Seeing Fairies
Page 2
I regrettably never met Marjorie but in several interviews with friends it becomes clear that she was a very special individual. Time and time again friends spoke of her in reverence: for example, “They truly broke the mould when they made Marjorie, she was the kindest, gentlest, most interesting soul I ever met.”8 A simple perusal of the following pages brings this out: written style is, in my experience, an infallible guide to character and Marjorie’s English is straightforward, considerate (see her discussion of the Cottingley photographs), and vibrant with conviction. Talking to those she knew, I had, despite my own scepticism about many of Marjorie’s beliefs, a sense of someone capable of creating a space around her, in which the normal rules of life did not always operate. For example, one no-nonsense house-help, later a friend of Marjorie’s, described her first day of employment: while doing the dishes, she saw a mysterious transparent blue light float over the sink…9
Fairy Sightings
A mysterious transparent blue light floating over the sink… And here we must turn from the history of the collection to the sightings in this book and the problem of fairy accounts more generally. Other fairies in the pages that follow save a child from punishment, soothe a dying woman, and help flowers bud. The worst that can be said about these fairies, in fact, is that some are rather insipid. There is certainly little to fear. Curiously, in one of the very few “nasty” fairy stories, Marjorie feels she has to justify its inclusion as it goes against the grain of other accounts.10 It is a far cry from the fairies of earlier times when mysterious lights were a best-case scenario and where maiming and death were the rule. Take this story from Wales. The experience dates to the early 1700s: it gives an excellent sense of how fairies were seen in the generations after the English Civil War. Some children have run into a circle of mysterious dwarfish dancers in a field and the children are frightened.
In the first discovery we began, with no small dread, to question one another as to what they could be, as there were no soldiers in the country, nor was it the time for May dancers and as they differed much from all the human beings we had ever seen. Thus alarmed we dropped our play, left our station and made for the stile. Still keeping our eyes upon them we observed one of their company starting from the rest and making towards us with a running pace. I being the youngest was the last at the stile and, though struck with an inexpressible panic, saw the grim elf just at my heels, having a full and clear, though terrific view of him, with his ancient, swarthy and grim complexion. I screamed out exceedingly; my sister and our companions also set up a roar and [my sister] dragged me with violence over the stile on which, at the instant I was disengaged from it, this warlike Lilliputian leaned and stretched himself after me, but did not come over.11
If that is not chilling enough, consider the following even more traumatic Irish episode, also involving children, the encounter dating from the 1850s, the account from c. 1910.
One day, just before sunset in midsummer, and I a boy then, my brother and cousin and myself were gathering bilberries (whortleberries) up by the rocks at the back of here, when all at once we heard music. We hurried round the rocks, and there we were within a few hundred feet of six or eight of the gentle folk, and they dancing. When they saw us, a little woman dressed all in red came running out from them towards us, and she struck my cousin across the face with what seemed to be a green rush. We ran for home as hard as we could, and when my cousin reached the house she fell dead. Father saddled a horse and went for Father Ryan. When Father Ryan arrived, he put a stole about his neck and began praying over my cousin and reading psalms and striking her with the stole; and in that way brought her back. He said if she had not caught hold of my brother, she would have been taken for ever.12
It is difficult to be scientific about these matters, of course. How do you measure malignity or fear? But even a rapid browse through the fairy sightings in this collection suggest far less menace than was the fairy norm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I looked through Marjorie’s book for an equivalent reference to a child meeting a scary fairy. The encounter I chose here is fascinating for various reasons, but no one would, I think, say that this is frightening. At very worst it might be described as eerie: note the refusal to make eye contact, the fairy escorting the child away, and the cool touch. We are in Kent and the girl was Felicity E. Royds.
[Felicity] found she had left some object—her coat or a toy—in the rose garden, and was sent back alone to fetch it. The rose garden was surrounded by thick yew hedges, and at the end of it was a cast-iron gate leading into a thicket of rhododendrons. The object, which she had gone to fetch, was on the grass near this gate, and she had just retrieved it and was turning away, fearful of what might come out of the bushes, when she saw coming through the gate a small man leading a light brown horse. The man was shorter than Felicity and appeared to be wearing a blue tunic with something white at the neck. His skin was very brown, browner than his hair. The pony was about the size of a Shetland but very slender. Although she did not feel frightened, Felicity did not look at the man directly, only out of the corner of her eye. He put his hand on her wrist, and his touch was cool, not cold like a fish or lizard but much cooler than a human touch. He led her out of the rose garden and onwards until they were within sight of the house, and then stood still while she went in. She said that she was not at all musical, but while he held her hand she seemed to be aware of a strain of music that was sweet and high but sounded rather unfinished.13
And this is as scary as Marjorie’s fairy accounts get. Not only is this sighting not the equal of the examples above from Ireland and Wales, it is also atypical in the collection. Usually the fairies here are shown to be either unconscious of, or unconcerned with, the presence of children, or they are benevolent. The following example is a nice compromise between these two positions. I’ve stuck again with a child’s perspective.
At the age of eight or nine [Miss Berens] lived in Worcestershire, and she was pushing her dolls’ pram down a lane near her home when she met a man who was obviously the worse for drink. This frightened her, and she walked quickly with her pram to a gateway, where she knew she could open the gate easily. She went through into a field, and there, just inside it, on a big, moss-covered stone, sat a sad-looking fairy with folded wings and clad in greyish clothes. The child looked round to see if the drunkard had followed her, but he had not, and when she turned to speak to the fairy it had disappeared.14
Nor is behaviour the only difference between pre-twentieth-century and twentieth-century fairy sightings. Fairies in Marjorie’s book are invariably associated with nature: theosophists, as noted above, believed that fairies were simply part of the natural process and that each flower, rock, and body of water had its own tutelary spirit. I haven’t kept score but having read this book a number of times I would guess that half of the sightings are explicitly connected with nature in theosophist terms. Compare this now to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fairies, who lived out in the countryside, but who did not (or at least were not seen) helping plants or making trees grow higher.15
Even appearances change with the years. Wings are everywhere in Seeing Fairies: about half of the sightings have fairies fluttering around bushes or gliding from branch to branch. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts sometimes described fairies moving through the air: or in some cases moving from place to place instantly. But wings were not there in tradition. They were inserted in fairy art late in the eighteenth century. The inspiration for winged fairies almost certainly came from the sixteenth-century putti or cherubs (the last stink bomb of the Renaissance), angel lore, and just possibly a line of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock. By the nineteenth century fairies were often pictured with wings (and without), but I know of no nineteenth-century encounter where a fairy is seen flapping around. By the early twentieth century, though, this starts to change—Cottingley is crucial—and by the 1950s, when Marjorie began her collection, wings were acceptable though not de-rigueur fairy-wea
r. Today, of course, wings are the sine qua non of fairies. No fairy-themed children’s party would be complete without two-dozen, cheap strap-on sets.16
All this leads us to perhaps the most intriguing problem of all. Why do fairies change with the centuries? How is it that fairies in 1700 seem to have behaved and lived and looked differently from fairies in 1950, say? Having never had a conversation with Marjorie Johnson, I cannot be sure what her answer would have been to this question. Perhaps she would have replied that fairies do not change but that our perceptions of fairies do? Fairyists from a theosophist background argue that fairies create their bodies and their clothes from our ectoplasm (a word I’ve never really understood), sometimes copying human observers, a view Marjorie Johnson shared to judge by this book. Perhaps they also copy human expectations? A sceptic, of course, would argue that fairies change because they are simply human projections. The human mind has created fairies and, as a result, fairies mutate according to mutable human needs and expectations. Similar arguments are made about meetings with “aliens” and other “entities,” of course, and the sceptics, be they right or wrong, have the neater, simpler argument here. Marjorie Johnson’s book will not, in any case, resolve that problem; the slipperiness of this topic is such that no book or study ever will. But Marjorie’s heroic, life-long effort to explain fairies provides one of the most powerful torches yet to shine into (delete as appropriate) the hidden world of faery/the cobwebbed corners of the human psyche.17
I should note that some folklorists would disagree with the utility of this book. A number, indeed, will argue that the fairy sightings gathered here don’t really count because these fairies (with their wings, pollen, and lack of anger-management issues) are not traditional fairies. But nothing could be further from the truth. These are the new traditional fairies, the latest version of a supernatural or fantasy creature that has been evolving since the time of the Anglo-Saxon elves and perhaps since the time of the pre-Celtic peoples of these islands. Marjorie’s fairies—the bastard children of Madame Blavatsky and Oberon of the Fey—don’t, it is true, resemble eighteenth and nineteenth-century fairies. But, then, the fairies of Queen Victoria’s reign were different from those of Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s day, and the fairies of the twenty-third century will be different from those of our time. Personally, I find Marjorie’s fairies less interesting than those running around the British and Irish countryside, c.1800, bringing chaos and sometimes luck in their wake, but the aesthetics of fairies is another issue altogether.
Last Things
I want to finish this introduction with a proposal, a justification of my editing policy and, of course, thanks. First, the proposal. The Fairy Investigation Society (then under Leslie Shepard) came to an end sometime in the early 1990s. In the past months I have attempted to start the organization anew. I cannot say “bring it back to life” (as Craufurd did after the Second World War) because, for one, there is no continuity of members between the original FIS and the remodeled version; and, also, because I have tried to set the FIS up on a slightly different footing. The original FIS was open to those who believed in fairies. The refounded FIS will be open, instead, to anyone who is interested in fairy lore, believers or otherwise: it is hoped that membership will stretch from hardened folklorists, through Forteans, to the outer fringe of modern “fairies” and fairy mystics. As well as an e-letter, there will be a forum and the sharing of expertise and knowledge. If you are interested, I would direct you to my website www.fairyist.com where you can easily make contact. I also intend, in 2015, to launch, a new fairy census fifty years after the Johnson-MacGregor survey. I hope that this will mean a database of contemporary fairy belief. I will be concentrating my fire on the United Kingdom and Ireland, but I would welcome any descriptions (first- or second-hand) of fairy sightings or encounters for eventual inclusion from anywhere in the world.
Next, a few words on how this book was revived in 2013 after so many years “on ice”: not least because those quoting passages might want to take into account some of the textual problems I faced before they employ Marjorie’s words. The manuscript was, in the autumn of 2012, in the hands of Heather Guy, one of Marjorie’s heirs. For my own research and also in view of eventual publication, Heather very kindly scanned the entire manuscript and sent it to me in pdf, simultaneously using OCR software to email it as a word processed file. My job—and it has proved a surprisingly difficult one!—was to compare the original and the scanned file and to correct the inevitable mistakes that come about when an old-fashioned typewritten manuscript of several hundred pages is fed into a computer. I was helped extensively in this by Jeannie Lukin, whose final communication on her work included the sentence: “I enjoyed a lot of these stories, but my eyes did start bleeding a bit toward the end”; sentiments I came to share. It is important to be absolutely and emphatically clear that any errors of word recognition, e.g. “bad” instead of “had” or “then” instead of “them,” are entirely my own fault, as I have been through the text repeatedly and was at no stage rushed by the publisher. If some have slipped through, I apologise profoundly to Marjorie and to the reader, both of whom deserve better.
While correcting OCR errors I gradually came to realize that there were also, as was to be expected, mistakes in the manuscript. In changing the original prose I gave myself two rules: (1) the would-Marjorie-approve rule and (2) does-this-help-the-twenty-first-century-reader rule. What has this actually meant? Well, I never changed the ordering of the book, despite strong temptations to do so: but I did frequently change paragraph breaks and punctuation. I shifted the boundaries, too, between some of the later chapters, but again never changed the sequence of accounts. I corrected grammatical errors, “typos” and spelling mistakes, which I suspect that Marjorie would have spotted during proofreading. I integrated the book’s two footnotes into the main text changing the language slightly to make the prose flow. I have not, at any point, changed the substance of what Marjorie wrote, even if (very, very occasionally) I felt that Marjorie or her correspondents could have expressed themselves better. There is one exception: the dedication has been altered to take in the extra reference to Leslie Shepard present in the German translation but not in the English manuscript. I presume the German translation represents a later version in this respect. On three occasions Marjorie speaks of illustrations that were to appear in the book: once in relation to an ice tracing and twice in relation to fairy photographs. In two cases these were not available, and so could not be included: I removed then the reference to printed illustrations. One of these three illustrations, however, a magnificent photograph of Marjorie playing a pan pipe to “a materialising fairy,” Heather Guy found in her attic and now graces the front cover. In the chapter on angels, a page was missing from the version passed onto me by Heather, and subsequent searches in the original manuscript, by then in the hands of Wendy Constantinis, proved futile. Luckily part of this page (“When I was down at the point…” to “but I felt so happy”) had been previously published in the Fairy Investigation News-Letter 5 (1961). For the rest I, on Wendy’s suggestion, went to the German translation and retranslated back from German into English with the expert help of Droo Ray. The words from “M.K.F. Thornley, a pilgrim…” to “…experiences with angels.” are, in fact, my own, but should give the sense of Marjorie’s now lost page. I might note here that the German translation seems generally to have been of a high quality, though it abbreviated some episodes. Square brackets contain very occasional editorial notes. Then, a last point: Marjorie wrote her own blurb for the back cover, which has been used.
I have tried to convey in the two paragraphs above difficulties in the preparation of Seeing Fairies. If any reader has the suspicion that I have either failed to spot an OCR error or, far more seriously, that I have overstepped my brief in re-editing and he or she would like to check for their own purposes, then I will be very happy to pass on a scan of the relevant part of the manuscript.
Turning now from d
ifficulties to glory I want to finish this introduction by thanking all those who have helped me in finding the manuscript, with my work on the manuscript, and with my research into the Fairy Investigation Society more generally. I take great pleasure in repeating here some of the names above and of introducing others for the first time: Karen Averby, “Dr. Beachcombing’s Blog,” Janet Bord, David Boyle, Jean Bullock, Chris Charman, Wendy Constantinis, Nichola Court, Adrian Gallegos, Gus Gayford, Wade Gilbreath, Rose Gordon, Heather Guy (and family), Chris Hale, Jessica Hemming, Lesley Hall, Patrick Huyghe, Stephen Lees, Jeannie Lukin, Patricia Lysaght, Suzanne Michaud, Peter Michel, Maggie Michelle, Droo Ray, Bob Rickard, Ian Russell, Chris Savia, Richard Shillitoe, Paul Sieveking, Michael Swords, Stephen Taylor, Chris Woodyard, Yvonne (whose surname I lost, sorry!), Lisi and Lea and Valentina Young, and Folklore’s anonymous reviewer of my 2013 FIS article. The following pages represent the life’s work of an intelligent, dedicated, and passionate woman: they deserve an English-speaking public and I like to think that Marjorie Johnson would welcome, fifty years overdue, the publication of her fairy book, while being tolerant of the trifling changes I have made.
— Santa Brigida, Italy, 15 May 2014
Notes
(1) Simon Young, “A History of the Fairy Investigation Society, 1927-1960,”Folklore124 (2013), 139-156 at 145-146; MacGregor dedicated hisThe Ghost Book: Strange Hauntings in Britain(London, Hutchins, 1955) to Marjorie.