I keep thinking about fairies and medieval culture and what they would have represented. Fairies weren’t granted their benevolent, altruistic personas until very recently, like twentieth century, Disney fairy godmother recently. Fairies as they were depicted in European folklore always had an ulterior motive. We get the tale of the Erlkonig in Germany were the fairy King comes and steals the souls of young children (mostly boys, if you know what I mean). They were witty and conniving. They were tricksters, only interested in situations and people that brought something to the table, people that they wanted or had something they wanted. They weren’t Cinderella’s godmother or the maternal fairies in Sleeping Beauty. Even in the Grimm fairy tales, where both of these stories were first transferred into writ from the oral tradition, fairies followed this paradigm. There wasn’t even a fairy godmother in the Grimm version of Cinderella (Ashenputtel).
I think it’s interesting for us to read romances like Sir Orfeo where fairies play an integral part in the plot development, because it’s almost impossible for us not to associate fairies with the Disney portrayal of them. If you asked a random person on the street, or even did a random poll and asked a bunch of people on the street, what characteristics they would associate with fairies, I would be extremely surprised if more than 10 out of 50 said anything about them being sneaky or crafty and none of them would say they could be evil or malevolent beings. I guess what I’m getting at, is our knowledge of fairies cannot inform our reading of Sir Orfeo or really any text that was written before the twentieth century. I can imagine that the medieval concept of fairies was centered on the fact that these magical beings were not of our world or of God’s world; therefore they were of the devil’s world. Anything not of God was dangerous, and fairies, beings not of this world, were even more dangerous. I guess my point is that people in Medieval England would not have found it strange that no one wanted to go to this fairy world or be a part of it. They would not have had to get passed any notion of benevolence in fairies to grasp the concept of an evil fairy, because all fairies were evil, at least they weren’t good and could definitely not be trusted.
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To continue your argument, I think if you read a tale that involved a good fairy to medieval people, they would be quite confused and shocked. And the idea of a tooth fairy would probably be frightening! (Except for the free money part.) I think it’s notable that even today though there are some distinctions, such as the fact that fairy godmothers are not just called fairies. The good fairy is also a term used.
With the reading I have been doing on medieval magic (which I think ties into fairies), I would find it safe to say that probably the acceptance of fairies came with time and was especially helped by the invention of the printing press for exposure. I also read that “magic and the mysteries of the Church were on some level compatible, enabling the practitioner of magic to call upon God to strengthen his or her power,” so maybe this too could be applied to the idea of fairies even it were in a negative way (Sweeney 43).
I think the fairies in Sir Orfeo are interesting, too.
There is definitely magic and dragons and other mythological/supernatural elements in some of the other tales (Talking animals, etc), but I kind of think the labeling of “okay” and “evil” occurrances of these are kind of random.
I’ve always kind of struggled with the magical elements in the Bible in conjunction with its preachings and warnings against black magic and demonic/evil activity like it. It’s good “magic” when God turns staffs into asps and water into bread, but there are other forms of magic that are demonic and we’re supposed to distinguish those from one another.
Although I don’t have any Biblical lines to support my claim, I think that the fairy world described in Sir Orfeo is meant to resemble what people reading the text during the time would associate with Satan and his demons. I’m just remembering some images from Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno where Satan is kind of…fairy-like; he has wings and is kind of smallish, etc.
…so maybe medieval readers would have been wise to the whole “fairies are no good” thing?
So, for the same of my creative project, does anybody know what this fairies looked like? Googling has yielded a ton of different results. It’s especially hard to find images of male fairies haha.
I’m not sure what exactly they looked like but I can tell you that they weren’t the little, teaspoon sized fairies with wings that we think of today. The fairies like Der Erlkonig and the fairies in Sir Orfeo could look like humans, but significantly more attractive. The Erlkonig didn’t have a body, per se. The original tale describes him as having a torso and kind of a genie like tale. Later versions describe him as a being made up of nature, like he has twigs for fingers and moss for hair, etc. I have a copy of the original sketches of the Grimm Fairy Tales that were drawn by another Grimm Brother. I’ll look through it and see if there are any pictures of fairies. If there are, I’ll scan them and post them here. But I think that the fairies in Sir Orfeo would probably have just looked like really really attractive humans. I can’t remember if they’re described as having any different physical characteristics.
I can’t believe how big of a dork I am. haha
http://www.michelletocher.com/illustrations/the_old_woman_in_the_wood.jpg
This is kind of what I’m talking about with Der Erlkonig. Granted, the Grimm Brothers wrote these in 19th century Germany, not medieval england, but they were originally oral folk stories with ambiguous origins. Hope this helps a little.