Note 30 — Chapter III · Fairy Ways and Words

Before closing this chapter, I wish to touch on the question of the language of the fairies, though fairy tales hardly ever raise it, as they usually assume the fairies to speak the same language as the mortals around them. There is, however, one well-known exception, namely, the story of Eliodorus, already mentioned, p. 117, as recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis, who relates how Eliodorus, preferring at the age of twelve to play the truant to undergoing a frequent beating by his teacher, fasted two days in hiding in the hollow of a river bank, and how he was then accosted by two little men who induced him to follow them to a land of sports and other delights. There he remained long enough to be able, years later, to give his diocesan, the second Menevian bishop named David30, a comprehensive account of the people and realm of Faery. After Eliodorus had for some time visited and revisited that land of twilight, his mother desired him to bring her some of the gold of the fairies. So one day he tried to bring away the gold ball with which the fairy king’s son used to play; but he was not only unsuccessful, but subjected to indignities also, and prevented from evermore finding his way back to fairyland. So he had to go again to school and to the studies which he so detested; but in the course of time he learned enough to become a priest; and when, stricken in years, he used to be entreated by Bishop David to relate this part of his early history, he never could be got to unfold his tale without shedding tears. Among other things which he said of the fairies’ mode of living, he stated that they ate neither flesh nor fish, but lived for the most part on various kinds of milk food cooked after the fashion of stirabout, flavoured as it were with saffron31. But one of the most curious portions of Eliodorus’ yarn was that relating to the language of the fairies; for he pretended to have learnt it and to have found it to resemble his own Britannica Lingua, ‘Brythoneg, or Welsh.’ In the words instanced Giraldus perceived a similarity to Greek32, which he accounted for by means of the fabulous origin of the Welsh from the Trojans and the supposed sojourn made in Greece by those erring Trojans on their way to Britain. Giraldus displays quite a pretty interest in comparative philology, and talks glibly of the Lingua Britannica; but one never feels certain that he knew very much more about it than the author of the Germania, the first to refer to it under that name. Tacitus, however, had the excuse that he lived at a distance and some eleven centuries before the advent of Gerald the Welshman.