The Fairies and the Realms of the Dead

Abstract

Annual General Meeting on 18 March, I970 AT first sight the commonly received idea of Fairyland seems as far as possible from the shadowy and bloodless Realms of the Dead, and yet, in studying fairy-lore and ghost-lore alike we are haunted and teased by resemblances between them. This is not to say that the Fairies and the Dead are identical, or that the fairies derive entirely from notions about the dead, only that there are many interconnections between them, and that some classes of the dead were undoubtedly regarded by the old people as inhabitants of Fairyland. One of our earliest pair of fairies, the Green Children, described by Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newbridge, seem far from being ghosts, yet the land they came from, St Martin's Land, bears some resemblance to a country of the dead. It was an underground land, without sun or moon, but always in a kind of twilight, and access to it was by a cave. It is to be noticed, too, that the habitual food of the children was beans, the food of the dead. There is some suggestion of a connection here, but the medieval example of a full fusing of Fairyland with the Realm of the Dead is the delightful I4th century poem of 'King Orfeo'. The influence here is Celtic, for it is a translation of a Breton Lai.