at fixed times or as many times as they wished. And from time to time the women of our land have been oppressed by these earth-dwellers and innocent boys and girls and the young people and adolescents of both sexes have very often been taken away, though quite a few are restored safe and sound after a number of days, or sometimes a number of weeks, but some are never seen again, and certain ones are found half-alive, etc. But it would be tedious to waste more of this study on them; for whether these things are brought about by the frauds, impostures, and illusions of the devil, which seems to be the view of almost all the more reasonable people, or whether they are some kind of mixed species created between spirits and animals, as some conjecture, yet it is certain that the appearance of these spirits has been common in many other regions, not only in Iceland, so that it is pointless to take this [their ubiquity in Iceland] as evidence that these curious creatures were fashioned in the underworld.12
Some European traditions locate fairies in castles deep in the woods or even in realms beneath the surface of lakes, rather than in underground kingdoms, but otherwise Oddur Einarsson’s description conforms closely to the common understanding of the vast majority of medieval people. Though several other kinds of interaction are certainly possible, fairies most often impinge on the human life world in two ways: by copulating with mortals or by abducting them. What is more interesting about Oddur’s account for our immediate purposes, however, is the attempt he makes to explain these creatures in terms of a standard Christian cosmology. The two possibilities he suggests—that they are either a trick of the devil (fraus Sathanae) or some kind of mixed species (genus mixtum) halfway between spirit and animal—are found elsewhere,13 though his apparent reluctance to concede that fairies may actually be devils (a third explanation that was widely entertained by other authorities) seems due to an understandable reluctance to endorse the common belief that the mouth of hell was situated in Iceland.14
Citing James I’s statement that the “spirites that are called vulgarlie called the Fayrie” are one of the four kinds of devil “conversing in the earth,” C. S. Lewis suggested that the idea that fairies were really devils became the “official view” only around the beginning of the seventeenth century.15 In actuality, however, it had been the orthodox position of the church for more than three hundred years. While traces of it can be detected much earlier,16 it was first set out systematically in William of Auvergne’s De Universo (written in the 1230s) and was frequently reiterated throughout the later Middle Ages. The popular late eleventh-century theological handbook the Elucidarium,17 composed in England by Honorius of Autun (or Augsberg),18 though it deals at length with good and bad angels, has nothing whatsoever to say about fairies. This silence is unsurprising since the earliest position taken by the church on the question of fairies seems to have been to deny their reality altogether: “Credidisti quod quidam credere solent,” asks Bishop Burchard of Worms in a penitential from around the year 1000, “quod sint agrestes feminae, quas sylvaticas vocant?” [Have you believed what some are accustomed to believe that there are rural women whom they call sylvans?] The bishop then makes quite clear the fatuity of such a belief: “Si credidisti, decem dies in pane et aqua poeniteas” [If you have believed it, do penance on bread and water for ten days].19 Things were very different, however, by the thirteenth century, when, in an adaptation of another of Burchard’s warnings against superstitious practices (this one against making gifts to “satyri vel pilosi” to obtain their goodwill), these creatures were changed to “diaboli … quos faunos vocant” [devils whom they call fauns], and the penance increased from ten days to fifteen.20
By the time of an early fourteenth-century French Dominican redaction and translation of the Elucidarium known as the Second Lucidaire,21 the faithful are left in no doubt not only that fairies exist, but also that they are quite simply devils: “And vnto the regarde of þe feyryes the which man sayth were wonte to be in tymes past, they were not men ne women naturalles but were deuylles þe whiche shewed themselfe vnto þe people of þat tyme, for they were paynyms, ydolatres and without fayth.”22 Things are a little more complicated than this, however, for the Lucydarye has a second explanation of fairy phenomena; they can also be devilish illusions (what Oddur Einarsson calls fraudes Sathanae), rather than actual devils: “And theyr vysyons ben semblables vnto theym of a man the whiche is dronke, vnto whome it semeth that the house turneth vnder his fete, by þe whiche he falleth, and al the house ne the erthe remeueth not. In lyke wyse the deuyl them sheweth these vysyons in theyr entendemente” (p. 51). This distinction, which goes back at least to William of Auvergne, may seem like hairsplitting, but it was evidently important to medieval churchmen as a way of accounting for different kinds of fairy phenomena, particularly the ability of fairies to impersonate humans. Thus Étienne de Bourbon retells the old story of how Saint Germain, “recognizing that it was the trickery of demons” [cognoscens autem esse demonum ludificationem], exposed the true nature of what appeared to be a group of local people attending a feast set out for the fairies (“bone res”) by proving that their human counter parts were actually still sleeping soundly in their beds.23
The recognition that in the discourse of the late medieval church fairies are demons (or demonic illusions) has important consequences for the study of vernacular belief. If fairies are demons, it follows that demons, or at least some demons, are fairies, and this insight opens up a world of still largely unexplored ecclesiastical material for investigation. Understandably, writers on medieval fairy beliefs have hitherto concentrated mainly on vernacular writing, chiefly romances, where fairyland is generally treated with something like transparency, though they have often supplemented these sources with the commentary of learned writers such as Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, Gervase of Tilbury, and William of Newburgh. However, when we turn to pastoral manuals, saints’ lives, sermons, exempla, and miracle tales, we encounter a host of fairies masquerading as devils. Admittedly they are generally more shadowy figures than their counter parts in vernacular romance, but they offer the great advantage of highlighting the attitudes of the representatives of official culture toward them. It is this interplay of learned and vernacular culture in the Middle Ages that constitutes the main theme of this book.
Strictly speaking, if fairies are devils, then it must also follow that any belief in fairies as non-devils is potentially heretical. Surprisingly, such an uncompromising line is rarely openly expressed in medieval ecclesiastical discourse, at least before the fifteenth century, but it is certainly implicit in a remarkable story told by the thirteenth-century Belgian Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré in his Bonum Universale de Apibus. Augustine in his City of God briefly discusses creatures he calls dusii, which he represents as the Gaulish equivalents of those “Silvans and Pans, commonly called incubi” [silvanos et panes, quos vulgo incubos vocant] who were said to seduce women—in other words, creatures that a later age would call ‘fairies.’24 Thomas gives this dramatic account of how such “dusii-demons inhabit the mountains and corrupt and derange their dupes”:
In 1231 when Master Conrad was preaching against the heretics in Germany and died a blessed death at their hands,25 a certain heretic who had been corrupted by demons solicited a Dominican friar to join his heresy (as I heard many years ago from Brother Conrad, the Dominican Provincial in Germany).26 When he saw the friar immediately recoil, he said to him: “You are very firm in your faith yet you have seen no more credible evidence of it than what is found in certain books. But if you should wish to believe my words I might show you Christ and his mother and the saints in plain sight.” The friar at once suspected a demonic illusion, but wishing to put it to the test, said, “Not without cause would I then believe, were you to put your promises into effect.” The joyful heretic set a date for the friar. The friar however secretly took along a pix containing Christ’s holy body concealed under his cloak. The heretic then led the friar into a very spacious palace in a cave in a mountain, which shone with a wonderful brightness. They came directly to the lower part of the palace, where they saw thrones placed, as if made of the purest gold, and on them a king, surrounded with glittering splendor, and next to him a most beautiful queen with a radiant face, and on either side benches on which were older men like patriarchs or prophets with
