Yes, but elves associated with the dead? And worse yet, deadly?
Purkiss is not alone in casting elves in the shadows of death. Folklorist Micha F. Lindemans shares her opinion in the Encyclopedia Mythica: Alves of old-Norse folklore were “the spirits of the dead who live[d] close together in hills and mountains,” ancestors of the local farmers who offered the earth-sprites sacrifices in return for favors. Similarly, elves of Teutonic and Norse traditionswere originally the spirits of the dead who brought fertility. Later they became supernatural beings, shaped as humans, who are either very beautiful (elves of light) or extremely ugly (dark/black elves). They were worshipped in trees, mountains and waterfalls. The Danish elves are beautiful creatures, but they have hollow backs. The Celtic elves are the size of humans. . . . In stories from the 8th and 9th century [British Isles] there are many references to elves, or fairies as they are called there.
And whether light or dark, white or black, beautiful or ugly, elf or fairy, these creatures were to be respected and feared.
Dwelling on the margins or at thresholds and crossroads—ever perilous places for pilgrims or wanderers—elves are gatekeepers between the realm of living and dead, the seasons, the end of a year and new beginnings. To meander mindlessly into their midst whether in folktale or more recent fictions is to invite trouble, even death. Betty Ballantine says in her foreword to Faeries that the world of faery is a place “of dark enchantments, of captivating beauty, of enormous ugliness, of callous superficiality, of humour, mischief, joy and inspiration, of terror, laughter, love and tragedy. . . . it is a world to enter with extreme caution, for of all things that faeries resent the most it is curious humans blundering about their private domains like so many ill-mannered tourists.”
If in doubt, consider Arya’s lesson to Eragon just prior to their meeting up with the elves of Du Weldenvarden. Wary of his likelihood to offend or embarrass, she coaches, “because elves live for so many years, we consider courtesy to be the highest social virtue. . . . If you make a mistake the elves will think you did it on purpose. And only harm will come if they discover that it was born of ignorance” (Eldest). Arya next instructs him on the appropriate forms of address and formal gestures for greeting (which remind me of the Vulcan “Live long and prosper” and simultaneous hand salute, but more on Vulcan-elven similarities a little later). All of this presumably to save Eragon from losing face—perhaps both figuratively and quite literally—when introduced to her elven kin.
Du Weldenvarden is the “private domain” of the elves, a sea of trees that spans the “entire length of Alagaësia,” a place both “mysterious and enticing, as well as dangerous,” and Eragon recognizes the forest as “step[ping] into fairyland,” “a perilous place for mortals . . . riddled with strange magic and stranger creatures” (Eldest). Nasuada confirms it as a supernatural realm, claiming the elves “placed wards around the forest that prevent any thought, item, or being from entering it through arcane means,” while the witch Angela counsels Eragon to “be careful in Du Weldenvarden.” In so painting this picture for us, Paolini is drawing on traditions of the Archetypal Forest, that dark and shadowy otherworld so compelling and frightening to the human imagination. One need only recall the fairytales of one’s youth, set deep in the woods where dwell the stuff of nightmares: trolls or dragons, talking wolves or bears, ogres or witches or the trees themselves that will consume the hapless traveler. In Jung’s terms, the forest is the site of the unconscious, that dark unknowable part of the human psyche where rules of logic are abandoned, where creativity and magic spring to life—a place to visit, an important place to journey and be tested, but the initiate (whether Eragon, you, or I) must beware the trap of enchantment. To stay in the forest—to remain unconscious—is a kind of death. To spring forth from it, a kind of rebirth.
Small wonder then that elves and fairies and all manner of other fantastical beings and beasties dwell in this mystical otherworld, apart from mere mortal men. We have always been afraid of the dark and the deep woods. (Well, at least I’m not afraid to admit it!) And writers from the earliest medieval poets to composer Stephen Sondheim have deftly played upon our fears, recognizing the attraction and repulsion of journeying “into the wood.” For there live the elves who, even in the epic poem Beowulf that marks the beginning of English literature, are the “misbegotten” descendents of Cain and cousins to the “cruel spirit” Grendel, the supernatural foe that the hero Beowulf must defeat. Such a sinister birthright!
But then so is Eragon’s. Eragon, who as Rider and through his connection with Saphira, is becoming an elf, or at the very least, elfish. Eragon, who, arguably elf-possessed by Rhunön, fashions Brisngr at her ancient forge and tempers the blade with elven charm and spell. Eragon. Brother of Murtagh, who in Eldest, has become vile slave of Galbatorix, claiming that he and Eragon are “the same . . . mirror images of each other.” Like resembles like. Or at the very least has the capacity to perpetuate like. And as so many others know, from Luke Skywalker to Victor Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll to Ged in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, once you have a shadow-self or alter-ego or Doppelgänger (double walker) hanging about, whether you are human or scientist or wizard or semi-elf, there’s bound to be trouble with your double. And it’s usually of the sinister variety.
But back to the woods and the rich, if roguish, heritage of elves.
It’s in the medieval forest where Thomas the Rhymer is abducted by the temptress Faerie Queen whose rosy lips he kisses underneath the Elderberry, a tree noted for its faery world connections. The lady in the “grass-green silk” skirt beckons the smitten Thomas along the “bonny road, / which winds about the fernie brae” and into a seven-year enchantment. Legend tells that he returned after his Elfland sojourn with the powers of longevity, poetry, prophecy, and magic: nice gifts from his green elf lover. One may wonder if Paolini’s Arya bears any resemblance to this faery seductress, for surely Eragon is equally smitten and led along a bonny path to Ellesméra, and, it turns out, ends up not a bad rhymester (E-rapper?), an apt heir to Thomas. Witness the poem Eragon writes “after the style of the elves” for the celebration of Agaetí Blödhren.
In Sherwood Forest we encounter trickster Robin Hood, closely linked with mischievous Robin Goodfellow, also the Green Knight of the Sir Gawain tale, all relatives of the Green Man. Loosely, the Green Man is any eldritch sort (whether the Jolly Ho Ho Ho Green Giant or Peter Pan or Puck), dressed in green or leaves or bark, or all of the above, associated with the forest and the green world and therefore a symbol of the “wildness, and . . . passionate energy of nature,” its beauties and perils (as John Matthews says in The Green Man). Although perhaps better known for their naughty escapades with the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin, Maid Marian, and his rogue comrades are akin to the spirits of the woodland: the King of the Wood, the Queen of the May, and their wood-sprite retinue. While popular film and later traditions painted them as merry and good-hearted and handy with arrows, they spring from the same outlaw and magical source as do elves. In fact, Robin’s derring-do and audacity, his thrill-seeking and dangerous escapades, are in keeping with his elvish nature as Green Man. (Echoes of Robin and Marian as bold bandits who “rob from the rich to give to the poor” reverberate in Eragon’s daring dragon-egg thieves Arya, Fäolin, and Glenwing.)
In fact, Robin’s very namesake is Robin Goodfellow—whom we’ll meet again in Shakespeare’s Puck—another Green Man elven prankster of wood and grove who teaches, Matthews notes, “by paradox and trickery, forcing [humans] to take paths into unknown territory.” And Goodfellow is close cousin to the Green Knight, that very same green guy who strides into Arthur’s court, “full fierce he was to sight,” demanding a blow-by-blow hatchet match. The only knight emboldened to meet the challenge is Gawain and he promptly beheads the Green Knight, obviously a creature of faery, for in the very next gruesomely delicious scene, his decapitated head demands that Gawain journey to the Green Chapel—coincidentally (you guessed it) in a deep, dark fore
st “fearsome and wild”—within a year to receive a retaliatory blow. Of course, what follows is a testing period for Gawain and beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that the Green Knight, like the Green Man, “offers his life-blood for the sake of the people, in return for their own courage and self-sacrifice” (says Matthews). In this, he is not unlike Oromis, who sacrificed his magical powers and able body (as did Glaedr, his dragon) and in Eldest takes on the task of tutoring Eragon, presumably in return for the young hero’s impending courage and self-sacrifice.
Finally, throughout the forests around Camelot, King Arthur and his knights embark on many a magical quest, replete with elvish adventures and faery seductions and perilous otherworldly quests. Merlin dwells in these primal woods (as in twentieth-century tales do pointy-eared Yoda, Wise Old Man figure in Luke Skywalker’s training, and Ogion the Silent, to whom Ged is apprentice), just as Oromis dwells in Du Weldenvarden. Like Oromis (Yoda and Ogion), Merlin’s wildwood roaming allows him to learn “the speech of animals and [hone] his prophetic powers” as Terry Windling puts it in the introduction to The Green Man. And it is no coincidence that the young hero in these tales—whether ancient folklore or current-day fantasy—must stay for a time in the woods to learn from the elf or wizard master how to listen, to observe, to gain the boon of patience, fight with a sword (or light saber or wizard’s staff), and then emerge and rejoin the rest of the world in the hope of its betterment or rescue. For even though a very important part of any hero’s training is the onset of self-knowledge, to stay in the woods is to lose oneself—sometimes to madness, sometimes to death. Get out or go loony or croak. It’s that simple.
All of these magical, sometimes tricksy fellows and dames with fairy glamour about them are allied with the green natural world and have more up their sleeves than those who confront or train with them might guess. They are not sweet and wingéd beings, dressed in tulle and trilling fair songs in mortal ears. Paolini has rightly sensed and communicated the dangers inherent in consorting with elves. Brom warns Eragon that elves, male or female, are fierce sword- and magic-wielders, and can “tear [him] apart with ease” (Eragon). When Eragon first tries to probe Arya’s consciousness, she drives “an icy dagger into his mind” and “ruthlessly crush[es] his defenses” until he reassures her he is an ally (Eragon). In their sword-to-sword combat, even soon after her recovery, Arya clearly bests Eragon. As a result, he quickly learns to appropriately respect and fear her (a fine feminist flourish by our young author, methinks), taking to heart the wise words of witchy Angela: “Just because elves do not display their emotions doesn’t mean they aren’t subject to rage and passion like the rest of us mortals. What can make them so deadly, though, is how they conceal it, sometimes for years” (Eldest).
And speaking of deadly, how about that Elva? She of the dragon mark placed haplessly by Eragon, she of the terrible knowing smile, body of a four-year-old, voice of a forty-year-old. She of the dreadful appetite and appetites. She who can read the “primal fears” of others, especially Nasuada, and feel the unbearable pain of all beings. Elva, as her name suggests, is ensorcelled, a creature of fairy—old wives might call her a changeling. She bemoans the wyrd given her by Eragon: “the magic in my blood drives me to protect people from pain . . . no matter the injury to myself or whether I want to help or not. . . . Use me as you would an assassin—in hiding, in the dark, and without mercy” (Eldest). It seems she, like her elven cousins, bears the mark of Cain. Even after Eragon casts the counter-spell on Elva in Brisingr, his attempt to counteract the original devastating enchantment. And we shudder to think what might befall if the morally ambivalent child-elf falls into the wrong hands. . . .
Yet how to reconcile these dark creations and characters of Paolini with their bright and shining counterparts in his novels? In Eragon we’re told that elves are called the “Fair Folk” because, as Brom explains, “they are more graceful than any of the other races.” When Eragon first encounters Lifaen, Edurna, Celdin, and Narí in Du Weldenvarden, he is struck at once by their laughter and jouissance: “They joined hands and danced in a circle around [Arya] like children, singing merrily as they spun through the grass. . . . It was a wondrous sound, like flutes and harps trilling with delight at their own music” (Eldest). In fact, Paolini—whether knowingly or unknowingly—is describing the duality of elves that came into play around the time of Will Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Prior to Shakespeare’s romantic comedy (and some would argue Spenser’s Faerie Queene), elves were, as we’ve seen, more closely allied with the demonic and diabolical. Danger. Elves ahead. Enter at your own risk. But with the likes of theatrical Puck, Titania, Oberon, and their glittering attendants, elves became faeries became the creatures of stardust and moonbeams, twinkling lights and dances in rings. Clap your hands if you believe. Trickery and caprice still lingered in the background, but the profile of elves and fairies would never be the same.
Though Shakespeare’s Oberon bears some slight vestige of his former fearfulness (moodiness and possessiveness) as Lord of the Underworld and “Anglo Saxon King of the Fairies,” Titania, the once foreboding consort to Oberon, has been distilled to an ultra-feminine nymph. Gone is any dark resonance of Morgan le Fay6 to whom Titania was folkloric sister; gone are any associations of death. Likewise, Shakespeare’s Puck is reduced to a troublesome, meddlesome Cupid figure. Even his tricks on humans seem trite in comparison to his forefather, Robin Goodfellow, who would have sooner lured and entrapped than aided and abetted lovers lost in the faery wood. In short, Shakespeare turns elves into fairies, diminutive, pretty creatures prone to playfulness but never really bent on any harm. The stately beings of Irish and Welsh folktales, the formidable harbingers of danger or guardians of the dead, shrink in stature and power. Purkiss asserts that “the sweet fairies of the Dream are indeed the remote ancestors of every wholly benign fairy, right down to the pink-clad Sugar Plum fairies in tights. In taking the sting of death out of fairies, Shakespeare robs them of their complexity.”
And the cuteness continues through the centuries, at first seeping into, then flooding the narratives of later writers7 including those of the Enlightenment, the Romantics, and the Victorians. Two notable exceptions to the sweet and airy sort are Mozart’s Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, a formidable fairy femme who shrieks her rage, “Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart” in the famous aria,8 and Goethe’s “Erlkönig” (translated as Erl-King or Elf-King) which tells the horrific tale of a feverish young lad claiming the King of Elves wants to abduct him and finally dying in his father’s arms. These two Germanic pieces have in them obvious remnants of the earlier traditions of elves, also true of John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which tells a similar abduction tale of a knight by a “full beautiful . . . faery’s child.” But this nymph has more in common with Morgan le Fay or Homer’s Sirens9 than Shakespeare’s Titania, for she takes the knight to an “elfin grot” where he slumbers deeply and learns from the specters in his nightmares—pale knights, kings, and warriors—that the beautiful lady without mercy has enthralled him. He awakens to continue presumably ever after, “alone and palely loitering,” his life essence drained by the merciless elf-lady. We shall shortly see how Arya is likewise a “belle dame sans merci” to Eragon. . . .
Another English writer who balks at saccharine fairy-lore, Christina Rossetti, recaptures the wickedness of elves. In Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market,” Laura succumbs to the enticements of the goblins and offers a lock of her gold hair (uh-oh!) in exchange for their fairy fruit which she instantly devours in a (ahem!) shockingly sexual way: “she sucked and sucked and sucked the more / Fruits which that unknown orchard bore, / She sucked until her lips were sore.” Apparently, once is never enough. For afterward, Laura lives a tormented existence. She pines and dwindles away, longing to see the elf-men again, but seemingly unable to do so, yearning to “taste” once more their forbidden fruits. Only the intervention of her sister, Lizzie, s
pares Laura from a fate similar to that of the young knight in Keats’s poem.
Arguably, two pieces best illustrate Purkiss’s idea of “the split between a fairyland seen as ideal and a terrible reality that underlies it”: Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. In the former, the knight Roland, son of Arthur, must voyage to the realm of fairy where his sister is prisoner in the castle of the king of Elfland. His brothers before him have attempted the rescue and been beguiled by the fairies, having seen only the glamour and beauty of the magical inveiglers. But Roland alone sees the reverse image of Elfland: “without illusion . . . fairyland is revealed as a charnel-house, grey and grim, with the fairies as the grinning dead,” a place “haunted by dead people, by nameless fears” (as Purkiss describes it). In Peter Pan we meet Tinkerbell, the diminutive and pretty fairy (with a healthy sprinkling of temper and jealousy) and, by contrast, the brash Peter Pan, whose very name suggests his connection with Pan/Puck and all things elvish.10 As Puer Eternis or eternal boy, Peter lives in Neverland with the other Lost Boys,11 a definite nod to the under/other worlds of faery. Here one may play at pirates and raids; one may fly and dally and have great adventures. But the truth of Neverland is that it is a kind of trap. To remain forever a child is to remain forever in the forest is to not grow up is to be swallowed by the ticking crocodile, so to speak. Initially, such a state may appear attractive, but frankly, in the end it sucks to be abducted by fairies.
Secrets of the Dragon Riders: Your Favorite Authors on Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle: Completely Unauthorized Page 13
