Snake-Man Makes World's Longest Post!
Just remembered, the nearest 'It Happened To Me' sighting I have is of the rather common 'It Happened To Me Mum' variety...
Me Mum grew up in Vauxhall, hardly the most common haunt of the Fair Folk. In some Peabody Buildings, housing for less well off folk. In the late fifties.
She's out in the park and spots one. Do I have a description? Not really. I think it was of the gossamer winged variety. She says she just saw it, as children do, and just filed it away in her mind, rather than reacting to it at the time. And of course, like everyone else, she Swears It Was Real but she can't explain it.
A fair(l)y standard encounter, I'd say. I'll ask her about it properly next time I'm down to see her.
The area's been bulldozed down now to make nicer and more yuppie friendly flats - I certainly couldn't afford them!
Also, a few observations on a General Theory of Fairies:
1) When did they exist? The Day Before Yesterday.
- They're never here now, they always were here before, be it childhood or history. Rather than in the present, although as this thread has proved, not exclusively. Often people who see Them don't really think about it until days, or sometimes years, later. Characteristic of dreams, methinks. But I like to think they were never there at the time, if you see what I mean - they only pop up as memories later. That's a mindfark, eh?
2) Where do they live? In the Uncanny.
(Or the Unheimlich if you want to give it its posh, psycho-analytical title.) Or the Liminal, if you like - the border between real and unreal, rather than completely in one or the other. Out of the corner of your mind's eye, if you like. Unlike ghosts or even aliens, the whole 'proof' thing seems a bit irrelevant for Them; how can you prove or disprove a grinning sprite you've seen, which disappeared with no trace, whose face you can't remember and who you didn't react to at the time...
- So if you want to see one, try: believing you might, while tripping off your head on LSD at dawn or dusk having very little sleep, on your own, preferably in a place you find eerie or you know has occult associations. Who's to say whether they popped up from your mind or somewhere else, after all?
3) What are they?
Maybe they're artifacts of consciousness, psychic jokes from the earth itself (this is the way-cool Ultraterrestrial theory, isn't it?). In this respect, they're never going to be explained.
- Hence the laughing, and the endless, and always spooky, grinning. They're surreal in a way they seem quite complicit with. They always know more than you. Nobody ever encounters lost, broken or hurt fairies, that I'm aware of. Do they?
- They don't seem to need anything living creatures need to survive - there's no fairy ecology, permanent heirarchy or anything else. There's no set form for them. If there is any of this sort of thing, it changes from sighting to sighting. Like children dressing up, or actors, rather than legitimate sightings into a coherent Other Dimension. Hence, maybe, why they Have No Souls, because they don't have a set pattern of existence.
- They Play Tricks On You... like your mind does.
Controversial, or bleeding obvious? Tell me.
And two great, utterly fictional 'sources' which nobody's cited yet, which I'm surprised at:
Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling (who knew his spirits).
A couple of kids accidently conjure up the original Puck, a squat and Earthy sprite who takes particular exception to the Victorian fairy concept.
It has some great, basic Fairy Lore in.
WHICH SAYS:
Yeah, maybe They are the downgraded, forgotten Gods of yesteryear. In the first fantastic story, the powerful smithy God Weland comes over to England with Viking invaders, lives it up for a few centuries before being forgotten, and ends up a shoe-repairing sprite in some forgotten areas of, I think, the West Country. Where's Weland's Forge again?
AND ALSO:
Following on from The Day Before Yesterday concept – they idea they were here but aren’t now, that modernity of some kind has made them leave...
Kipling says all the fairies left at the time of Henry the Eighth’s destruction of the monasteries, claiming They can’t live peacefully in times of spiritual strife, even if it is Christian.
Of course, other writers (some on this thread) have put the leaving at different times. For Tolkien, it was at the end of the great era of prehistory, just as Man was beginning to take a hold over the world.
One of the neatest and most common puts it at the dawn of the industrial age, when Cold Iron rail tracks are being lain all over the country, thus making it impossible for the Fair Folk to get on with things.
But we’ve also heard about the last century’s world wars as being the impetus, so I expect the event horizon will just keep moving forward to keep Them on the edge of memory…
(I bet in the future, some people will claim They left the world after the bombing of the World Trade Centre, or some similarly traumatic event in history. That kind of global news does wrestle you effectively out of any cosily Uncanny mood you might have, doesn’t it?)
And (finally, I promise) for a modern, grown-up, magic realist take on Them, you have to read Little, Big by John Crowley. Which as, amongst other things, one of the most genuinely horrible Changelings in. And lots of ideas about, as you’d expect, scale. But mainly it’s adept at conjuring up the liminal atmosphere, the sense that there’s a curtain twitching somewhere, and if you could only look through it, you’d see Them at last…
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