Fairy Food

 You are wondering far from home when you encounter a fairy which offers you a simple meal of bread and butter. Should you accept it?

 Many would say no, assuming that gifts of food from the fairies are dangerous.

 In the ballade the Childe Rowland Merlin, for example, warned the protagonist who was setting into fairyland to rescue someone that they should “bite no bit, and drink no drop, however hungry or thirsty you be; drink a drop, or bite a bit, while in Elfland you be and never will you see Middle Earth again.”

 Lady Wilde points out that in Ireland it was believed that to eat fairy food was fatal.

 Often fairy food turned out to be foul and dangerous things, glamoured to appear like food.

 So at first glance you might think you should avoid eating fairy food, after all there are many stories where this turns out to be dangerous.

 Yet nothing in fairyland is ever so simple as this. For the fairies are our neighbors and they frequently care about us.

 a man from the City of Doualan who was struggling to feed his family. One evening while he was returning home he pasted over Crokelien hill when he encountered a woman who asked him why he was grieving. He told her that it was because he couldn’t earn enough to feed his family.

“If you want you can send your son to keep my cows and I will give you as much money as you’d like,” the woman told him.

She then led him underground to great heaps of gold and wheat and beef. So he filled his pockets and returned home. The next day he sent his son out to watch the woman’s cattle. When dinner time came the woman fed the young man a meal more wonderful than he’d ever eaten.

 Other times ploughmen would ask for loaves of bread and find them on plates at the edge of their fields. In another story from the Alpes an old fairy gives lost children food and keeps them safe through the winter, and they are fine.

 Indeed, one needed to be careful, for not accepting food from the fairies could also lead them to feel so insulted they might kill  you anyways. In Scotland, for example,

 A ploughman while engaged at his work heard, or fancied he heard, a sound of churning, and said he wished his thirst “was on the dairymaid.” In a short time after a woman appeared and offered him a drink of buttermilk. Her green dress and sudden appearance made him refuse the offer, and she said that next year he would not need the drink. When the twelve months were nearly out the man died.

 The Project Gutenberg eBook, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, by John Gregorson Campbell

 I’m reminded of Scandinavian tales which makes this clearer, with two friends encountering the fairy who offers them each a bit of butter, the one who refuses is cursed and the one who accepts is blessed.

 Another similar story comes from the Isle of Man, where Wentz records that one woman was offered butter milk by a fairy. “but the thirsty woman, ignorant of fairy customs and the penalty attending their infringement, declined the kind offer of refreshment, and immediately found herself a prisoner in the hillock. She was led to an apartment containing a chest full of meal and a great bag of wool, and was told by the fairy that when she had eaten all the meal and spun all the wool she would be free to return to her home. The prisoner at once set herself to eating and spinning assiduously, but without apparent result, and despairing of completing the task consulted an old man of very sad countenance who had long been a captive in the hillock. He willingly gave her his advice, which was to wet her left eye with saliva each morning before she settled down to her task. She followed this advice, and gradually the wool and the meal were exhausted. Then the fairy granted her freedom, but in doing so cursed the old man, and said that she had it in her power to keep him in the hillock for ever.’ (wentz)

 As stated, one had to be careful refusing fairy food, for doing so might lead to curses, imprisonment, and death.

 Fairies were dangerous neighbors but they were neighbors as shown by a story from Britanny France in which a family lived above a fairy family, and the two of them could hear each other talk and pass things back and fort on occasion. One night, when there wasn’t a crumb of bread left in the house and the human woman’s child was hungry. She told her child to knock on the hearth and ask for some bread.

"Here, my boy, here is enough to eat all your life and give it to no one but your parents."

Such stories, of fairies providing people with bread that never ends are fairly common and are often a pleasant surprise, rather than something which is asked for.

One should perhaps keep in mind that fairies often need human food to survive. This is likely in addition to their own food of course, but there does seem to be some magic in human food that keeps many fairies from growing sickly.

Generally, if you are in fairyland or there is a party of fairies the food is dangerous, but if you are in the human world or being offered a humble meal by a humble fairy within our world, even if you enter the fairy’s cottage, it is generally dangerous not to eat. Again, this latter case likely exists because fairies were our neighbors and could come to care for us, in their own, nonhuman sort of way.

Except this isn’t entirely satisfying. We can now turn to a more abstract question. Why does eating food at a fairy party or deep in fairy land lead to imprisonment?

In the lore of many steppes people, of which the Indo-Europeans likely hail from as well we see that when someone would try to pull a spirit of the dead from the land of the dead, such as a shaman or the Greek Goddess Demetrus, if a person of Goddess ate food in the land of the dead they were trapped there, and there was no getting them out, at least not completely.

Eating food in the land of the underworld then is a sign that you accept your place within it.

In an Irish story a woman is taken to fairyland and essentially appears as a ghost after to tell her husband” "Do not be disturbed, dear husband," said the appearance; "I am now in the power of the fairies, but if you only have courage and prudence we may be soon happy with each other again. Next Friday will be May-eve, and the whole court will ride out of the old fort after midnight. I must be there along with the rest. Sprinkle a circle with holy water, and have a black-hafted knife with you. If you have courage to pull me off the horse, and draw me into the ring, all they can do will be useless. You must have some food for me every night on the dresser, for if I taste one mouthful with them, I will be lost to you forever.”

Even closer to the idea of the human as a ghost, taken to fairyland comes from the story of Bridget.

“It happened when she was about nineteen years of age that she fainted one day on the street before the house, where she was washing the spuds for dinner. The mother and sister went out for to carry her in, and they laid her down on the bed—the poor girl never rose from it more. Maybe a week she was lingering dying, not a word ever came from her lips and she used no food at all.

Not a long after the burying her mother heard a rapping on the window, close upon midnight. She rose and she says, “Oh Bridget dear, is it you?”[164]

“It is indeed, mamma,” says a voice. “Let you give me a drink of sweet milk and a small taste of bread.”

“I’ve heard tell of the dead were uneasy, but never of one needing food,” says the mother.

“The fairies have me away,” answers Bridget. “’Tis myself is living this day, and you are after giving decent burial to an old thing they left in my place.”

With that the poor mother brought milk and bread to the window and handed it out.

"Will you ever contrive to get home, my poor Bridget?” says she.”

 In another Newfoundland story there are girls are seeking to avoid being pulled into the underworld forever by sneaking off when they can to eat human food. They are essentially living as ghosts, neither in the underworld with the fairies nor in the land of the living.

 This might be in part because there is some magic in the food of humans, the food of the land of the living, and food made under the sun and fresh air. This could explain why fairies needed human food in the first place, for many were like ancestor spirits in many places crave human food. They need human food to remain healthy.

 Wentz recorded an Irish story in which

 The fairy queen was “fretting her life out for want of some milk that has the scent of green grass in it and of the fresh upper air.”

 In Denmark People would often see these trold dancing at night. However, one of these trold told a man that they were going to move. “Why?” The man asked. “We can’t survive here anymore,” the trold told him. “You see the trold have been surviving by stealing food, but people have started putting a cross over everything so we have to move or starve to death.”

 

What fairies have then is insubstantial food, at least much of the time, for they exist in a liminal state.

 

This might give us a better answer about human and fairy food. For much of fairy food might very well be a liminal and dreamlike thing, perhaps even a thing of the underworld and the land of the dead in some cases. Thus, it is something to be avoided. On the other hand while many fairies have connections to lands of the dead or other liminal spaces, many dwell within our world or places of paradise, so their food can be the same or better than ours. This then becomes a question of what you think the source of the fairy food is.

 

Is it liminal and illusionary food from the land of the dead or something rotting they are trying to pass as food?

 

Is it food from our world that they now have?

 

Is it food from the a sort of heavenly otherworld that is even better than our own?

 

It is difficult to tell, of course, but you can generally trust fairies if they are giving you food out of sympathy, as payment for your work or goods, or they are fairies that live close enough to you that you have at least heard them and they have heard you frequently. They aren’t trustworthy if they are acting flippant or you had to enter the otherworld to meet them, without any agreement before hand.

 

Still, this doesn’t answer the question we began with. What do you do if you are far from home and a fairy offers you food?

 

I don’t know of any stories with this scenario, for they are all deep in fairyland or in lands where the fairies would be your neighbors. And so I can’t help you with it. After all, this fairy isn’t your neighbor, per say, but fairies did sometimes help travelers. Yet other lands are often considered to be part of the otherworld and the fairies from them could be dangerous.

 

So flip a coin and hope that luck gives you the right answer, for sometimes fairyland is just dangerous. Also, if you do survive this type of encounter, please say something so we can all learn.