Fairies in Medieval Romance

The New Middle Ages

by James Wade

This study offers new approaches for considering the unique narrative possibilities of fairies in medieval romance, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie to Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. James Wade provides a counter-reading to theories of the Celtic origins of medieval fairies and suggests ways in which these unusual figures can help us think about the internal logics of medieval romance.

Genres: Medieval, History, Literary Criticism, Fairy Tales

225 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

James Wade

James Wade is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He has published Fairies in Medieval Romance as well as articles on romance and related writings.

Reviews

[Andrew Higgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting monograph that explores the role of fairies in Medieval Romance. The author contextualises this role from the very interesting and somewhat (as he states) controversial critical framework of world-building suggesting that the Medieval authors of the Arthurian cycle of stories and others created an internal folklore in their story that used the adoxic and other worldly element of the fairy to produce unique figures and episodes to facilitate their narrative needs. The author pretty much backs this up by exploring the changing and transformative role of Morgan Le Fay in the Arthurian corpus. The author shows the problems the fairy represented to the writers of Romance and suggests the fairy element became de-emphasized as authors attempted to ground their works in more of a sense of reality and verisimilitude. At times the author's writing is a bit dense as in this example 'That is, they were able to maintain a simultaneous sense of historic verisimilitude and intra-narrative indeterminacy by transforming historically real folklore into folklore that is actual within their romances at a meta-world level.' (41) Yes - not an easy one to parse! The authors treatment of the Arthurian island of Avalon as a simulacra of world-building is quite interesting and the later chapters that look at Medieval works involving fairies such as Sir Orfeo, Richard Coer de Lion (where Richard the Lionhart is the product of a fairy mistress!), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Huon de Bordeaux (among others) are quite interesting. The notes have some good sources to explore further and this text while challenging at times has given me some interesting areas to explore around the role of fairies as world-building elements in Medieval fiction - which I will be thinking about the next time I read one of these Medieval texts.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not too familiar with a lot of the texts, but it gives a good overview how the fairies were handled there. Very enlightening