Fairy Elements in British Literary Writings in the Decade Following the Cottingley Fairy Photographs Episode

WELCOME TO MYTHON 44, here in East Lansing, Michigan. Let me start by thanking the Mythopoeic Society and the Council of Stewards for inviting me, and Marion Van Loo and the Mythcon Committee for arranging the details, and Leslie Donovan for working out the programming. I'd also like to welcome Franny Billingsley, our writer Guest of Honor. Our theme for this year's conference is Green and Growing: The Land and Its Inhabitants. A look at the programming for this conference shows many different ways of approaching this theme, and in particular in approaching the complex relationship between a land (that is, any land), the beings that live in that land, and the beings that potentially live in the minds of the inhabitants of that land. That may sound confusing, but let me explain further. In general, I wish today to speak of that intersection of these varied branches. This area of intersection can be called Faerie or fairyland, as it exists in a kind of boundary world between the land and its inhabitants, and the fairies themselves may be seen as the beings that potentially live in the land, or in the mind of the land's inhabitants. One could explore this area of intersection along lines of its physical landscapes (or how the lie of the land might influence stories of Faerie), or in terms of nationalities and human identities, and how those aspects might be reflected in particular fairylands. To give just two quick examples of the latter, before moving on, I would mention L. Frank Baum's Oz, certainly the best-known American fairyland; and the more modern Mythago Wood novels by Robert Holdstock, in which a certain woods in Britain is found to interact with the people who live near it by generating actual beings, called mythagos, from these people's minds--from their collective unconscious--and these mythagos in turn create new stories. Holdstock's conception is an ingenious storytelling device, calling close attention to the stories themselves and the differences between various versions of the same story, coming from the stock of people who have lived, over many ages, in the land that is now called Britain. Stepping back, one could ask what is it that makes Mythago Wood so British, on the one hand, and what is it that makes Oz so American, on the other? I hope to hear, over the next few days, other presenters, perhaps, elaborate on these topics, and other similar ones. For myself, I'd like to narrow the scope of my own contribution by focusing on one neglected and (to me) interesting corner of this very large field--that is, on a particular time period of the British literary use of fairyland or fairies. The obsession with fairies, and fairyland, in Victorian and Edwardian England is well-known. Examples of this obsession can be seen in the paintings of Richard Dadd and Richard Doyle, in the writings of John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and J.M. Barrie--particularly Barrie's Peter Pan--in the twelve colored fairy books of Andrew Lang, and in the flower fairies of Cicely Barker. The above list is just the tip of the iceberg. (For other examples, see the books by Nicola Bown, Diane Purkiss, and Carole G. Silver listed in my bibliography.) But the period that interests me is not the Victorian or Edwardian heyday of fairies, but the Georgian dying out of literary interest in fairies. The First World War was one nail in the coffin of fairy literature, as was the post-war rise of modernism, which downgraded the literature of romance to the nursery, and nearly exterminated it for decades. Fairies as a literary subject survived into the war, as Robert Graves's 1917 book of poems Fairies and Fusiliers attests, though the fairy poems were not reprinted when Graves collected his verse some years later. A third blow to fairy literature was the episode of the Cottingley fairy photographs, the chronology of which is pertinent here so I shall recap some of the major events. Briefly, in 1917 two young girls in Cottingley, near Bradford in West Yorkshire, took some photographs of themselves in the woods with fairies. …

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