“Better we had through mire and bush
Been lantern-led by Friar Rush.”
Shakespeare in 1 “Henry IV.” calls it a “ball of wildfire,” and also used the Latin name, ignis fatuus.
This bewilderment of the rustics by false fires does not always seem to have been the result of diabolical malice on the part of the fairies, but sometimes assumed the form of a practical joke. Like most practical jokes, it was probably much more amusing to the joker than the joked, and the benighted wanderer had little cause to thank him of whom it could be said—
“Whene’er such wanderers I meete
As from their night-sports they trudge home;
With counterfeiting voice I grete
And call them on, with me to roam
Thro’ woods, thro’ lakes,
Thro’ bogs, thro’ brakes;
Or else, unseene, with them I go
All in the nicke
To play some tricke,
And frolic it, with ho, ho, ho!”
An old legend tells us how on the advent of Christianity great Pan and all the woodland deities deserted their old haunts and were never seen of men again; and in the same way the march of science and the spread of education must ere now have killed off all the fairies, except in the most out-of-the-way districts. Once coaxed and propitiated, or shudderingly dreaded, they now but serve to make a pleasant fancy for a Christmas-card, or aid in the grand spectacular effects of the Christmas pantomime. Those, then, who would see these denizens of elf-land and all the grace and beauty that even the very name of fairy-land suggests, will seek them no longer in the ferny glades of some fair woodland or beneath the silvery beams of the moon, but reduce the matter to a prosaic visit to some great theatre, and endeavour to find in the great array of “supers” and the glowing of coloured fires the realisation of their fair ideal. The fairies are, in fact, as dead, as hopelessly defunct, as the proverbial door-nail, which seems to have been accepted by the wisdom of our ancestors as the most expressive symbol of mortality and the stern decrees of irreversible Fate.[26]
The Pigmies had not the same glamour of romance about them that was associated with the dwellers in elf-land. The consideration of them nevertheless comes well within the same chapter, as, like the fairies, they were a race of beings of human mould, but differing from the ordinary standard of humanity by reason of the exceeding smallness of their stature.
References to them will be found in the writings of Herodotus, Philostratus, Pliny, and many other authors, the first allusion to them being in the third book of the Iliad, where the Trojans are compared to cranes fighting against pigmies:—
“Thus by their leaders’ care each martial band
Moves into ranks, and stretches o’er the land.
With shouts the Trojans, rushing from afar,
Proclaim their motions, and provoke the war:
So when inclement winters vex the plain
With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain,
To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly,
With noise, and order, through the mid-way sky:
To pigmy nations wounds and death they bring,
And all the war descends upon the wing.”[27]
[27] “Marking the tracts of air, the clamorous cranes
Wheel their due flight in varied ranks descried;
And each with outstretched neck his rank maintains,
In marshalled order through th’ ethereal void.” [Back]