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 Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 10:55 am
James Bartleby's On the Spirits of the Wood is largely considered to be the most thorough treatise on spirits currently in existence. As it was written in 1534 (long
after spirits ceased their dealings with humans—assuming, of course, that the reader believes in spirits to begin with) it is a secondary source only, relying heavily
on previous texts, most of which have now been lost to history. Copies are rare and difficult to obtain, especially outside of scholarly circles.
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Posted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 10:58 am
CHAPTER I: THE WAR OF FLOWERS Spirits, also known variously as Fair Folk, fairies, sidhe, and elves, have not been seen by man—to all reliable accounts—for some two hundred years, but our interest in them persists, perhaps for that very reason. It has become popular in the modern age to cast spirits as romantic characters in books and plays (surely there are few among us who have not read The Fair Summer, to our private shame), and even question their existence entirely, no doubt as a logical reaction to unlikely portrayals of spirits as gossamer-winged sprites dancing naked in the fields or dwelling diminutively inside mushroom houses. My goal is to impress upon the public that these stories do not reflect the truth of spirits; for though their most recent role in human history was a benevolent one, we must not forget that mankind has been terrified of (and terrorized by) spirits for as long as we have been passing down tales at the fireside, and that they are very real indeed.
As spirits have purportedly complained, the memory of our species is short and selective; only seven centuries have passed since we waged war with their kind, which we tend to forget in light of the more recent and favorably heroic Great War—that is, the war between men and Wolves—of which we were unquestionably the victors. One need only read personal accounts of the War of Flowers to know that spirits do not amuse themselves by riding mice and finches, and that if they have ever gaily danced naked in a field, humans have not witnessed them doing so and lived.
The horrors of the War of Flowers are, in fact, unimaginable to us given the comfort of our peacetime lives. As might be expected, few reliable correspondences remain from that time, but the famous letters of the unnamed soldier are considered authentic by most modern scholars, having been faithfully reproduced in the Royal Library of Palisade several times over the intervening centuries. The following passage, thought to date to 815-16, contains some of the most striking descriptions of the war (I have taken the liberty of improving the spelling, and translating some words no longer in use):
There are few of us left now in this wretched place. Today I killed one of the devils by my own hand, but it was only luck that saw the blade strike true. If you find hairs of moss folded in this paper, burn them—the creature's accursed lifeblood spilled all over my clothes, and I've been plucking greenery from myself for hours. Those who do not know why we call it the War of Flowers need only come to the battlefield and see what happens when a spirit is slain. We fight in an eternal spring, with lavender blooming as high as our waists. I have never seen anything so lovely or so horrible in my life.
I fear it will not be long. The spirit Gwyn, the one they have begun calling Wolf Prince, is here now. I saw him yesterday from afar, tearing out a man's throat like his namesake. He took three arrows and did not fall. They say he is gone mad—that he has been touched too many times by iron, or has a piece of it broken off and lodged inside him—and as much as all spirits look mad to me, with their bright demon's eyes, I can say this one looks worse. Pray you never see a spirit without its glamour, for now, on the field of battle, they do not bother with such things any more….
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Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 12:16 pm
CHAPTER II: ON GLAMOURS Spirits' magical properties are poorly understood. Recorded reports of spirit mischief are often conflated with misfortunes of the ordinary variety, and it is difficult to distinguish between the two. Did the housewife's milk spoil because she left it out in the sun, or because, as she claims—with great feeling—a slighted spirit decided to act its revenge upon her? Hundreds of years after the fact, it is impossible to tell for certain. There does seem to be some truth to the well-accepted idea that spirits are able to ruin food and sow petty illnesses in livestock and children, however; Hubert Church, in his Complete Record of Fairy Malfeasance (a colorful but more or less reliable document), writes that the spirit Efnysien once said the following to his host:
This human took mushrooms from the Wood on three occasions, you see, and failed to leave out any offerings for a month afterward; so the next time I came across him I made certain to disturb his cows in such a way that their milk emerged clotted and stinking. I much regretted this later, for it turned out the milk was all he had to offer me, and I have always possessed a taste for cream. I decided to next afflict his infant with a festering earache—after all, why should the child enjoy milk when I could not? The man became so desperate that he squeezed his wife's breast empty over a bowl, and then left the bowl in the same place he'd picked the mushrooms. I shan't tell you whether or not I drank it!
Occasionally spirits have implied the existence of healing and divinatory gifts among their kind—particularly among the House of Summer and the House of Autumn, respectively—but to my knowledge such abilities have never been observed by humans, and must therefore remain topics of pure speculation. As it stands, no one can contest that fairy glamour, which has been observed on nearly every occasion a spirit has interacted with humankind, is the best-documented form of spirit magic—and perhaps the most subtle.
A spirit is alarming in its natural form. This truth is best illustrated by another passage from Church, describing a spirit being revealed after sneaking in to a garden party:
He handed her the little spoon, which she thought was silver but was truly iron; and all at once her form underwent a terrible change. Her womanly charms melted away like wax to reveal a thin and staring creature beneath; her white fingers, even as she shrieked and dropped the spoon, had become as long and crookedly jointed as bundles of twigs. A horrible gauntness came over her face, and her eyes grew large and uncanny to behold—their color expanded to leave almost nothing of the whites, like the eyes of a cat, glittering cruelly in the candlelight; and when she opened her mouth to hiss at them, all her teeth had grown pointed.
It is no wonder, then, that spirits choose to conceal their features behind a glamour when they walk among humans. Whether they do so out of secretiveness or a peculiar tendency toward vanity is less clear. In a curious twist, spirits are always known to leave one aspect of their true form showing through their glamour; this phenomenon is described in numerous dependable texts and has also made its way into popular folklore. Often this flaw is the color of their eyes. Unfortunately, I have not been able to determine whether spirits are truly unable to conjure a perfect glamour—the most popular theory—or whether they include the flaw deliberately, as part of their strange preoccupation with fairness and good manners (understanding, of course, that the spirit version of courtesy differs quite substantially from the human).
Means by which to dispel a glamour and reveal a spirit are equally well-documented, though perhaps less strictly reliable. Iron, it seems, is a foolproof method, though the iron must touch the spirit to be wholly effective. Startling or injuring a spirit also appear to be likely tactics. It is often said that spirits are only able to maintain a glamour while awake; but this is impossible to verify, as a human (again, to the best of my knowledge) has never witnessed a spirit sleeping; some believe that spirits do not sleep at all. Ultimately, many people have historically relied upon alternative methods to expose spirits—requiring a suspicious newcomer to a village to sit and eat bread, for example, under the assumption that spirits are revolted by cooked foods and a refusal to do so would be damning.
In essence, a glamour is an illusion; and there have been cases, though rare, of spirits extending the influence of their glamour beyond their own person. An example of this might be the old story of Prince Henry and the Spirit Feast, in which the prince discovers and partakes of a lavish banquet on a hill, only to come to his senses hours later sitting on a rock with no food nor guests anywhere in sight. The tale Isobel's Dogs, commonly regarded as a children's story but listed in Fairy Malfeasance as a matter of fact, describes a woman run to her death of exhaustion by a howling pack of illusory hounds. Interestingly, most cases of these types of powerful magics are said to have occurred on the day or night of an equinox or solstice, raising the very real possibility that they are only executable at certain junctures...
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