I picked up a nice little book in the Amnesty bookshop in Newcastle the other day called The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, by the always excellent Katharine Briggs. One thing particularly caught my eye, which is the treatment of the Lord of the Rings (which hadn't been published for long when this book came out in 1969) as a piece of modern Fairy literature. She says "Even in these books, where the elves are in full power and activity, the end is one of diminishment and vanishing. After the fatal ring has been destroyed something of elfin power seemed to go with it, and the elves began to cross the sea to the western lands."
I'd never really thought of it in this context, but she's dead right that this fits in very neatly with British fairy beliefs, which from the earliest times have the elves or faeries as a departing or vanishing race, disappearing into twilight sometime in the past. Even as early as Chaucer, the Wife of Bath says that the fairies could often be seen in King Arthur's time, but since the coming of the Friars, "now can no man see none elves mo."
My favourite folk tale illustrating this comes from the 19th century, which just goes to show that the elves were a long time in going. A crazy Scottish geologist and one of the leading proponents for intelligent design, Hugh Miller, records the following:
"The inmates of this little hamlet had all gone to church, all except a herd boy and a little girl, his sister, who were lounging beside one of the cottages; when, just as the shadow of the garden-dial had fallen on the line of noon, they saw a long cavalcade ascending out of the ravine through the wooded hollow. It winded among the knolls and bushes; and, turning round the northern gable of the cottage beside which the sole spectators of the scene were stationed, began to ascend the eminence towards the south. The horses were shaggy, diminutive things, speckled dun and grey; the riders, stunted, misgrown, ugly creatures, attired in antique jerkins of plaid, long grey cloaks and little red caps, from under which their wild uncombed locks shot out over their cheeks and foreheads. The boy and his sister stood gazing in utter dismay and astonishment, as rider after rider, each one more uncouth and dwarfish than the one that preceded it, passed the cottage and disappeared among the brushwood which at that period covered the hill, until at length the entire route, except the last rider, who lingered a few yards behind the others, had gone by.
"What are ye little mannie? And where are ye going?" Inquired the boy, his curiosity getting the better of his fears and his prudence.
"Not of the race of Adam." said the creature, turning for a moment in his saddle. "The People of Peace shall never more be seen in Scotland."
So at last, stripped of all their glamour and wondrous magic, all their finery "melted into air, into thin air" the elves make their last exit from Britain. Except of course that people still see them today from time to time, between the blinking of their eyes. But this little story from Scotland strikes me as the saddest and most wonderful of all the "last of the faeries" stories. Except maybe the tale of the Trolls leaving Denmark, which I may tell you sometime...
