CHAPTER IV.
THE LIGHT ELVES.
Over the beautiful Light Elves of the _Edda_, in old Scandinavia, ruledthe beloved sun-god Frey; and they lived in a summer land calledAlfheim, and it was their office to sport in air or on the leaves oftrees, and to make the earth thrive.
But they changed character as centuries passed; and they came toresemble the fairies of Great Britain in their extreme waywardness andfickleness. For though they were fair and benevolent most of the time,they could be, when it so pleased them, ugly and hurtful; and what theycould be, they very often were; for fairies were not expected to keep afirm rein on their moods and tempers.
Norwegian peasants described some of their Huldrafolk as tiny bare boys,with tall hats; and in Sweden, as well, they were slender and delicate.When a Swedish elf-maid or moon-maid wished to approach the inmates of ahouse, she rode on a sunbeam through the keyhole, or between theopenings in a shutter.
The German wild-women were like them, going about alone, and having finehair flowing to their feet. They had some odd traits, one of which wassermonizing! and exhorting stray mortals who had done them a service, tolead a godly life.
The elle-maid in Denmark and in neighboring countries was always winsomeand graceful, and carried an enchanted harp. She loved moonlight best,and was a charming dancer. But her evil element was in her very beauty,with which she entrapped foolish young gentlemen, and waylaid them, andcarried them off who knows whither? She could be detected by the shapeof her back, it being hollow, like a spoon; which was meant to show thatthere was something wrong with her, and that she was not what sheseemed, but fit only for the abhorrence of passers-by. The elle-man, hermate, was old and ill-favored, a disagreeable person; for if any onecame near him while he was bathing in the sun, he opened his mouth andbreathed pestilence upon them.
AN ELLE-MAID, OF DENMARK.]
BERTHA, THE WHITE LADY.]
A common trait of the air-fairies was to assist at a birth and give theinfant, at their will, good and bad gifts. Dame Bertha, the White Ladyof Germany, came to the birth of certain princely babes, and theKorrigans made it a general practice. Whenever they nursed or tended anew-born mortal, bestowed presents on him and foretold his destiny, oneof the little people was almost always perverse enough to bestow andforetell something unfortunate. You all know Grimm's beautiful tale ofDornroeschen, which in English we call The Sleeping Beauty, where thejealous thirteenth fairy predicts the poor young lady's spindle-wound.Around the famous Roche des Fees in the forest of Theil, are those whobelieve yet that the elves pass in and out at the chimneys, on errandsto little children.
The modern Greek fairies haunted trees, danced rounds, bathed in coolwater, and carried off whomsoever they coveted. A person offending themin their own fields was smitten with disease.
The Chinese Shan Sao were a foot high, lived among the mountains, andwere afraid of nothing. They, too, were revengeful; for if they wereattacked or annoyed by mortals, they "caused them to sicken withalternate heat and cold." Bonfires were burnt to drive them away.
The innocent White Dwarves of the Isle of Ruegen in the Baltic Sea, madelace-work of silver, too fine for the eye to detect, all winter long;but came idly out into the woods and fields with returning spring,leaping and singing, and wild with affectionate joy. They were notallowed to ramble about in their own shapes; therefore they changedthemselves to doves and butterflies, and winged their way to goodmortals, whom they guarded from all harm.
SOME GREEK FAIRIES.]
The Korrigans of Brittainy, mentioned a while ago, were peculiar in manyways. They had beautiful singing voices and bright eyes, but they neverdanced. They preferred to sit still at twilight, like mermaids, combingtheir long golden hair. The tallest of them was nearly two feet high,fair as a lily, and transparent as dew itself, yet able as the rest toseem dark, and humpy, and terrifying. He who passed the night with them,or joined in their sports, was sure to die shortly, since their verybreath or touch was fatal. And again, as in the case of Seigneur Nann,about whom a touching Breton ballad was made, they doomed to death anywho refused to marry one of them within three days.
Of the American Indian fairies we do not know much. In Mr. Schoolcraft'sbooks of Indian legends there is a beautiful little Bone-dwarf, who mayalmost be considered a fairy. In the land of the Sioux they tell thepretty story of Antelope and Karkapaha, and how the wee warrior-folk,thronging on the hill, clad in deerskin, and armed with feathered arrowand spear, put the daring heart of a slain enemy into the breast of thetimid lover, Karkapaha, and made him worthy both to win and keep hislovely maiden, and to deserve homage for his bravery, from her tribeand his. Some of you will remember one thing against the Puk-Wudjies,which is an Algonquin name meaning "little vanishing folk," to wit: thatthey killed Hiawatha's friend, "the very strong man Kwasind," as ourLongfellow called him. He had excited their envy, and they flung on hishead, as he floated in his canoe, the only thing on earth that couldkill him, the seed-vessel of the white pine.
The Scotch, Irish and English overground fairies were, as a generalthing, very much alike. They had the power of becoming visible orinvisible, compressing or enlarging their size, and taking any shapethey pleased. When an Irish Shefro was disturbed or angry, and wanted toget a house or a person off her grounds, she put on the strangestappearances: she could crow, spit fire, slap a tail or a hoof about,grin like a dragon, or give a frightful, weird, lion-like roar. Ofcourse the object of her polite attentions thought it best to obligeher. If she and her companions were anxious to enter a house, theylifted the spryest of their number to the keyhole, and pushed himthrough. He carried a piece of string, which he fastened to the insideknob, and the other end to a chair or stool; and over this perilousbridge the whole giggling tribe marched in one by one. The Irish andScotch fays were more mischievous than the English, but have not faredso well, having had no memorable verses made about them. The littleScots were sometimes dwarfish wild creatures, wrapped in their plaids,or, oftener, comely and yellow-haired; the ladies in green mantles,inlaid with wild-flowers; and dapper little gentlemen in green trousers,fastened with bobs of silk. They carried arrows, and went on tinyspirited horses, as did the Welsh fairies, "the silver bosses of theirbridles jingling in the night-breeze." An old account of Scotland saysthat they were "clothed in green, with dishevelled hair floating overtheir shoulders, and faces more blooming than the vermeil blush of asummer morning."
Their Welsh cousins were many. A native poet once sang of them:
----In every hollow, A hundred wry-mouthed elves.
They were queer little beings, and had notions of what was decorous, forthey combed the goats' beards every Friday night, "to make them decentfor Sunday!" They were very quarrelsome; you could hear them snarlingand jabbering like jays among themselves, so that in some parts of Walesa proverb has arisen: "They can no more agree than the fairies!" Theinhabitants believed that the midgets never had courage to go throughthe gorse, or prickly furze, which is a common shrub in that country.One sick old woman who was bothered by the Tylwyth Teg ("the fairfamily") souring her milk and spilling her tea, used to choke up herroom with the furze, and make such a hedge about the bed, that nothinglarger than a needle could be so much as pointed at her. In Breconshirethe Tylwyth Teg gave loaves to the peasantry, which, if they were noteaten then and there in the dark, would turn in the morning intotoadstools! When Welsh fairies took it into their heads to bestow foodand money, very lazy people were often supported in great style, withouta stroke of work. And the Tylwyth Teg loved to reward patience andgenerosity. They played the harp continuously, and, on grand occasions,the bugle; but if a bagpipe was heard among them, that indicated aScotch visitor from over the border.
King James I. of England mentions in his _Daemonology_ a "King and Queeneof Phairie: sic a jolie courte and traine as they had!" Nothing couldhave exceeded the state and elegance of their ceremonious little lives.According to a sweet old play, they had houses made all ofmother-of-pearl, an ivory ten
nis-court, a nutmeg parlor, a sapphiredairy-room, a ginger hall; chambers of agate, kitchens of crystal, thejacks of gold, the spits of Spanish needles! They dressed in importedcobweb! with a four-leaved clover, lined with a dog-tooth violet, forovercoat; and they ate (think of eating such a pretty thing!) deliciousrainbow-tart, the trout-fly's gilded wing, and
----the broke heart of a nightingale O'ercome with music.
But we never heard that Chinese or Scandinavian elves could afford suchluxury.
Their English dwellings were often in the bubble-castles of sunnybrooks; and the bright-jacketed hobgoblins took their pleasure sittingunder toadstools, or paddling about in egg-shell boats, playingjew's-harps large as themselves. Beside the freehold of blossomyhillocks and dingles, they had dells of their own, and palaces, witheverything lovely in them; and whatever they longed for was to be hadfor the wishing. They had fair gardens in clefts of the Cornish rocks,where vari-colored flowers, only seen by moonlight, grew; in thesegardens they loved to walk, tossing a posy to some mortal passing by;but if he ever gave it away they were angry with him forever after. Theyliked to fish; and the crews put out to sea in funny uniforms of green,with red caps. They travelled on a fern, a rush, a bit of weed, or evenboldly bestrode the bee and the dragon-fly; and they went to the chase,as in the Isle of Man, on full-sized horses whenever they could getthem! and when it came to time of war, their armies laid-to likeAlexander's own, with mushroom-shield and bearded grass-blades formighty spears, and honeysuckle trumpets braying furiously! There aretraditions of battles so vehement and long that the cavalry trampleddown the dews of the mountain-side, and sent many a peerless fellow, atevery charge, to the fairy hospitals and cemeteries.
AN ELF-TRAVELLER.]
Their chief and all but universal amusement, sacred to moonlight andmusic, was dancing hand-in-hand; and what was called a fairy-ring wasthe swirl of grasses in a field taller and deeper green than the rest,which was supposed to mark their circling path. Inside these rings itwas considered very dangerous to sleep, especially after sundown. Ifyou put your foot within them, with a companion's foot upon your own,the elfin tribe became visible to you, and you heard their tinklinglaughter; and if, again, you wished a charm to defy all their anger,for they hated to be overlooked by mortal eyes, you had merely to turnyour coat inside out. But a house built where the wee folks had dancedwas made prosperous.
Hear how deftly old John Lyly, nearly four hundred years ago, put thedancing in his lines:
Round about, round about, in a fine ring-a, Thus we dance, thus we prance, and thus we sing-a! Trip and go, to and fro, over this green-a; All about, in and out, for our brave queen-a.
For the elves, as we know, were governed generally by a queen, who borea white wand, and stood in the centre while her gay retainers skippedabout her. Fairy-rings were common in every Irish parish. At Alnwick inNorthumberland County in England, was one celebrated from antiquity; andit was believed that evil would befall any who ran around it more thannine times. The children were constantly running it that often; butnothing could tempt the bravest of them all to go one step farther. InFrance, as in Wales, the fairies guarded the cromlechs with care, andpreferred to hold revel near them.
At these merry festivals, in the pauses of action, meat and drink werepassed around. A Danish ballad tells how Svend-Faelling drained a hornpresented by elf-maids, which made him as strong as twelve men, and gavehim the appetite of twelve men, too; a natural but embarrassingconsequence. It used to be proclaimed that any one daring enough to rushon a fairy feast, and snatch the drinking-glass, and get away with it,would be lucky henceforward. The famous goblet, the Luck of Edenhall,was seized after that fashion, by one of the Musgraves; whereat thelittle people disappeared, crying aloud:
If that glass do break or fall, Farewell the Luck of Edenhall!
Once upon a time the Duke of Wharton dined at Edenhall, and came verynear ruining his host, and all his race; for the precious Luck slippedfrom his hand; but the clever butler at his elbow happily caught it inhis napkin, and averted the catastrophe: so the beautiful cup and thefavored family enjoy each other in security to this day.
In the Song of Sir Olaf, we are told how he fell in, while riding bynight, with the whirling elves; and how, after their every plea andthreat that he should stay from his to-be-wedded sweetheart at home, anddance, instead, with them, he hears the weird French refrain:
O the dance, the dance! How well the dance goes under the trees!
And through their wicked magic, after all his steadfast resistance, withthe wild music and the dizzy measure whirling in his brain, there hedies.
All the gay, unsteady, fantastic motion broke up at the morningcock-crow, and instantly the little bacchantes vanished. And, strangestof all! the betraying flash of the dawn showed their peach-like color,their blonde, smooth hair, and bodily agility changed, like a Dead Seaapple, and turned into ugliness and distortion! It was not the lovelyvision of a minute back which hurried away on the early breeze, but acrowd of leering, sullen-eyed bugaboos, laughing fiercely to think howthey had deceived a beholder.
These, then, were the Light Elves, not all lovable, or loyal, or gentle,as they were expected to be, but cruel to wayfarers like poor Sir Olaf,and treacherous and mocking; beautiful so long as they were good, andhideous when they had done a foul deed. It is hard to say wherein theywere better than the Underground Elves, who were, despite some kindlycharacteristics, professional doers of evil, and had not the choice orchance of being so happy and fortunate. But we record them as we findthem, not without the sobering thought that here, as at every point, thefairies are a running commentary on the puzzle of our own human life.