Elfin music: an anthology of English fairy poetry

besides the conflicting accounts of the elfin lineage. "Most spirits," says a writer in Chambers's Journal, "could contract and shrink their size at will, but the fairy alone seems to have been regarded as essentially small in size. The majority of other spirits, such as dwarfs, genii, etc., are represented as deformed creatures, whereas the fairy has almost uniformly been described as a beautiful miniature of the human being, perfect in face and form." This statement, however, is not even generally correct; it is contradicted continually in legends and poetry alike. It is evident, for instance, that the "Queen of Fair Elfland," with whom the immortal Thomas the Rhymer of "bonny Ercildoune" performed his "dark night" journey into Fairyland, was a spirit who, at any rate, approached the common height of humanity. Such also were the elfin emperors of Spenser, and such were the fairy ladies whom Dryden celebrates in his magnificent modernized version of Chaucer's "The Flower and the Leaf," who were simply departed human beings in a certain state of bondage. The inhabitants of the Elfin World, and generally all classes of nature-spirits, are poetically depicted in all forms and sizes at the whim of the poet or romancer. They are sometimes identical with the original human-sized fairy of the Arthurian and Charlemagne legends, and sometimes with the tiny "good people" of

Gothic lore. These differences in form eventually gave rise to a harmonizing tradition that fits well into the spirit of fairy mythology. In the fine ballad of "The Young Tamlane," that elfin knight, who had passed from mortality into fairyhood, informs his mistress that he can leave his body when he pleases and inhabit either earth or air.

Our shapes and size we can convert
To either large or small;
An old nutshell's the same to us
As is the lofty hall.

The religion practiced in the elfin world is another debated point. According to Chaucer, the book, bell, and holy water, and the morning prayers of monks and limitours friars licensed to beg within certain limits, had, even in his day, thoroughly exorcised the fairies and driven them off the face of the earth. This is a statement which may be true enough in the case of the trolls, brownies, and other survivals of pagan times.

In the old days of King Arthur,
Of whom the Britons speak with great honor,
All this land was filled with Fairyland;
The elf-queen, with her jolly company
Danced very often in many a green meadow.
This was the old opinion, as I read;
I speak of many hundred years ago;
But now no man can see any more elves,
For now the great charity and prayers...