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There is no phenomenon without a cause but in the immense complexity of historical record it is not always easy to detect the true cause, and to trace its growth and working until the result delights us. No other literature save that of Greece alone can vie with ours in its pictures of the land of fantasy and glamour, or has brought back from that mysterious realm of unfading beauty treasures of more exquisite and enduring charm. We could not blot out from English poetry its visions of the fairyland without a sense of irreparable loss. Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." "Charmed magic casements opening on the foam Swinburne, until in our own days it has received a fresh accession of life alike from Ireland and from Gaelic Scotland, we are never for long without hearing the horns of Elfland faintly winding, never for long are we denied access to those As we pass on from Shakespeare and his immediate followers to Herrick and Milton, through the last ballad writers to Thomson and Gray, and then note in Percy and Chatterton the beginnings of the romantic revival which culminated in Keats and Coleridge, was continued by Tennyson, the Rossettis, and Mr. The Irish references will be found in the first volume of my Voyage of Bran (London, 1895), or mainly in the forthcoming second volume.]įew things are more marvellous in our marvellous poetic literature of the last three centuries than the persistence of the fairy note throughout the whole of its evolution. Chambers' edition, London, 1897) or in Halliwell's Illustrations of Shakespeare's Fairy Mythology (London, 1845, ^^ reprinted with additions by Hazlitt, London, 1875). As far as English literature is concerned, the facts and instances cited may be found in any good edition of the Midsummer Night's Dream (I have used Mr. I have not thought it necessary to burden this paper with references. The latter, however, are, I believe, secondary, the former primary. But when I insist upon the dominant nature of the agricultural element in the fairy creed, I by no means deny or overlook the numerous other elements which have entered into it. I need but mention the most striking instance of the way in which Mannhardt's teaching has borne fruit in this country: Mr. In postulating an agricultural basis for the Tuatha de Danann mythology and ritual I do but find myself in accord with all recent students of mythology in this country. I was compelled to form a theory, which would fit the facts, of primitive conceptions of life and sacrifice compelled also to determine the real nature of the Tuatha de Danann, the ancestors of the fairies believed in to this day by the Irish peasantry. In that volume, which will appear shortly, I discuss the Celtic doctrine of re-birth. My paper is in reality an outcome of my work in the second volume of the Voyage of Bran. The two problems are by no means necessarily connected but I found that by emphasising certain elements, unduly neglected hitherto, in the fairy creed I was brought into contact with historic facts and conditions which, as it seems to me, adequately explain why England, alone of modern countries, has admitted the fairy world into its highest imaginative literature.
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What I have here done is to essay an explanation of the special part played by fairy mythology in English literature, as well as of the essential conceptions which underlie generally that mythology, and from which it derives force and sanction. To adequately discuss the origin or nature of English fairy mythology would demand volumes. [The title of the following study is, perhaps, too wide and general in scope. THE FAIRY MYTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE: ITS ORIGIN AND NATURE.