The leaves that hung but never grew

Just returned from a very pleasant stay in Canterbury. Second-hand book find of the week: Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran ... with an essay upon the Irish vision of the happy otherworld, &c, London, David Nutt, 2 vols, 1895. Bookseller’s pencilled note inside says ‘Very worn! Very scarce’. It is worn, but I have seen worse. I am very lucky to have found an affordable copy.

I bought the book for the sake of Nutt’s ‘essay’ (actually a lengthy study) because I already own Meyer's translation of The Voyage of Bran in the Llanerch Press edition (wonderful publisher, Llanerch Press: I recommend them to anyone with a penchant for classic collections of folklore and legends). But I am going to give part of Meyer’s translation here, since for one thing I haven’t yet had time to read Nutt’s essay and for another, The Voyage of Bran is superb, and I love it:

Bran is sailing on the sea when he meets a man driving in a chariot over the waves. The man sings:

Bran deems it a marvellous beauty
In his coracle across the clear sea:
While to me in my chariot from afar
It is a flowery plain on which he rides about.

‘What is a clear sea
For the prowed skiff in which Bran is,
That is a happy plain with profusion of flowers
To me from the chariot of two wheels.

Bran sees
The number of waves beating across the clear sea:
I myself see in Mag Mon
Red-headed flowers without fault.

Sea-horses glisten in summer
As far as Bran has stretched his glance:
Rivers pour forth a stream of honey
In the land of Manannan son of Ler.

The sheen of the main, on which thou art,
The white hue of the sea, on which thou rowest about,
Yellow and azure are spread out,
It is land, and is not rough.

Speckled salmon leap from the womb
Of the white sea, on which thou lookest:
They are calves, they are coloured lambs
With friendliness, without mutual slaughter.

Though (but) one chariot-rider is seen
In Mag Mell of many flowers,
There are many steeds on its surface,
Though them thou seest not.

The size of the plain, the number of the host,
Colours glisten with pure glory,
A fair stream of silver, cloths of gold,
Afford a welcome with all abundance.

A beautiful game, most delightful,
They play (sitting) at the luxurious wine,
Men and gentle women under a bush,
Without sin, without crime.

Along the top of a wood has swum
Thy coracle across ridges,
There is a wood of beautiful fruit
Under the prow of thy little skiff.

A wood with blossom and fruit,
On which is the vine’s veritable fragrance,
A wood without decay, without defect,
On which are leaves of golden hue.

We are from the beginning of creation
Without old age, without consummation of earth,
Hence we expect not that there should be frailty,
The sin has not come to us.’

from Imram Brain maic Febail [The Voyage of Bran son of Febal] (seventh century CE)

trans. Kuno Meyer (1858–1919)


tags: fairy beliefs | otherworld journey

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Much of the last few weeks has gone by in a feverish blur - first a nasty little virus, and then the head cold that invaded while I was convalescing.

One of the things that cheered me in passing was the news of what sounds like quite persuasive evidence that the famous Indonesian ‘Hobbit’ was indeed a member of a separate human species. There was a piece in the Guardian.

(Mind you, I love the way the archaeologists find the remains of a female, and the news media illustrate the story with a picture of a male, with a club, ‘returning from a hunt’. It makes my brain hurt to unpack all the sexist assumptions in there, so I am not going to bother.)

Right from the start, the discovery of ‘Homo floresiensis’ has reminded me of the theories, controversial in his own time and now discounted, of the Victorian folklorist David Macritchie. In his book The Testimony of Tradition (1890) and later works he argued that fairy beliefs arose from folk-memories of prehistoric tribes of rarely-seen dwarfish humans. In point of fact, I am certain that he was totally wrong about the origin of fairy beliefs. But his hypothesis is fun to play with:

The attributes with which the “little people” of North Europe are accredited cannot be given in detail here. It is enough to note that they were believed to live in houses wholly or partly underground, the latter kind being described as “hollow” mounds, or hills; that when people of taller race entered such subterranean dwellings (as occasionally they did) they found the domestic utensils of the dwarfs were of the kind labelled “pre-historic” in our antiquarian museums; that the copper vessels which dwarf women sometimes left behind them when discovered surreptitiously milking the cows of their neighbours, were likewise of an antique form; further, that they helped themselves to the beef and mutton of their neighbours, after having shot the animals with flint-headed arrows; that melodies peculiar to them are still sung by the peasants of certain localities; that words used by them are still employed by children in their games; and that many families in many districts are believed to have inherited some of their blood. Of this intercourse between the taller races and the dwarfs, there are many records in old traditions. In the days of King Arthur, when, as Chaucer tells us, the land was “ful-filled of faërie,” the knights errant had usually a dwarf as attendant. One of King Arthur's own knights was a Fairy. According to Highland tradition, every high-caste family of pure Gaelic descent had an attendant dwarf. These examples show the “little people” in a not unfriendly light. But many other stories speak of them as “malignant” foes, and as dreaded oppressors. Of which the rational explanation is that these various tales relate to various localities and epochs.

David Macritchie (1851–1925)

from Fians, Fairies and Picts (1893)


Incidentally, Macritchie's ideas influenced the imagination of the historical novelist Rosemary Sutcliff in books like Sword at Sunset (1963).


tag: fairy beliefs

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