Fairy stories abound in medieval literature. For the most part, they have been studied as literary devices deployed by canny authors. Richard Firth Green points to the obvious, but often overlooked, fact that most medieval people believed that fairies could be real. Even the clerical authorities who castigated such beliefs accepted that very real demons might masquerade as imaginary fairies. Thus, he argues that fairies can be understood as components of medieval literature only after they are understood as components of medieval culture: “literary diagnosis . . . should properly follow, not precede, the study of ferlies as things” (12).
The study of fairies, per se, is a daunting task. First, they must be defined and differentiated from a host of other preternatural creatures: goblins, dwarves, brownies, kobolds, and so forth. No clear taxonomy can be derived from the sources themselves, so Green establishes his own definition: fairies are “numinous, social, humanoid creatures who were widely believed to live at the fringes of the human lifeworld and interact intermittently with human beings” (4). A second problem is the breadth of fairy source material. Although they are often associated particularly with Celtic traditions, Green demonstrates that all western European vernaculars had their versions of fairy stories. His samplings range across the continent, although he draws most of his vernacular material from English and northern French sources. And then, of course, there is the vexing issue of what to do with Latin sources written by ecclesiastical elites, which consistently argued that fairies could be nothing other than Christian demons in disguise.
This last problem becomes the centerpiece of Green's study. He does not attempt to trace all aspects of fairy belief across all areas of medieval culture. Instead, he focuses on fairies as a zone of contestation between clerical and vernacular cultures. This approach could easily have led to a standard study of churchmen trying to suppress “popular” beliefs. Happily, as a literary scholar whose first allegiance is clearly to the vernacular, Green pays close attention to the resistance vernacular culture displayed and the complex discourse that developed between it and ecclesiastical critiques.
After a couple of chapters that lay out the methodological issues I have sketched above, the book proceeds, in three major chapters, to tackle several complex issues of human-fairy interaction. First “Incubi Fairies” discusses interspecies sex acts. One main fairy activity was the seduction of human beings, including impregnating them or bearing their children. The classic incubus, conceived by clerical authorities as a demon, was typically gendered male and afflicted young women in the night. As is well known, by the thirteenth century, churchmen had developed a solid scholastic rationale to explain how sexless demons appeared to reproduce, by spiriting off human semen and using it to impregnate women. The logical result was that children produced by this sinful union were, nevertheless, fully human. Vernacular culture never quite accepted all that. In vernacular accounts, beautiful fairy women often seduce hapless human men, and their children are frequently hybrid, preternatural things.
Similar issues fill the chapter on fairy changelings, supposedly left in the place of human children who had been stolen away from their parents. In many circumstances, though, a changeling could also refer to a human child who had been afflicted by fairy magic in some way, or to refer to children of supposedly mixed parentage. The most famous such changeling in medieval literature was Merlin, whose half-fairy/demonic parentage never ceased to fascinate commentators. Green also explores the intriguing ways in which various terms for changeling could be used as insults. Even Christ could be called a changeling, although this libel was generally placed in the mouths of obvious villains, such as the biblical King Herod, to demonstrate their lack of understanding of Christ's true nature.
A final chapter addresses instances of humans thought to be “Living in Fairyland,” usually after suffering a mortal wound or even apparent death. Once again the most famous example comes from Arthurian legends, in this case Arthur himself, who is spirited off to Avalon after his final battle. The idea of famous heroes sleeping away the centuries in fairyland was widespread in medieval culture, as were more quotidian stories of people who had lived through the apparent death of a loved one only to find that he or she had actually been taken away by fairies, who had left some kind of simulacrum behind to be buried. Such blurring of lines between life and death manifested most powerfully in the complex series of beliefs that circulated about the Wild Hunt. They also served as a means through which vernacular cultures could adopt and adapt the idea of purgatory in ways that perpetually troubled clerical elites.
Green recognizes that one overriding dynamic across the medieval centuries was the increasing suspicion with which churchmen viewed fairy beliefs. Always understood as demons in official ecclesiastical discourse, fairies were more and more aggressively demonized as the Middle Ages progressed, along with many other elements of magic and superstition. Only in his short postscript does Green address the intersection of fairy beliefs and witchcraft fully, and I am not sure that I am convinced by his final suggestion that witch hunts may have been less severe in England than on the continent in part because of a healthy skepticism about fairies inculcated into English elites by Geoffrey Chaucer.
Witchcraft, however, brings so many complications of its own that Green is right only to allude to it here and there, drawing intriguing connections that others may want to explore more fully. Green's own great accomplishment in this book is to give some sensible shape to the vast array of fairy beliefs that existed in the Middle Ages, situating them firmly at the juncture of vernacular and clerical cultures, as well as of literary imagination and lived reality.
