Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green

much the same vein, Oberon presents Huon of Bordeaux with a magic cup whose powers are activated by making the sign of the cross over it.¹⁴¹ Yonec’s father in Marie de France’s lai, despite living in an underground kingdom and being able to turn himself at will into a hawk, feels the need to protest to his lady that he is a true Christian, and Désiré’s fairy mistress is similarly insistent on her own religious orthodoxy; indeed both are prepared to display the soundness of their faith by receiving mass.¹⁴² By contrast, in Walter Map’s account of Henno cum dentibus (an analogue to the Melusine story) we encounter a fairy bride who whenever she attends church always finds an excuse to leave before the consecration of the host.¹⁴³ Similarly, when Richard I’s bride in the romance of Richard the Lionheart faints at the elevation of the host in their nuptial mass,¹⁴⁴ we are immediately ready to suspect her fairy origins, and our suspicions are confirmed when fifteen years later “an erl off gret pouste” who has noticed her avoiding the mass tries to force her to remain, with alarming consequences:

      Sche took here douȝtyr in here hond,

      And Johan her sone she wolde not wonde;

      Out of the rofe she gan her dyght,

      Openly before all theyr syght.

      Johan fell frome her in that stounde,

      And brak his thygh on the grounde.

      And with her doughter she fled her waye,

      That never after she was isey. (lines 227–34)

      If the Plantagenets had once had a foundation myth similar to that of the Lusignans, their fairy ancestor has been worked over far more thoroughly than Melusine;¹⁴⁵ the author of this dramatic scene, at least, displays open collusion with the assumptions of the great tradition.

      I have suggested a number of ways in which the great tradition’s Kulturkampf against fairy beliefs are reflected in vernacular romance, but the question of belief goes deeper than this. Most literary critics will share Helen Cooper’s relative lack of interest in whether romance audiences actually believed in fairies: “even in the pre-or early-modern period, the fairies of romance did not require belief, but they probably needed rather less suspension of disbelief. What they do require is a recognition on the part of readers and audiences that the real world cannot be reduced to the rational.”¹⁴⁶ But, we might counter, when belief in fairies could offer a reasonable explanation for many things that would otherwise have seemed inexplicable, rationality, in this sense, must be viewed as every bit as historically contingent as belief.¹⁴⁷ Setting aside the question of whether rationality/irrationality might not be a misleading binary to evoke in such contexts, implying as it does some version of Lévy-Bruhl’s prelogical society,¹⁴⁸ we would do well to remember that all metaphysical beliefs, our own included, must be in some sense non-empiricist and thus open to a charge of irrationality. When we apply this term to medieval beliefs, then, we are not necessarily imputing a general failure of reason to medieval people; we are simply expressing our disagreement with a set of principles upon which they sometimes put reason to work. No one who has followed Albertus Magnus wrestling with the problems of demonic insemination would dream of challenging his logic; it is not the deductive process but the acceptability of his premises that disturbs us. In this sense, then, medieval people were no more irrational than we are. As R. G. Collingwood puts it, “the common characteristic of [fairy] tales is their magical character. To understand them means understanding magic: understanding why people behaved in the ways for which we use magic as a general term. Now if magical behavior is irrational behavior, this cannot be done.”¹⁴⁹ Neither of the usual literary explanations—the poetic (magic as a play of the imagination) nor the narratological (magic as a way of telling a story)—gets to grips with this problem, for both assume an irrationality that needs to be justified or explained away. The consequences for literary analysis, once we accept that the question of fairy belief might have been a perfectly serious matter in the Middle Ages, are threefold.

      First, there is the question of genre. For Helen Cooper, folktale and romance belong to quite separate discursive realms: “the folklore history of fairies has been the subject of much scholarship and more speculation, but lies beyond the scope of this book. The question here is what kind of generic niche was occupied by the fairy, and the fairy lady in particular, after her arrival on the romance scene.”¹⁵⁰ In this context, however, we should perhaps think less of immutable literary genres provoking predictable responses in their readers and more of genres that are to some degree controlled or defined by reader response. As Hans-Robert Jauss puts it, “the history of genres in this perspective also presupposes reflection on that which can become visible only to the retrospective observer: … the historical as well as the aesthetic significance of masterworks, which itself may change with the history of their effects and later interpretations, and thereby may also differently illuminate the coherence of the history of their genre.”¹⁵¹ It is important to recognize that our perception of medieval romance itself, and not just its constitutive memes, is historically contingent and has been deeply affected by the changing history of fairies. Specifically, our generic horizon of expectation, as the rezeptionästhetiker would say, has been profoundly distorted by eighteenth-century attitudes to fairy stories: the very coinage ‘fairy tale’ (a calque on the French conte de fées) includes among its senses “an unreal or incredible story; a falsehood” (Oxford English Dictionary [OED]). In other words, we have been conditioned by the age of enlightenment to construe any story containing fairies as a literary fantasy, and we tend unreflectively to project such conditioning back upon our medieval ancestors. As I have been at some pains to show, such an attitude would have found far fewer supporters in the Middle Ages than it does now. It is not that medieval fairy stories (in the sense of improbable Märchen) did not exist, but as with their modern descendants (in which, as Derek Brewer points out, “few actual fairies, of what ever kind, appear”),¹⁵² their narrative impulse seems generally to lie elsewhere.¹⁵³