching her that he had carried her off by force from among the dead (_quod cam a mortuis rapuisset_)." Upon this it is to be observed that the expression here made use of cannot be regarded as one which had accidentally dropped out of the narrative previously given; but it is an allusion to an independent and inconsistent version, given in forgetfulness that the writer had already in another part of his work related the story at large and with comments. There he had explicitly called Alnoth--the heir and offspring of a devil (_dæmon_), and had expressed his wonder that such a person should have given up his whole inheritance (namely, the manor of Ledbury North, which he made over to the see of Hereford in gratitude for the miraculous cure of his palsy) to Christ in return for his restored health, and spent the rest of his life as a pilgrim. Mediæval writers (especially ecclesiastics) were in a difficulty in describing fairies. They looked upon them as having an objective existence; and yet they knew not how to classify them. Fairies were certainly neither departed saints nor holy angels. Beside these two kinds of spirits, the only choice left was between devils and ghosts of the wicked dead, or, at most, of the dead who had no claims to extraordinary goodness. They did not believe in any other creatures which could be identified with these mysterious elves. It is no wonder, therefore, if they were occasionally perplexed, occasionally inconsistent, sometimes denouncing them as devils, at other times dismissing them as ghosts.[242]

This is what seems to have happened to Map. In the two chapters immediately preceding, he has given two legends illustrating each horn of the dilemma. One of these relates the marriage of Henno With-the-Teeth, who found a lovely maiden in a grove on the coast of Normandy. She was sitting alone, apparelled in royal silk, and weeping. Her beauty and her tears attracted the gallant knight, to whom, in response to his questions, she told a cock-and-bull story about her father having brought her, all unwilling as she was, by sea to be married to the King of France; but having been driven by a storm on the shore, she said she had landed, and then her father had taken advantage of a sudden change of wind to sail away, leaving her to her fate. Henno was an easy conquest: he took her home and married her. Unluckily, however, he had a mother who had her suspicions. She noticed that her fair daughter-in-law, though she went often to church, always upon some trumpery excuse came late, so as to avoid being sprinkled with holy water, and as regularly left before the consecration of the elements. So this virtuous old vixen determined to watch one Sunday morning; and she discovered that after Henno had gone to church, his wife, transformed into a serpent, entered a bath, and in a little while, issuing upon a cloth which her maid had spread out for her, she tore it into pieces with her teeth before resuming human form. The maid afterwards went through the like performance, her mistress waiting upon her. All this was in due course confided to Henno, who, in company with a priest, unexpectedly burst in the next time upon his wife and her servant, and sprinkled them with holy water. Mistress and maid thereupon with a great yell bounded out through the roof and disappeared.

Clearly these ladies were devils: no other creatures with self-respect would be guilty of such transformations and such constant disregard of the proprieties at church. Ghosts get their turn in Map's other narrative. It concerns a man whose wife had died. After sorrowing long for her death, he found her one night in a deep and solitary dale amid a number of women. With great joy he seized her, and, carrying her off, lived with her again for many years and had a numerous progeny. Not a few of her descendants were living when Map wrote, and were known as _the children of the dead woman_. This, of course, is not a Swan-maiden story at all. At the end of