Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green

Scholastic theology could not accept the idea that there were degrees of guilt among the followers of Satan,⁶³ while the notion that some devils were actually redeemable lay even further beyond the pale. Walter Map tells two Faust-like tales of men who put themselves in the power of demons, and both are lulled into a sense of false security when their Mephistopheles figures (in one case a female called, significantly, Meridiana) claim to be harmless fairies. “You fear perhaps an illusion,” says Meridiana, “and are meaning to evade the subtlety of a succubus in my person. You are mistaken”;⁶⁴ and the other tells his victim, a young knight called Eudo, “We can do anything that makes for laughter and nothing that makes for tears. Now I am one of those exiles from heaven who, without abetting or consenting to the crime of Lucifer, were foolishly and unthinkingly carried away in the train of his accomplices” (p. 321). “Deceived by these and similar stories,” says Map, “Eudo cheerfully assented to the pact” (p. 329). Clearly some clerics felt that the fable of the neutral angels was fraught with spiritual danger, while the notion of redeemable demons was, if anything, even worse. “That some demons are good, others well-intentioned, others omniscient, others neither saved nor damned. Error!” [quod aliqui demones boni sint, alii benigni, alii omniscientes, alii nec salvi nec damnati. Error] was the unequivocal pronouncement of the Paris theological faculty in 1398.⁶⁵

      Vernacular tradition too seems to have balked at the idea of fairies as neutral angels. For instance, the French romance of Esclarmonde (a continuation of Huon of Bourdeaux) is careful to distinguish neutral angels from genuine fairies. Having narrowly escaped from a shipwreck as he is hastening to arrive at the deathbed of his fairy mentor, Oberon, Huon comes upon a monastery, where he attends a strangely truncated form of the mass; by producing a holy object (a stole) he forces one of the monks to reveal his true nature to him, and he and his fellows turn out to be neutral angels.⁶⁶ The whole point of this episode seems to be to differentiate these neutral angels from the actual fairies (whose chief is Oberon). Though the Middle English translation draws no clear distinction between neutral and fallen angels (“al we that be here were chasyd out of paradyse with lucyfer”),⁶⁷ it portrays these spirits as holding out a hope of salvation: “but we that be here yet we hope to come to saluacyon” (p. 593). The French original, though, makes it quite plain that they do in fact belong to the third party of angels, those who sided with neither God nor Lucifer: “La tierce pars ne se sot v tenir / Ou a celui [Lucifer] ou au vrai Jesuscrist” (lines 2717–18). The Middle English translation does distinguish these beings from both humans and fairies—“[we] be conuersant amonge the people, & as well as they of the fayery” (p. 593)—but implies that they exercise some power over the fairies: “we be tho that hathe the conducte of al the fayery of the world” (p. 594). The French original by contrast makes the storm in which Huon is almost drowned the work of these demon monks but attributes his delivery to fairy power:

      “Sire,” dist il, “jou t’ai dit verité:

      De faerie oïs onques parler.”

      “Oïl,” dist Hües, “j’en ai oï assés;

      Si m’a ëu grant mestier en la mer

      Il m’ont aidié ma vie a respiter.”

      “Hües,” dist il, “vous dites verité.” (lines 2740–45)

      [“Sir,” he said, “I have told you the truth: have you never heard tell of fairy magic.” “Yes,” said Huon, “I have heard enough about it: when I was in great need in the sea, they helped me to save my life.” “Huon,” he said, “you speak the truth.”]

      Harf-Lancner suggests that we are dealing here with an amalgam of two conceptions of fairyland, one learned and the other folkloric,⁶⁸ but I think rather that the author is drawing a deliberate distinction between the real world of the fairies (that represented by Oberon and his followers) and a demonic substitute (the monkish neutral angels), devised by learned culture as a way of rendering vernacular beliefs less dangerous. This point is illustrated even more clearly in the Scottish romance of Thomas of Erceldoune. When Thomas first encounters the fairy queen, he mistakes her for the Virgin Mary,⁶⁹ but he is quickly disabused:

      Qwene of heuen ne am I noghte,

      ffor I tuke neuer so heghe degre.

      But I ame of ane oþer countree (lines 91–93).⁷⁰

      It is made equally clear, however, that this country is not the devil’s, for as she rides with Thomas to fairyland, she warns him against picking the fruit that borders their path: “Thomas, þou late þame stande, / Or ells þe fende the will atteynt” (lines 197–98). Even more significant is the reason she gives a reluctant Thomas, after his seven-year sojourn in fairyland, for his return to the world:

      Bot langere here þou may noghte duelle,

      The skylle I sall þe telle whare fore:

      To Morne, of helle þe foulle fende

      Amange this folke will feche his fee;

      And þou art mekill mane and hende,—

      I trowe full wele he wole chese the. (lines 287–92)

      If the fiend of hell regularly takes an inhabitant of fairyland as his “fee,” clearly the fairies are to be distinguished from devils, even lesser devils. This point is reiterated in two unique passages in one of the five manuscripts of the poem, B.L., MS Lansdowne 762. In the first section of the poem Thomas sexually assaults the fairy queen and then watches her beauty fade before his eyes:⁷¹

      Thomas stode vpe in þat stede,

      and he by helde þat lady gaye;

      Hir hare it hange all ouer hir hede,

      Hir eghe semede owte, þat are were graye,

      and alle þe riche clothynge was a waye. (lines 129–33)

      At this point the Lansdowne manuscript adds a passage that balances the earlier one in which Thomas had mistaken her for the Virgin:

      Sche woxe so grym and so stowte

      The dewyll he wende she had be,

      In the Name of the trynite,

      he coniuryde here anon ryght

      That she shulde not come hym nere,

      But wende away of his sight.

      She said, “thomas, this is no nede,

      ffor fende of hell am I none.” (lines 143–50)

      In a later passage, when Thomas asks her about her transformation, she explains that it had been a ruse to deceive her jealous husband and that otherwise, “Me had been as good to goo / To the brynnyng fyre of hell” (lines 247–48). If all this were not enough, four of the manuscripts (the fifth, B.L., MS Sloane 2578, is defective at this point) preserve a remarkable passage (lines 201–20) in which the path to fairyland is contrasted with four other paths: those leading to heaven, to the earthly paradise, to purgatory, and to hell. In the traditional ballad derived from this medieval romance these five paths have been reduced to three:

      O see not ye yon narrow road,

      So thick beset wi thorns and briers?

      That is the path of righteousness,

      Tho after it but few enquires.

      And see not ye that braid braid road,

      That lies across yon lillie leven?

      That is the path of wickedness,

      Tho some call it the road to heaven.

      And see not ye that bonny road,

      Which winds about the fernie brae?

      That is the road to fair Elfland,

      Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae.⁷²

      These passages provide clear evidence that some people felt that fairyland lay beyond the boundaries of a conventional Christian cosmology, and