III. Maud’s ability to help them.
I. The opinion, which sets the fairies in opposition to the established faith of all Christendom, is widely diffused. To the Breton peasant, as M. de la Villemarqué has above informed us, his Korrigan is a heathen princess, doomed to a long sorrow for obstinately refusing the message of salvation.
The brothers Grimm, speaking of the fairies in Ireland, say that “they are angels cast out from heaven, who have not fallen as low as hell; but in great fear and uncertainty about their future state, doubt, themselves, whether they shall obtain mercy at the last day.”[K]
Of the fairies in Scotland, it is averred by the same learned and exact writers, that “they were originally angels dwelling in bliss, but who, because they suffered themselves to be seduced by the archfiend, were hurled down from heaven in innumerable multitudes. They shall wander till the last day over mountains and lakes. They know not how their sentence will run—whether they shall be saved or damned; but dread the worst.”
Tales, in many parts of Europe, which represent the fairies as exceedingly solicitous about their salvation, and as inquiring of priests and others concerning their own spiritual prospects, for the most part with an unfavourable answer, tend to fix upon them a reproachful affinity with the spirits of darkness.
II. That the powerful fairies, who have appeared to us, from childhood upwards, as irresistible dispensers of good and evil to our kind, should need aid of any sort from us, is an unexpected feature of the fairy lore, which breaks by degrees upon the zealous and advancing inquirer.
The two excellent brothers Grimm, in the most elaborate and comprehensive collection,[L] probably, of national traditions that Europe possesses, have furnished us with various instances. We select a very few. In the following graceful Alpine pastoral, the need of human help attaches to an exigency of life or death:—