5 - Otherworld Enchantments and Faery Realms

Summary

Magic can afford human practitioners of magic a significant degree of power, especially through its transformative, often bodily, possibilities, which can be both protective and destructive. Healing, inviolability, invisibility, shape-shifting and intervention in destiny through divination: all these effects are presented as available to individuals through learning, and they frequently offer challenges as well as assistance to the protagonists of romance. These interventionist aspects of magic, white and black, marvellous and menacing, are vastly increased by its association with the otherworld. Always linked to larger notions of the supernatural through its connection to demons, magic also intersects with notions of the faery, neither demonic nor divine. The faery rewrites classical notions of gods and daimons in the idea of beings with supernatural powers, and draws too on legends of the Germanic and Celtic gods, as well as on folk beliefs in a range of supernatural creatures, often associated with the natural world – in particular spirits of the air or elves. Such figures are often larger-thanlife, though folk tales included encounters with the ‘little folk’ who would come to define popular perceptions of the faery. Residues of past belief, literary echoes, folk and learned ideas of gods, demons and spirits with special powers, and cultural perceptions of the possibilities of magic shape images of enchanters and enchantresses that go far beyond the reality of human practices of magic evoked in legal or theological discourse.

The world of faery is a conventional feature of romance: it presents a parallel sphere of marvellous adventure and is often the provenance of enchanters and enchantresses, and of magical objects. It is literally the otherworld, tangential, a place into which anyone may step by chance, the inhabitants of which may stray into the human world. It is shifting and vaguely defined, not always explicitly as faery, not always given boundaries. Rather romances tend to create a nebulous ethos of the supernatural associated with a particular figure, place or landscape. Though the otherworld is typically associated with the wilderness beyond the court, and with the violent and unpredictable, it is often a place of learning. Figures associated with the faery tend to be distinguished by knowledge and skill in sophisticated arts.