(Carmina, I., O. 1, v. 30.)
and, still more frequently, in Ovid.
Not far from Rome, as we are told by Chorier, was a place formerly called “Ad Nymphas,” and, at this day, “Santa Ninfa,” which without doubt, he adds, in the language of our ancestors, would have been called “The Place of Fays” (Recherches des Antiquitez, de Vienne, Lyon, 1659).
The word faée, or fée, among the French, is derived, according to Du Cange, from the barbarous Latin fadus or fada, in Italian fata. Gervase of Tilbury, in his Otia Imperialia (D. 3, c. 88), speaks of “some of this kind of larvæ, which they named fadœ, we have heard to be lovers,” and in his relation of a nocturnal contest between two knights (c. 94) he exclaims, “What shall I say? I know not if it were a true horse, or if it were a fairy (fadus), as men assert.” From the Roman de Partenay, or de Lezignan, MS. Du Cange cites—
“Le chasteau fut fait d’une fée
Si comme il est partout retrait.”
Hence, he says, faërie for spectres:
“Plusieurs parlant de Guenart,
Du Lou, de l’Asne, et de Renart,
De faëries, et de songes,
De fantosmes, et de mensonges.”
The same Gervase explains the Latin fata (fée, French) a divining woman, an enchantress, or a witch (D. 3, c. 88).
Master Wace, in his Histoire des Ducs de Normendie (confounded by many with the Roman de Rou), describing the fountain of Berenton, in Bretagne, says—
“En la forest et environ,
Mais jo ne sais par quel raison
La scut l’en les fées veeir,
Se li Breton nos dient veir, etc.”