THE DEEP ONES: "The Child That Went with the Fairies" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

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THE DEEP ONES: "The Child That Went with the Fairies" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

2papijoe
Dec 31, 2022, 5:01 pm

Reading this in The Purcell Papers

3paradoxosalpha
Edited: Jan 4, 2023, 11:10 am

I read this one out of Mysterious and Horrific Stories, and worked my way up to it with the three stories before it in the book: "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," "A Chapter in the History of the Tyrone Family," and "An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House." The first and third of those are very conventional and "authentic" seeming ghost stories, almost understated in their presentation. (The second is a gothic fright with secret passages, family corruption, weird apparitions, and so forth.) In this context, "The Child that Went with the Fairies" seemed very folkloric and traditional, and although it was missing the sort of documentary conceits that the other stories exhibited, I felt suspicious that it was based on a specific actual rumor or legend.

Details that sort of surprised me included the presence of the scary black lady fairy and Billy's persistent haunting of the family.

When the carriage arrived among the children, I was reminded of the wicked queen's advent in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I wondered if C. S. Lewis had read this story.

This story was certainly remote from Arthur Machen's reimagining of the fairies, but among the lore of Yog-Sothothery I was (strangely, perhaps) most put in mind of the Fungi from Yuggoth with their offers of exciting excursions from which return would be possible only in some attenuated form.

4paradoxosalpha
Edited: Jan 4, 2023, 11:12 am

that lonely hillhaunt of the "Good people," as the fairies are called euphemistically

Surely "fairy" is itself a euphemism, contracting "the fair folk," where "fair" is a euphemistic moral quality rather than a visible complexion.

5papijoe
Jan 4, 2023, 12:20 pm

I thought the line “Poor was this widow in a land of poverty” and the description of the more affluent folk leaving a cache of sod for the poor was a poignantly effective way of presenting the characters.
The idea of certain vegetation warding against dangerous spiritual threats was kind of novel, although I seem to remember reading something similar in Grave’s The White Goddess
>3 paradoxosalpha: I had a similar response to the high strangeness of the “black” fairy, as well as the sinister strategy of distracting the other children with the disappearing apples while the fairy queen made off with their brother
I liked your point on the similarity to the White Witch and wouldn’t be surprised if it was an influence on Lewis
Tolkien, in his essay On Fairy-Stories, makes the argument that the value of fairy tales is diminished by the work of Andrew Lang and Walt Disney in making them less scary. Mr Strange and Dr Norrell features a fairy called The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair that is more in line with Le Faun’s more perilous representation of the Fey Folk

6paradoxosalpha
Edited: Jan 4, 2023, 2:23 pm

>5 papijoe: Mr Strange and Dr Norrell features a fairy called The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair that is more in line with Le Faun’s more perilous representation of the Fey Folk

Unlike my mere suspicion regarding Lewis, I am confident that Susanna Clarke has read this story. Her book The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories is even better for fairy menace than Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is.

Tolkien, in his essay On Fairy-Stories, makes the argument that the value of fairy tales is diminished by the work of Andrew Lang and Walt Disney in making them less scary.

Tolkien's own Smith of Wooton Major was pretty unthreatening, I thought. (I did like it, though.)

7RandyStafford
Jan 4, 2023, 11:27 pm

I seem to recall that, in the pages of Fortean Times Simon Young claimed this story was a pretty good representation of Irish beliefs regarding the fairies. I found a paper he did on fairies and Le Fanu at https://www.academia.edu/43994550/Young_Le_Fanu_and_Living_Fairy_Gothic but haven't read it yet.

Like most others, I found the presence of the black woman unexpected as well as Bill continuing to show up for eight months after he disappeared.

Also thought Le Fanu well captured the despondency of a family with a missing loved one whose ultimate fate is unknown.

8housefulofpaper
Jan 15, 2023, 7:08 pm

I've got this in at least two collections, but as I'm currenly away from home I reread it online. It's always chilled me (perhaps due to my getting frights from the "stranger danger" public information films, that used to be screened just after pre-schoolers lunchtime TV programmes).

The black lady-in-waiting is, in the context of 19th Century rural Ireland, as genuinely out of place and unsettling as the intimidating coachmen and the laws of physics not behaving as they should, for all that it strikes an awkward note today. Also, I think I read somewhere that there was a Europen belef in black-skinned supernatural creatures, and they were definitely not confused with or meant to be, humans of African ancestry (I'm quite sure that I'm not thinking of Christmas in the Netherlands' Zwarte Pieten).

>5 papijoe: The idea of certain vegetation warding against dangerous spiritual threats was kind of novel, although I seem to remember reading something similar in Grave’s The White Goddess - I read about rowan/mountain ash trees planted outside houses in Ireland not very long ago. I have a feeling it was in a collection of Algernon Blackwood's non-fiction, but I'm not able to go and check. Of course, Bram Stoker popularised the idea that garlic can repel a vampire in Dracula.

>7 RandyStafford: Bill continuing to show up for eight months after he disappeared this reminds me of Rose's unsucessful escape from her ghostly or undead husband, Vanderhausen of Rotterdam, in Le Fanu's "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter". Has any scholarly work been done, I wonder, to trace the elements of the folklore of fairies, of ghosts, and of vampires, in Le Fanu's tales,and how he combined them; and if (or more likely how) that can be seen influencing the work of M. R. James and Bram Stoker?