Do Fairies Exist?
John F. Winston
Here is some information about fairies.
.....................................................................
.....................................................................
From: B
Do you believe in fairies?
http://www.leisure.scotsman.com
/houseandgarden/headlines_specific.cfm?articleid=6898
AS A chat-up line, it's hard to beat for jaw-dropping impact.
"Have you ever," the poet and painter William Blake is reputed to
have asked a woman next to him at a 19th-century party, "seen a
fairy funeral?" Surprisingly, no. But Blake had. The fairies, he
said, were "the size and color of grey and green grasshoppers,
bearing a body laid out on a rose leaf which they buried with songs
and then disappeared." And where had this visionary experience
occurred? A wooded glade, crisp underfoot with the bark shed from
ancient trees? A perfumed rose garden, dancing with the shadows of
evening sun? A house near Bognor Regis actually.
Of course Blake may not necessarily be the most reliable of
witnesses. He also claimed to have seen a bearded g-d peering in
through his windows and a bunch of ang-ls sitting up a nearby tree.
That was before his depression set in. But the cusp between a
fantasy world and the natural one, between fairyland and Bognor
Regis, has fascinated writers and artists for centuries. The faerie
folk are mentioned in the medieval chronicles and go back even
further; Chaucer describes them as something people "no longer"
believe in.
David Ellwand, a Sussex-based photographer, understands fairy
fascination. He even has a 21st-century equivalent of Blake's
party-stopping moment. In the last few years, acquaintances who
idly asked Ellwand what he'd been up to haven't been quite sure how
to react to his reply: "Making fairy clothes."
Ellwand's musings on what fairy folk wear - should they of course
exist - has led to what must be one of the year's most eccentric but
intriguing publications, Fairie-ality. A big, glossy, coffee table
book, Fairie-ality is a catalogue of ethereal fashion that takes
the reader on a mythical journey through a fairy calendar of balls
and first dates, culminating with a fairy wedding. Ellwand has
spent the last three years down on his hands and knees searching
through the grass for natural materials, and then painstakingly
using them to create haute couture for sprites. He has moulded skirts
from the creamy petals of the calla lily; soft velveteen cuffs with
the blush of pink from rose petals; dresses soft as down from goose
feathers; belts from snail shells; shoe heels from acorns; and
headdresses from the skeletal remains of leaves, delicate as finest
Belgian lace.
Lush, lavish, and fantastic. But not real. Is it? Ellwand doesn't
actually believe in fairies, does he? Silence. Does he? He keeps an
open mind. He was born in Liverpool but moved to Yorkshire, and
sometimes he has stood at places such as Gordale Scar, near Malham,
where the queen of the fairies is meant to live, and he's looked at
the rugged limestone and the deeply etched valleys and gorges and
he's wondered. "I haven't seen any little wh-te-winged beings," he
says, sounding a little discomfited, "but sometimes you do feel
watched. And when you talk to people who say they have seen them
you do believe they've seen them."
He found what looked like a fossilised piece of fern once. But he
thinks it might have been a fairy sword. Ellwand has long been
interested in folklore and his original idea was for a much more
complex fairy book than a fashion catalogue. He's now working on a
darker book and is happily putting together fairy suits of armour.
It might seem bizarre, a grown man prepared to believe in fairies,
but historically it would be completely wrong to associate fairies
with women, or even just with children.
There have been female writers and artists who have used fairy
images, such as Christina Rossetti in her 19th-century poem
'Goblin Market'. More recently, the 'Glasgow Girl' artists who,
in the early 20th century, made jewellery, textiles and ceramics
in fairy designs. And there was Cicely Mary Barker with her 'Flower
Fairies' illustrations. But throughout the centuries it has
overwhelmingly been men who have talked about, written about and
painted fairies.
It's not just Blake and the other Romantic poets. There was
Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. JM Barrie's Tinkerbell in
Peter Pan. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
who created literature's most logical character, Sherlock Holmes,
lost his heart to illogical fairies. He seriously damaged his
public reputation in the 1920s when he publicly stated that he
believed photographs of the Cottingley fairies were authentic.
The photographs, taken by two young cousins, Frances Griffiths
and Elsie Wright, caused a sensation when published in 1919. They
appeared to show the girls posing with fairies dancing round them.
Most of the nation couldn't believe their eyes. But Arthur Conan
Doyle insisted that he believed his. It was true that the
photograph's negatives weren't tampered with, but the answer was
much simpler than technical wizardry. It wasn't until the two women
were in their 80s that they finally confessed that the 'fairies'
were paper cut outs pinned to leaves with hat pins.
Doyle had lost his credibility long before. His critics concluded
that his gullibility made him far more Watson than Holmes. The
golden age of fairies was really the Victorian era, when Doyle's
father, Charles, and particularly his uncle, Richard, made their
mark as fairy artists. But there was a whole host of fairy painters
that included Richard Dadd, Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham.
This interest in fairies was something of a backlash in an age of
industrialisation, an age when scientific reason threatened to
consume rel-gious belief. Interestingly, Victorian fairy paintings
were also often very erotic, despite it being an age of s-xual
repression. The images we now associate with fairies were created
mainly by men, and are of sweetly bautiful, slender yet curvaceous
beings. Perhaps that's the main difference between male and female
interest in fairies: women like the fantasy; men like the se-.
"Fairies have always been very -exy," claims horror writer James
Herbert, whose last novel, Once, combined gore with traditional
fairies. "Very sensuous... lovely sylph-like figures and silky,
transparent gowns." Silky, transparent gowns. Fairy clothes. But
Ellwand has gone much further than that in Fairie-ality: hats, shoes,
boots, jackets, bathing suits. Nature has some perfect solutions,
says Ellwand. If we could just get beech nutshells to scale, "we'd
all go out and put them on our heads," he insists, which suggests
that he might just have overdone his time down in the pixie wood.
His work, though, is exquisite, and you don't need to believe in
fairies to be captivated by it. The book's illustrator, David
Downton, certainly didn't. Downton, who draws for top designers
such as Dior, Chanel, Valentino and Lacroix for Vogue, Elle and
Marie Claire, admits that he was baffled by the fairy concept when
first approached. It was just a rather bizarre job to him - until he
saw Ellwand's work. "I was very sceptical and then I saw what David
had done and was amazed by it. I had never seen anything like it
before. I'm a fashion illustrator and you do get to see things and
then see them repeat; it's cyclical. But I had never seen anything
like this before.
They are extraordinary."
So extraordinary that Ellwand has been asked by Elle magazine
to create a gown for their Chri-tmas issue, and an American shoe
designer has asked for 10 shoe designs. He has done 10 picture
books in the past but this, he jokes, is the first that won't go
straight to the remainder shops. Downton agrees. The clothes, he
says, are "terribly sophisticated and may even turn out to be
influential". Of course they wouldn't work in human size, although
there will be few women who leaf through this book and don't
wistfully wish they could work. They have, says Downton, a very
special quality. "Everyone's talking about natural materials, but
you can't get more natural than this.
It's the juxtaposition of texture and color and scale that is
really amazing."
They are little works of art. "It seemed to me like land artists
who find things in the environment and make sculptures that
disappear as they rot away." says Downton. For these perfect
little outfits don't last as long as even human clothes. The
colors fade and lose their sheen; the pink-tipped petals curl and
brown and the leaves wither and wrinkle. "They have an Andy
Goldsworthy feel to them," says Downton. "They disappear. But
they're magical in their own way." Just, as Ellwand might say,
like fairies.
? Fairie-ality: The Fashion Collection from the House of
Ellwand, Walker Books, #25
**COPYRIGHT NOTICE**
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted
work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit
or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
To subscribe to this group, send an email to:
Para-Discus...@yahoogroups.com
John Winston. john...@mlode.com