Monday, Feb. 21, 1977

Long Looks at the Little People

By Paul Gray

KINGDOMS OF ELFIN by SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER 222 pages. Viking. $8.95.

AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FAIRIES

by KATHARINE BRIGGS 481 pages. Pantheon. $12.95.

If man had not invented them, fairies would have to exist. How else could mortals account for lost objects and the malfunctions of the material world? It was no accident that a new strain of elves--gremlins--magically appeared at about the time of World War II, when things began going wrong with airplanes. For centuries the presence of fairies helped temper parental rage at the misbehavior of children; the ethereal little devils were responsible. When things went bump in the night, it was far better to suspect the hobgoblins than creatures more substantial and threatening. Most important, the winged folk held out the prospect of an airy, insubstantial and blissfully frivolous life beyond the reach of the wealthiest voluptuaries. The highest compliment Edmund Spenser could pay Elizabeth I was to call her the Faerie Queene. The Little People could do everything that the big people could not.

Weightless Beauty. Which is why J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904) amounted to such a calumny on fairies. Barrie wrote, "Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead." He thus upended the truth (people need fairies) and propagated a late Victorian myth (fairies need people) that must have grounded Puck and Ariel. The rest of the century was no kinder. Thanks to Peter Pan's continuing popularity and Disneyfication, Tinker Bell & Co. were ultimately reduced to trademarks or synonyms for homosexuals. The supernatural was obviously not long for this world. Until now. In Kingdoms of Elfin, Author Sylvia Townsend Warner, 83, never condescends to an ethereal race that views mortals as "unfailingly serious and unfailingly absurd." Instead, she talks about fairies without being fey and creates a texture for the intangible.

Each of the book's 16 stories (most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker) can fly on its own. Taken together, they form both a whimsical saga of invisible dynasties and an extended commentary on Homo sapiens. Warner's elves are in many ways mirror images of men. They cannot weep and do not hate. They reproduce with difficulty but live for centuries: "Fairies are constructed for longevity, not fertility." They are governed exclusively by women--the more capricious the better.

Mocking the human dream of taking wing, elves aspire to a place in society so high that flying will be beneath them.

They are, in short, perfect dilettantes, content to dabble in whatever fashions flutter into vogue: "collecting butterflies, determining the pitch of birdsong, table-turning, cat races, purifying the language, building card castles." They create such evanescent diversions because they have so much time on their wings. "People who live for centuries," Warner notes, "are bound to repeat themselves." Sometimes boredom forces them to envy humans. According to a small chap named Elphenor, "there was better entertainment in the mortal world. Mortals packed more variety into their brief lives--perhaps because they knew them to be brief." Yet only the odd, deranged elf goes so far as to adopt the human hope of life after death. Without it, living and dying are much more pleasant: "As they do not believe in immortality they die unperturbed."

Warner's prose duplicates the irides cent beauty of elfin life. Her descriptions are brushed with an unsettling magic.

Yet Kingdoms of Elfin also pays humanity a backhanded compliment. There is melancholy as well as joy in the fairy state. Suspended somewhere between the angels and man, fairies are dropouts from the cosmic school of hard knocks. Warner's elfin courts are doomed to frivolity, to a tepid acceptance of beauty that does not die quite fast enough. In the book's last story, a mortal is given the last word. He is a passionate seeker of the fairies, who finds them, admires them and then compares them to a "swarm of mayflies, indivisibly borne aloft, lowering, shifting, veering, like a shaken impermeable gauze veil over the face of a stream." The fairies are free to laugh at this none-too-flattering description. The mortal response -- sadness -- is beyond them.

Warner shows that such thoughtless creatures can yield up thoughtful art. An Encyclopedia of Fairies shows just how many facts can be gathered about fancy. British Folklorist Katharine Briggs, 78, confesses that she is an "agnostic" on the subject of the existence of fairies. But her thorough compendium of arcana (from "Abbey Lubber" to "Young Tarn Lin") leaves the question of belief solely up to the browser. Prudently, she includes methods of protection against fairies' malevolent practical jokes: holy water, a midsummer herb called St. John's wort, red verbena, daisies.

Along with such cautionary information, An Encyclopedia offers a super natural host of legends, ballads, folk tales -- and more than enough hobgoblins and dragons to fill minds little or large. The entries are informative and scholarly without being stuffy. A good thing too. Fairies like to play tricks on the serious. Paul Gray

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