Off with the fairies

How living with Faerie can be good for the soul (a 15 minute read)

By Andrew Trounson

Can the land of Faerie be a comfort to the soul? And by soul I simply mean the place where we are moved by joy and sadness, the place that fortifies us as we struggle between the world in our heads and the real world outside us. But before I travel to Faery, bear with me a moment.

I live in a city, Melbourne, but every now and then I travel into the countryside. Or perhaps, it is more accurate to say that every now and then I pass through the countryside. When the houses yield to pastures, the pastures yield to stony hills and forests, and there is finally distance to see over, I yearn to be in that distance. I want to pull over at a truck stop, jump the fence, and just walk straight, straight to the eaves of the forest atop a distant ridge. I want to enter the distance where greens, greys, and yellows become leaves, stones and blades of grass – the details that painters hint at.

It is a yearning that is almost physical, and it never really leaves me. A yearning to escape perhaps. But from what? I’ll leave that be for now. Let’s go on to Faerie.

In her 1926 fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees conjures a world where the stolid and rather “English” country of Dorimare neighbours the land of Faerie, separated only by a line of hills – the Elfin Marches. All connection with Faerie is banned, no one dares go there. Faerie is suspect and feared.

There is a passage early in the book where one of the characters, the fantastically named Endymion Leer, a doctor who seem to know more than he should, is striving to calm and counsel the hero of the book, the Mayor of Dorimare, Nathaniel Chanticleer.

“(The doctor) leaned forward in his chair, and gazed steadily at Master Nathaniel. This time, his eyes were kind as well as piercing. “Master Nathaniel, I’d like to reason with you a little,” he said. “Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But like the juice of the poppy, if often gives a temporary relief.”

The book is a favourite of the great fantasy writer Neil Gaiman (the author of American Gods), and it was his endorsement on the cover and his introduction inside that made me read it. He describes it as a book of reconciliation, balancing the mundane (Dorimare) and the miraculous (Faerie) as one being necessary to the other. In this passage Mirrlees seems to be expressing exactly this, acknowledging the mundane power of reason, but noting its power only goes so far. It is far from absolute, for there are other “things” that move us.

We can’t ever know everything, especially about important questions like why we love, laugh, are compassionate, are moved to tears by songs and stories, why we think in metaphors, and why we have an expression that says “to lose yourself”, which begs the question of what it is we are losing ourselves from, and where are we now lost?

All through Lud-in-the-Mist it is unclear who’s side we are supposed to be on, that of Faerie – a sinister place of dancing and wildness, and of no return – or of stolid mundane Dorimare where it is clear something is missing.

In his introduction Gaiman writes that in all stories and fables, Faery is the world of the dead. In that sense I suppose the strange land of Faery mirrors the strangeness of unknowable death and the wildness that comes from knowing you will die. In contrast mundanity is built on the assumption we’ll live for ever, you just don’t think about death as you put the garbage out.

Another great fantasy writer, JRR Tolkien, thought long and deeply about the nature of Faery and fairy-stories in his essay Tree and Leaf. Like Gaiman he too sees Faerie as a land at least touching on death. It is a land where we can “escape” death, but where there is always a cost in that power of escape. Faerie is dangerous, two-faced, double-edged. Just think of magic shoes that never stop dancing, the cost of the touch that turns to gold, the corruption enclosed in a ring of power.

 “Few lessons are taught more clearly in (fairy-stories) than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial living, to which the “fugitive” would fly,” writes Tolkien.

But for Tolkien fairy-stories are also an expression of humanity’s great capacity for imagination and invention. Fairy-stories and fantasy, he argues, are completely different from allegories that are rooted in the natural world and try to explain it. In fairy-stories humanity becomes the creator, the artist. We make shit up. And for the story-teller at least, Tolkien says there is no more potent a spell than the adjective.

“When we take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we already have an enchanter’s power,” Tolkien writes. “We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire in the belly of the cold worm.”

Tolkien was deeply religious and a devout Catholic, and he sees this power of creation as a force that brings humanity closer to God, the ultimate creator. And the story of Christ’s life, death and resurrection is for him the ultimate fairy-story with the ultimate happy ending – we are forgiven and offered everlasting life.

But for someone like me who doesn’t believe, the comfort of fairy stories – reading them, watching them, making them up – is a much humbler thing. Paradoxically, my imagination, like the land of Faery itself, is a bridge that takes me between worlds, takes me beyond my own preoccupations to the real world and the real, living people in it. You have to enter the land of Faery – and be careful to return! – in order to see the world with more empathy, freer of your own problems. It takes imagination to walk in someone else’s shoes, or something else’s feet. It is why in TH White’s tragically comic retelling of the King Arthur fairy-story, The Once and Future King, the magician Merlin transforms the young Arthur into different animals to somehow train him to be a good and wise King.

I remember once walking along a city street in autumn, wrapped in my own inadequacies, and from the corner of my eye seeing a brown leaf fall twirling to the ground. But it wasn’t a leaf, it was a sparrow fluttering to the ground in that busy way that sparrows have. Leaves and sparrows are now imprinted on my psyche as metaphors for each other, and more deeply, for the fragility of life. Dried leaves alone would lack this poignancy – they might look pretty, they might need raking to stop them clogging your drain, but if every leaf is now a dead sparrow then the preciousness of life weighs heavily. But it can remind you of what’s important, whether small or large, and in that reminder of the urgency of things, the burden becomes lighter. Perhaps you can finally say sorry to a loved one, call the friend who doesn’t call you, simply smile a bit more often.

A tree soars into the air as all its leaves transform into sparrows, whirling around its bare branches before flying away over the hills – only in Faery.

Finally, Tolkien writes of the power of fairy-stories to help us recover from weariness, that state where nothing seems new anymore, where there is room only for cynicism and bitterness, where to try anything is pointless because it has all been done before and done better than you ever could. Fairy-stories offer recovery because in them the world is reinvented and in that invention we can see anew the world we’ve grown weary of – we are children again.

He mentions the magic and possibility that Dickens saw in the word mooreeffoc, which was simply how the sign outside the coffee room looked when Dickens noticed it from the inside. But fairy-stories, he writes, are more powerful than just seeing the world from a different angle. They create an entirely fantastic world where the everyday becomes wrapped in a new wonder, like seeing your partner’s face and really seeing them, not just passing them by, and seeing them not as you first saw them, but with all the tender wonder of the present. 

“We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses – and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for then may make us, or keep us, childish.”

And in this recovery, in perhaps seeing the world anew and the wonder of it, we can grasp the consolation that Tolkien writes of as being part of fairy-stories. Ultimately in fairy-stories, the wanderer, if they are lucky, will find their way back to the world and it will be a more luminous one for them than the world they left.

In Tolkien’s beautifully poignant fairy-story, Smith of Wootton Major, the Smith of the title must eventually give up the Faery star that had long been his passport to the magic realm, a place he couldn’t resist disappearing to no matter the ties of his family and his world. As he mourns its loss he is comforted by his now grown son:

“It’s that way is it, Dad? I wondered what had become of the star. That’s hard.” He took his father’s hand. “I’m grieved for you; but there’s good in it too, for this house. Do you know Master Smith, there is much you can teach me yet, if you have the time. And I do not mean only the working of iron.”

But enough of attempting to analyse the soulful benefits of Faery stories, which now that I look at it may seem just an elaborate justification for daydreaming. I want to end with a short Faery story of my own, and like all true Faery stories, whether good or indifferent, it has a happy ending. And I guess in a way, that is my point, it is why we need them.

 Entering the distance – a story of Faery

Driving home I kept snatching a look at the hills on the horizon. A police car shot by going the other way. I hadn’t even seen it coming. Instinctively I slowed down and checked my speed – over 110. The police car was disappearing away in my rear-view mirror as I slowed down to a 100.

As I topped a rise, the freeway stretched ahead of me, and that is when I saw in the distance, a car pulled up by the side of the road, something wrong about it. As I got closer I realised it had pulled over on the wrong side of the road and was facing towards me, the driver’s door wide open. A four-door white sedan, it was wound around with police tape.

 It was parked beside a wire fence beyond which the land rose gradually, the yellow grass broken by outcrops of grey rock and stands of eucalyptus that became a fringe of forest at the top of the ridge. I pulled over.

There was no one around. I was wary of going too close to the car, not wanting to interfere with a crime scene, if it was a crime scene. But I walked around it having a peek inside. It was an old car, but the interior was clean – woollen covers on the front seats, old radio and cassette player, a half empty plastic water bottle in the cup holder. That was it. Nothing else.

I looked around and up at the ridge for some sign of the driver and saw something sparkle in the sunlight. I didn’t know how far away, I’m no good with gauging distance, I don’t see enough of it I guess. But it would be a decent walk, at least a kilometre, or maybe two. But I saw it clearly, something shiny and moving in the breeze near a boulder. Taking a quick look around I climbed over the fence. There were large stones, almost like steps, either side of the fence. It was an easy matter to use the stones to climb onto a post and down the other side. 

I walked into the yellow sea of grass as if walking into a picture you can’t forget, and as I walked the grass resolved into loose stones, wallaby droppings and ants as large as spiders. I came to a tall tree stump whitened with age and blackened from some lightning strike decades ago. On one of its skeletal branches perched a magpie, its head cocked, its brown- almost-red eye looking at me. Its gaze made me stop, like a physical thing.

Often, sudden stillness will disturb a bird and I fully expected it to fly off, but instead it seemed to grow bored of me and began to call, high and melodious, echoing within itself. And again like a physical thing, like a door opening almost, I was free to keep walking.

By now I was tired and thirsty, and hungry even. How long had I been walking? Like distances I suddenly had no idea of time either, but a short way up ahead was the boulder and the intermittent sparkling – it was a trailing strip of plastic police tape tied around a tussock of kangaroo grass, like a bouquet.

For a moment I hesitated and the magpie went quiet as if it had noticed me again. But then it went back to its singing and in that moment of apparent normality I went forward and found the driver. He was in the shade of the boulder, lying on his back as if he had fainted. He was older than I, but not by much, perhaps 60 or so. His face was sunburnt, his lips cracked and his mouth wide open, his tongue swollen, filling the cavity. He wore a collared shirt, the sleeves rolled up, faded jeans and old sneakers. Dead of exposure I supposed. I looked back perplexed and there was the freeway and our cars, not that far away it seemed.

And then I heard a “ho, ho,” and I froze. It was my father’s voice. “Ho, ho,” is what he always said on reflex when something delighted him but he didn’t know what to say, as if his delight had crept up and ambushed him. His voice was coming from much further up the slope, perhaps from the trees, and without thinking I began stumbling up towards the forest.

By the time I reached the trees I was out of breath and gasping. I’d come up a dried river bed and as the land flattened the river bed deepened until just head of me it formed a wide curving basin, still filled with murky water and fringed with clutches of swamp grass. And on the far side sitting on a rock was my dead father. He was fishing. He had never really fished in his life, hated it, I thought. But here he was, fishing. As if to confirm his amateurism he wasn’t using a rod but a cork hand-reel, around which the line was wound, like what kids use. He was smiling to himself, engrossed. “Ho, ho!” he said.

“Dad!” I called out, but he didn’t hear me. He was deaf in one ear after all – fell off a ladder. I ran around the edge of the billabong suddenly like a child excited by the water but too scared to go in. “Dad!” I called again as I got closer. “Dad!” I yelled. And then, when I was close enough to touch, “Dad!” I whispered, right in his good ear. But he didn’t hear me. It was like I wasn’t there and something meant I couldn’t touch him. I could only squat next to him and watch.

He began to whistle an aimless tune, as he wound in the line and cast it back into the water. “You have to bait the hook, Dad,” I said, more to myself than to him, but to my surprise he suddenly looked at me and winked. “And before the magpie calls, you need to be gone,” he said and pointed across the water from where I had come, and where on a low tree branch now perched the magpie, looking at us. Then Dad pushed me hard and I fell over. I was shocked. He wasn’t a man to lay his hand on you, and the push had all his old strength, whether it was laying bricks in the garden or lifting the trailer. I began to cry like a hurt child and blindly I ran back around the billabong, Dad calling “quick!” behind me.

The magpie watched me coolly as I ran past it, and then it flew past my ear squawking and on back towards the dead tree stump. Dad’s calls were lost behind me as I ran down the slope and I knew my momentum was gradually overtaking the power of my legs to keep up. Down I went, rolling through the grass as the magpie’s song sounded as if from deep in a cave.

And there I was, sitting with my back to the lightning tree, overlooking my car, the freeway, and the far hills beyond. Out of my backpack I took a small thermos of black tea, a roll, and some cheese. I like the idea of Dad fishing, though he never really did of course. He preferred the shed he built where the nails and screws had their own containers, and the tools were lined up on hooks and shelves, and he would think out problems in his own methodical way that was never fast, but was always thought through. This was when he would just be.

And I thought to myself, sitting there, that maybe I should just be.

So I drank the tea and ate the roll and cheese, I brushed down my faded jeans and said again to myself that I needed to get some new sneakers, and then I went home, where people were pleased to see me. I hadn’t realised I’d been gone so long.

Picture credit: Carla Gottgens

End/