There is, however, an unwanted side effect of our getting smaller, and it is that the world gets smaller with us. With every passing year, we encounter fewer and fewer things that are new and unexpected. All the strategies we have been learning on this journey, all the fragments of wisdom we have been poaching, are intended to stretch our world and make it a little vaster, so as to leave space for wonder to happen. Magicians have taught us to appreciate the mystery, and then witches have taught us how to make it part of our lives. Scientists have showed us the usefulness of ignorance, and, lost in the forest, we have explored some old ways of living with nature, and thus with ourselves. Now we are ready to take a radical step, one that will keep our world full of vastness, never fully accommodated.
To locate our fifth key, we are going away with the fairies.
*
Thomas of Erceldoune should have known better than to rest under a solitary hawthorn: such trees belong to fairies. It has to be said that Thomas was young and bold, and if he believed in fairies, he was probably eager to meet one. That day, with the sun high in the sky, Thomas sat under a hawthorn tree in the Eildon Hills, in Scotland’s border country, a landscape of breathtaking beauty. Thomas was good with words. When he was around other people, they enjoyed his wit and expected his rejoinders to be swift and sharp. On a day like this, it was pleasant, for a change, to step back from what people wanted from him, and just enjoy the breeze and soak up the sunshine.
But when a beautiful woman rode by, Thomas could not help himself. She was richly dressed in green – a very promising colour, as you wear a green dress if you have plans to roll in the grass with someone. Thomas very much wanted to be that someone. The lady was elegant and self-assured, and just too beautiful for him to stay silent.
Thomas called to her, ‘Queen of Heaven!’ – tongue in cheek, of course (when you are talking to a beautiful woman, a light touch is your best friend).
She answered, gentle but deadpan, ‘Not of Heaven, no. I am the Queen of Elfland.’
We don’t know whether Thomas believed her or not. But when she dared him to kiss her, he did not refuse.
And of course as soon as he did so, he was in her power. The queen – because she was indeed the Queen of Elfland – took him on her horse and rode away on a bonny road that led to her realm. She told Thomas that he was to serve her for seven years, through good times and bad. But should he utter a word in ‘Elfyn-land’, he would never return to his own country. The queen also said to Thomas that for serving her, he would receive the gift of a tongue that could never lie.
He accepted his fate, which – to be honest – could have been worse. The Good People can flay you or hold you prisoner until everybody you know is old or dead; but the queen liked Thomas. We do not know the details of what happened to him in Elfland, but, sure enough, seven years later he returned home, in good shape.
He was the same, but not quite.
When Thomas came back, he could not lie any more. People started calling him ‘True Thomas’. He was a better poet than ever, a smoother talker, and being obliged to tell the truth did not hinder him in the least.
And there was something else. Some of the truths Thomas spoke were yet to come: for the queen had given him the ability to see into the future. He made good use of her gift.
He is a good man, Thomas the Rhymer.2
*
Is a world that incorporates fairies too vast?
We have learned how important it is to shift our world view, but seriously – fairies?
I am sure you agree that the world is vast enough to contain many things you and I don’t know, but that does not mean that it contains everything. We must draw the line at fairies.
And yet.
And yet – from time immemorial, level-headed, well-adjusted people have claimed to have encountered fairies. Some describe meetings with other strange beings – visitations from ghosts and poltergeists, conversations with doppelgängers.
On a daily basis, everywhere on the planet, from Brazilian slums to the French countryside, men and women have ‘supernatural’ experiences. But are such experiences real? The sensible answer is to say no, the eccentric answer is yes. We can do better than either.
Dr Simon Young is a British historian living in Italy, a university lecturer, and an authority on fairy lore. After ‘a brush with mortality’3 he became interested in fairies, and in 2014 started a project for which the word amazing is not, for once, inappropriate. Dr Young created an online ‘Fairy Census,’ where people could anonymously relate their experiences of meeting fairies, with the assurance that their identity would never be disclosed, so they would be safe from the ridicule of their peers. The version of the Fairy Census I consulted was published in January 2018 and recorded fairy sightings up to 2017. It contains five hundred entries.4 Five hundred accounts of modern people seeing fairies.
Young is confident that most of the people who have recounted their experiences for the Fairy Census are sincere. He is suspicious of only a small number of accounts, for an intriguing reason: after sifting through hundreds of reports, he noticed that there are ‘patterns within impossible experiences’, and the accounts that aroused his suspicions do not conform to them. But, as he admits, it would be a slippery slope for him to judge what is kosher and what is not in a Fairy Census.
When we were in touch via email, Young, a kind and patient man, made it immediately clear that he is not out to demonstrate that fairies are real. I didn’t doubt that. I had assumed that the point of his research could not be to ‘demonstrate’ the existence of fairies, but clearly, this was not the view of many of those who wrote to him after he had published the census (online, for free). They wanted a yes or a no, they demanded absolute certainty. This is not what fairies are about. Fairies are about diehard doubt.
Our fifth key is a lesson in scepticism. While it is all too easy to be sceptical about fairies, it is not so easy to be sceptical about other things – the value of money, what a proper career looks like, how an adult should behave, or, for that matter, the non-existence of fairies. But we should, or those things will end up controlling us, choking our sense of wonder.
Young’s work shows that something is going on: where there is smoke there is, at least, smoke. Fairies might or might not be literally real, but people have met them. And if five hundred people answered a comparatively obscure online census, available only in English, how many more fairy encounters are happening out there, unrecorded and forgotten?
*
On a night as black as the bottom of a cave, the young man had taken a shortcut through a small patch of urban woodland in Michigan. We don’t know his name, because this story comes from the Census and his name was kept secret, but we know he was in his twenties, and had had no prior experience of the supernatural. He had walked through these woods on many occasions; he knew his way around.
Even though it was not late – between 6 and 9 p.m., as far as we know – the woods were very silent. More so than they should have been. If the young man had been a fairy expert, he would have known that a profound silence can foreshadow a fairy encounter; but he was not, and he did not know.
He heard a voice. More than one. Whispering and laughing. The young man jerked his head up and looked around. He was not alone, but it was not humans he saw. There were shadows in the trees, small and quick, ‘darting through the branches’, to use his own words.