A week or so ago, when I was writing about “the Scottish governess,” I recalled something then that I hadn’t the space or time to write about in that essay.
It had to do, again, with the Scottish—or at any rate Celtic—folkloric motif of the “White Lady,” which that particular story touched upon, at least tangentially. I mentioned that this being appears in a number of different guises and under a number of different names, including the “Quene of Elphene” in the assizes and dittays for witchcraft recorded in The Miscellany of the Spalding Club. This being is identical, of course, to the “Queen of Elfland” of the story of Thomas of Ercildoune (Thomas the Rhymer), which is also the “Queen of Fairy” or the “Faerie Queene.”
The White Lady, or Queen of Elfland, is often depicted as a kind of consort of the Devil—who figures under many names in these stories, and is commonly represented as The Black Man. In The Miscellany he appears under the name “Christsonday,” and in the famous Breton lai Sir Orfeo, he is called “the fairy king:”
“The king of fairy with his rout Com to hunt him al about…”1
Of course, I should point out that these themes are by no means restricted to Celtic or British folklore. The Dutch and the Frisians had their Witte Wieven, “white women,” who were beings that were much to be dreaded; the Romans, moreover, had their own dominae candidae and Fatuae, which were said to have great powers of foreknowledge, as well as even greater powers for bringing harm to mortals. Even Egeria, the legendary demigoddess who was the supernatural wife and instructress of Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, may have belonged to this class of being.
At any rate, when I was writing about the strange story of the Scottish governess, I remembered a curious poem that I came across some time ago. It took me a while to locate the old booklet, which dates to the 1890s or thereabouts; it contains an English translation of an old Breton lai that’s probably of similar date and provenance to Sir Orfeo. This English translation is the only surviving form of the poem, at least that I could find; the Middle English original seems to be lost or forgotten.
The poem was reprinted in a small edition of fairy tales some years ago, called The Three Suitors: A Dozen and One Dooms, Drolls, and Dreads. But that book seems to be out of print these days, and is rather hard to find now.
Unfortunately, I don’t have that edition in my library, and I haven’t been able to find it or contact the editor; I only have a badly damaged copy of the original pamphlet of the poem in question, with most of its pages missing. Sadly, I’ve come across many such books in my collecting days, and sometimes it’s impossible to find rare volumes in any other condition.
Anyhow, the poem is called The Lay of the Queen of Elfland, I think, or maybe it was “Elphene” or “Elphame;” either way, it refers to the mistress of the “Little People”—the fairies, Bruni, pixies, elves, and other diminutive inhabitants of the shadow dimension of Fairyland. It’s a very strange poem, and a little unsettling; it comes in two parts, with one recounting the history of a knight called “Sir Percy,” who rides out to hunt a beautiful white hind that turns out to be the Queen of Elfland in disguise. He wounds her, and as punishment, the Queen of Elfland abducts Sir Percy and carries him off to Fairyland—where, we imagine, he is to suffer a fatum nefandum, that is to say, an unspeakable fate.
The second part concerns his wife, called “Lady Elysse,” who learns of her lord’s plight and eventually travels to Fairyland to redeem him. I recall it was a strange sort of inversion of the classic Orpheus and Eurydice story, which Sir Orfeo more or less faithfully repeats, with just a little Celtic folkloric color tossed in for fun.
I have some of the opening stanzas of the poem, which I thought I’d include:
“Sir Percy left his ladylove, A-swoon in her bridal bed, With love for him and the Lord Above A-dancing through her head. He touched her cheek, her locks of red, His eyes with love did swim; For she was a beauty, coveted— But her heart was a hearth for him. ’Twas hard, in sooth, ’twas hard to leave His bride, who soundly slept; So a kiss from her bent he to thieve— Then straightway from that chamber crept. He girded arms and swiftly swept Through the halls of the hoary Keep, Wherefrom heart-cheer was long abrept— Where the woe-bewildered weep. He left her for the forest hills To hunt the fabled hind, That dwelt amidst the meres and rills In mystery entwined. ’Twas evil that his heart designed, To hunt that shining deer; But Sir Percy had it in his mind To brook no curse, and heed no fear. Sir Percy and his squires twain Went a-hunting in the glades; Went a-riding through the forest fane That in deep’ning shadow fades. Fearful glances each man trades With the others that with him went; A-watch for fauns and fairy-rades In the hills and dales of Gwent.”
You can see something of the doggerel nature of the translation from the quality of these lines. I think there was something about these Late Victorian scholar-poetasters and their fondness for doggerel verse; I’ve come across similar renderings of other medieval lays, including Sir Orfeo itself. The translator also relies a little too heavily on obscure archaisms; I suppose the idea was to capture the flavor of the source material.
I’d dearly love to see the original, but I think that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
This part of the poem continues much as I described it; Sir Percy is punished by the Queen of Fairyland, and forced to live in the shadowy half-world whereof she is ruler. The story becomes much more interesting in the second part, when the perspective shifts to that of Sir Percy’s abandoned bride, Lady Elysse.
She is pregnant and fearful, uncertain of her lord’s fate, when suddenly Sir Percy returns. But Lady Elysse’s joy is short-lived; there is something strange about her husband, and it soon becomes clear what that is.
“A ghastly sigh, bereft of hope Escaped his sagging lips; He shook him, and his mouth gaped ope: His life seemed in eclipse. His skin hangs down in ragged strips, His swelled tongue wags and drools— All youth and vigour from him drips, Like the flesh that round him pools. His eyes fell on the wooden boards, Shattering like glass; His hair streamed out in snaky cords— He was bald and blind, alas! Like a bubbling, unctuous mass, Sir Percy puddled on the floor, A horror no fate may surpass— ’Twas a human man no more. At sight of this, the Lady Elysse Slumped in a sudden swoon; And awoke to hear the crack and hiss Of the fire’s midnight croon. But all her senses fled, eftsoon, When she saw the puddled thing, That once had been her life’s one boon— Had been her loved lordling. Its bones of wood, its hair of straw, Its flesh of ladled tar, ’Twas but a moppet, crude and raw, Fashioned hominis instar. ’Twere as from out a bourne afar A shape of evil came, In face and form, familiar— To play a devil’s game.”
Her returned “husband” was merely a stock, similar to the object mentioned at the end of the story of the Scottish governess; it was animated by the magic of the evil Queen of Elfland, who sent it to mock and taunt Lady Elysse.
I’m missing several more pages, but Lady Elysse eventually gives birth to Sir Percy’s child, which is also stolen by the Queen of Elfland, who substitutes a changeling in its place; as I said, it’s a very peculiar poem, and incorporates many more folkloric elements than Sir Orfeo.
At some point Lady Elysse discovers the changeling, and wrings from it the truth about Sir Percy and her infant. She resolves then to seek out Elfland and ransom her husband and child from the Queen of Elfland; she finds them, but unlike Sir Orfeo, she is rebuffed by the Queen, who envies Lady Elysse, and wishes to keep her abducted child and husband by her side in some evil simulacrum of a family.
Enraged, the Lady Elysse strikes off the Queen of Elfland’s head with a sword she had smuggled with her into Fairyland, but when she turns to take her husband and child into her arms, the Black Man materializes before her:
“She took a step, and then one more Towards her infant and her knight— When, suddenly, uprist before A shape in blackness dight. She knew that shape, from tales of old That the agèd women keep; Tales of ghastly crimes untold And the guerdon sinners reap. ’Twas the Black Man of the utter Deep, His face with beauty wrought— Such beauty made that Lady weep, And old wives’ tales were forgot. He henteth her by one pale arm And draggeth her to him, And with a smile, full of charm He grants her sudden whim: He kisses her—her thoughts a-swim She knows not what she does; She flies among the Seraphim— She cares not who nor what she was. White she grows, whiter than The rime of Winter’s freeze; Pale she grows, paler than Those fairies of the Friese Who come, betimes, to seek and seize Poor mothers lying-in, And meteth cruel atrocities To glut their sateless sin. And the Black Man whispered to Elysse: ‘Put away thy thoughts of love; ‘I seal thee by that single kiss: ‘Of the elves thou art Queen of. ‘Not more for thee the land above: ‘Thou art my wedded wife; ‘Thou art for me like a fitted glove— ‘Gone is thy mortal life!’ […] And behold Elysse, nèe Percy hight, Become the fairy Lady White; That life of love she erst had led, That life of happiness: Forgotten now, the man she wed— All now was emptiness. And the Black Man dight her in a gown Of gold, and a silvern crown. And palely shining, like a ghost, She looketh on the fairy host; She gazed with love upon them now Not with horror, nor regret— For they seemed now beautiful, somehow, With their eyes of glass and jet. And throughout Hell flew wingèd Fame— Behold the Queen of Elphame!”
The poem, it turns out, is actually a kind of “origin story” for the Queen of Elfland—for Lady Elysse is the new Queen of the Fairies, after slaying her predecessor. Presumably, we are meant to understand that is how the previous Queen achieved her office as well.
Anyhow, writing about that business with the Scottish governess recalled all of this to my mind; I think the author of that narrative may even have quoted a few lines from the poem (but don’t hold me to that—I might just be confusing and conflating things again). It certainly is fitting, though.
These are the sorts of things that I like to think about. Does the Lay of the Queen of Elfland—or whatever it’s called—and others like Sir Orfeo and the great corpus of European fairy tales, represent merely that…a body of romance and folklore, and nothing else? Or is there something more to it? Do these tales in fact represent scraps of garbled wisdom from a forgotten traditional science, one that perhaps catalogued the bestiary of the inferior or subtle world?
I can’t help but think they do, in some unfathomable way. The weird correspondence between the story of the Scottish governess, which purports to be a true account, and the fairy tale of the Lay of the Queen of Elfland, which is nothing but a medieval fantasy, suggests to me that there is more to these old tales than the modern scientistic mind imagines. But the notion that modern science should be prone to error must come as no great surprise to anyone who is paying attention.
The members of the College of Seth, I think I’ve mentioned in an earlier piece, call the Bruni, the fairies, the “Little People,” by another name—the “Derroes” (οἱ Δήρροι), which are considered a debased tag-end of an ancient, prehuman race. The Theosophists would call them “elementals,” and the Traditionalists would consider them to be the manifestations of inferior or subtle forces.
Perhaps these are merely three different ways of saying that these things are real, and that they are to be treated with a great deal of respect. It is a strange universe we live in; stranger not only than we suppose, but—as Haldane said—stranger than we can suppose.
This is probably the last I’ll write about this topic of malevolent “Little People” and supernatural “White Ladies;” it’s not of interest to most, but there were a few things I wanted to get off my chest, so to speak.
Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, eds., The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995) lines 283-4.