The books I’d read about Lewis hadn’t helped much; in fact, they only made me doubt my own response. Today’s Lewis scholars might, as Walter Hooper does, caution others against succumbing to “the mistaken notion that if you have found a biblical or literary ‘influence’ behind a work there is no more to be said about it,” but this is in fact exactly what nearly all of them do. If glosses on scripture are really all there is to Narnia, I don’t believe I could have ever mistaken it for a glimpse of far horizons. The true believers’ Narnia is monolithic, black-and-white, closed. It has no byways or twilight. There is no out-of-doors.
Now, at last, I had found Lewis himself writing wistfully of a third road, like the bonny road that leads to Elfland, which is also Fairyland or Faerie, as the place was known of old. A better name for it now might be the Otherworld, since the word “fairy” has, in the last 150 years, become tainted. Originally, a fairy was neither an animate Barbie doll with wings nor an adorable urchin wearing a petunia for a dress, but a creature belonging to one of many supernatural species in northwestern European folklore. Some were beautiful, some were ugly, some common, some rare. Many looked like human beings, others did not, and while some fairies were indeed small, others were larger than men, and still others could be big or small, depending on how they felt at the moment. The fairies in the folktales of the British Isles are most often the same size as human beings; in fact, some of them may once have been human beings. Specifically, they may be the dead, or people thought to be dead who perhaps aren’t after all. Vagueness is their brief.
Lewis devotes an entire chapter to these creatures in The Discarded Image, calling them Longaevi after the pagan author Martianus Capella, who with that word encompassed those beings who “haunt the woods, glades, and groves, and lakes and springs and brooks; whose names are Pans, Fauns, Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs,” a list that includes almost all of the anthropomorphic population of Narnia. The importance of what I will have to call the fairies (Longaevi is a bit much) lies, as Lewis wrote, in their unimportance. “They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value…. They intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory.”
Tolkien, too, was fascinated by the notion of Faerie and its inhabitants. These creatures, he wrote, are “not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet. Even upon the borders of Faerie we encounter them only at some chance crossing of the ways.” The third road pointed out to Thomas the Rhymer, the road to Elfland (“elf” was one synonym for “fairy”), leads neither to heaven nor to hell, and it promises a place where the relentless moral weighing that Christianity imposes upon every action in this world simply doesn’t apply. It is not a safe place — to the contrary, the traditional beliefs hold that the less a human being has to do with fairies and their business, the better — but then the real out-of-doors has never been very safe, either.
Lewis, as an Irishman, knew fairies more intimately than his friend. The housemaid who helped raise him and his brother had seen them near Dundrum in county Down, where their aunt lived, and as a man Lewis had vacationed in a bungalow on Ireland’s northern coast which the locals wouldn’t approach after dark. It was haunted, but according to Lewis, the ghost didn’t frighten the neighbors nearly as much as “the Good People” also known to frequent the spot: “They are greatly dreaded,” he reported, “and called ‘the good people’ not because they are good but in order to propitiate them.” In Celtic legend, they are known as the Sidhe (Gaelic for “peace,” another placating euphemism), local spirits who fiercely guard their favored sites and are sometimes said to be descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a mythical race of gods and heroes who were expelled from Ireland by human invaders before relocating to the Otherworld.
In his legendarium, Tolkien transformed these beings into the noble, ethereal elves who are migrating out of Middle-earth throughout The Lord of the Rings. (He conceived of his elves as a real historical race, of which Celtic myths and legends are a fanciful, degraded memory.) But in folklore, the Otherworld was never entirely detached from this one; it was like an alternate Britain, a different layer of reality, often contiguous with our own and occasionally accessible at certain points of convergence: a rabbit hole, perhaps, or a mirror, or a wardrobe.
Sometimes the Otherworld was said to be underground, its entrances in the barrows and other prehistoric sites that dotted the countryside. Most of these legends probably arose from attempts to explain how the ruins got there in the first place and from ancient rumors of the people who preceded the Celts. The stone spearheads found near their old haunts were called “elf-shot,” and the fairies were reputed to fear cold iron, possibly a memory of Stone Age natives subsiding before better-armed invaders. According to the peculiar mythology of Ireland, the land was home to a succession of five different “races” (some human, some giants, some much like gods) before the ancestors of the present occupants arrived.
The closest relation to the Sidhe in the Chronicles is the Lady of the Green Kirtle in The Silver Chair. Her dress is the same color as both the Queen of Elfland’s gown and the sash worn by the Green Knight, who, acting under the secret orders of Morgan Le Fay (whose surname means “the fairy”) tests Sir Gawain’s honor. The Lady of the Green Kirtle abducts Prince Rilian from Narnia and carries him off to her underground kingdom, where she detains him by enchantment, a typical act of fairy mischief. She is also a shape-shifter, specifically a lamia (a monster originating in Greek mythology), a child-devouring serpent that can transform itself into a beautiful woman. The Lady of the Green Kirtle is called a witch, but in many old tales the figures we now know as witches were originally described as fairies. She seems fair, but plays foul, tricking Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum into seeking shelter with the giants of Harfang, who intend to eat them at their Autumn Feast.
If The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the most medieval of the Chronicles, The Silver Chair has the most in common with traditional fairy tales. It shares their primal preoccupations with giants, kidnapping, and the prospect of being devoured, anxieties that are, if not peculiar to small children, then at least the most intense in them. Rereading the scenes at Harfang, where the giants are among the few characters in any of the seven books to treat the child characters like children, I was reminded of the time my three-year-old friend Corinne looked at me appraisingly and announced, “I don’t think you’ll eat me.” Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me just how menacing the world must sometimes look from her perspective or that I myself might constitute a kind of giant.
The Lady of the Green Kirtle does differ from traditional fairies in her imperial ambitions; she plans to conquer Narnia with her army of enslaved gnomes and to install Rilian as a puppet monarch. Why she should need to do this when he is already the rightful heir to the throne is never explained, and it would be more fairylike of her to simply capture the prince on a whim, much as a human being would decide to keep a caged bird as a pet. This is how the capricious “gentleman with the thistledown hair” in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell collects certain choice Londoners, exceptionally attractive human specimens whom he forces to attend exhausting nightly balls at his decrepit castle. The rest of humanity doesn’t interest him much. The Lady of the Green Kirtle is deliberately, rather than incidentally, wicked. A Narnian dwarf, upon learning of the lady’s scheme, pronounces her “doubtless the same kind as that White Witch…. those Northern Witches always mean the same thing, but in every age they have a different plan for getting it.”