ISSN 1754-1514 himself, or indeed his readers, the fact that the fairy lands he wrote about sprang from and were modified by the sober realities of daily life. In his introduction to the 1893 edi- The tion of Robert Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, written in 1691 and first published by Walter Scott in 1815, Bottle Lang retells a story about a young girl who has heard the superstition that those who see fairies must stop their eyes from ‘twinkling’ Imp so as not to ‘lose the vision’.4 One afternoon in the Spring of 1746, whilst reading in a window seat at the house of Lord Lovat at Issue 20, December 2016 Gortuleg, the young girl looks up to see ‘a ‘A Shy and Fugitive People’: Andrew Lang company of headlong riders hastening to and the Fairies the castle’.5 Believing these riders to be the Andrew Teverson Sleagh Maith (Good People), she endeav- ours to keep her eyes fixed steady upon the or Andrew Lang, the realm of fairy land hoard so that they don’t disappear. But the was synonymous with escape. Writing in figures, it transpires, are not fairies at all; FThe New Princeton Review in 1888, the they are the insubstantial and tattered forces same year in which he assembled his authori- of Charles Stuart, fleeing their annihilation tative edition of Perrault’s fairy tales and at the Battle of Culloden and hoping that completed his own novel about fairy abduc- Lord Lovat will help them disappear into the tion The Gold of Fairnilee, Lang lamented the Hebrides. Fairy beliefs, the anecdote sug- insistence in modern writing upon the ‘ugly, gests, are intertwined with real histories; manly face of life’ (he had in mind the natu- more than this, they often cluster around ralism of Émile Zola and Alphonse Daudet), sites of personal or, in this instance, national and instead celebrated what he called ‘liter- trauma. ary anodynes’: fictions that counteract the A similar proximity to the real may also mundanity and disappointment of reality by be observed in Lang’s own fictions of fairy offering ‘diversion, or comfort, or oblivion land. The Gold of Fairnilee is about a young … the draught magical which puts pain and man named Randall whose fascination with sorrow out of mind’.1 Once such anodyne, the Queen of the Fairies results in him being Lang goes on to observe, is administered to trapped in fairy land for seven years. In ‘lovers of the Fairy Queen’. ‘To get into fairy- generic terms, the novel fulfils the fantasti- land,’ he writes ‘… is the aspiration of all of us cal and otherworldly requirements demanded whom the world oppresses’.2 by Lang of his fictions. Simultaneously, how- These observations do much to contextu- ever, this marvellous story of fairy abduction alise Lang’s prolific and enduring engagement takes place against a backdrop of historical with the worlds of fairies in his writing. The violence and cultural dislocation. Randall’s fairy tale anthologies that he edited in col- father has died fighting the English at the laboration with his wife between 1889 and Battle of Flodden Field (1513) and one of 1910, his burlesque novels of a fairy court Randall’s earliest memories is of seeing his Prince Prigio (1889) and Prince Ricardo of father first as a defeated ghost with a broken Pantouflia(1893), his earnest reconstruction spear and then as a corpse stretched out on of the Tam Lin legend in The Gold of Fairnilee, a shield. Randall’s flight from reality is occa- and his apparently inexhaustible contribution sioned, at least in part, by this early moment to scholarship concerning the savage origins of childhood trauma and loss: he believes of fairy tales, may all be seen as a dimen- that the Fairy Queen will compensate him sion of his life-long endeavour to, as he told for an insufficient and troubling reality. The Henry Rider Haggard in a letter of 1887, fairy realm in The Gold of Fairnilee, however, return imaginatively to ‘a better place than turns out to be a place of danger, illusion, and Marloes Road’ – Marloes Road being his home entrapment, where history, seasonal change, in Kensington, London.3 and human life, stalls, and Randall, like Kai Escapist though he professed himself to in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow be, however, Lang could never conceal from Queen’, must be rescued from this fate by his www.thebottleimp.org.uk The Bottle Imp is the ezine of the Scottish Writing Exhibition www.scottishwriting.org.uk and is published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies www.asls.org.uk 1 companion Jeanie and brought back to the His own fairy narratives, however, and their real world to find his place there. The logic of success in late Victorian and Edwardian Lang’s fiction, in this respect at least, tends to Britain, suggest precisely this – that fairies contradict his professions about the virtues of persist, and become figures of fascination in escapism in his non-fiction. this period, not because they offer an escape Jeanie’s narrative trajectory too provides a into the past, but because they speak pow- realistic counterpart to Randall’s journey into erfully, if indirectly, about present concerns. the fantastic. As a baby, she was accidentally This ultimately is the paradox that character- carried away from a house in Northumbria ises Lang’s correspondence with the fairies: during a cross-border raid made by the he sees in them an imaginative vehicle of Scottish in revenge for an English theft of escape, but stubbornly, and against his own cows (Jeanie is bundled up in a carpet along inclination, the fairies drag him back to his with other treasures). Her arrival is described own world. in terms that foreshadow Randall’s abduction by the fairies, but in this case the borders Andrew Teverson she crosses are not those between reality Professor, Head of School of Humanities and the fairy realm but between the warring Kingston University London Kingdoms of England and Scotland. In making [email protected] this implicit parallel, Lang, perhaps uncon- sciously, reveals the paradigmatic character of Notes the fairy land in the novel: Randall’s transac- 1 See ‘Literary Anodynes’, in The Edinburgh Critical Edi- tions between the world of the real and the tion of the Selected Writings of Andrew Lang, ed. An- drew Teverson, Alexandra Warwick and Leigh Wilson world of fairies becomes a means of thinking (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 2. about the nature of the borderlands in which vols.; vol. 2, pp. 105–06. Originally published in New Lang was born, about his own journey away Princeton Review 6:2 (September 1888), pp. 145–53. from the borders to live in London, and about 2 Ibid. p. 109. 3 Quoted in Marysa Demoor’s unpublished thesis ‘An- political transactions between England and drew Lang: Late Victorian Humanist and Journalistic Scotland which, even as Lang wrote, were Critic, with a Descriptive Checklist of the Lang Letters’ being tested by the rise of Celtic nationalism (Rijksuniversiteit, 1983), p. 106. The letter is dated at the end of the nineteenth century. October 15, but no year is given, so 1887 is Demoor’s estimation. Lang was writing specifically about The Likewise the story of Jeanie and Randall’s Gold of Fairnilee and his endeavours in this novel to eventual marital union following Randall’s capture memories of his childhood. rescue from the Fairy Queen symbolises the 4 Andrew Lang, ‘Introduction’ to The Secret Common- historical union of England and Scotland, and wealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, by Robert Kirk (Lon- don: David Nutt, 1893), pp. lix–lx. Lang tells the story affirms Lang’s ongoing commitment to uni- to illustrate a belief recorded by Lord Tarbott in a letter fication at a time when he felt it to be under that is appended to the Secret Commonwealth. Tarbott threat from divisive nationalist factions.6 notes that ‘[Second] Sight is of no long Duration, only Lang’s fiction may not concern itself, like continuing ſo long as they can keep their Eyes ſteady without twinkling. The hardy therefore fix their look, Zola’s or Daudet’s, with the sordid underside that they may ſee the longer; but the timorous ſee only of human life, with adultery, divorce proceed- Glances; their eyes always twinkles at the firſt Sight of ings, cynical atheism and ‘the brutes who kick the Object’. See Kirk, p. 40. women to death’.7 No less than the French 5 Lang, ‘Introduction’, p. lix. 6 Lang made no secret of his sympathies for the Jacobite naturalists, however, Lang’s preoccupations cause, though his Jacobitism mainly took the form of are rooted in modern concerns and modern romantic nostalgia for a historical moment that he re- anxieties. garded as having passed. Whilst he insisted on the dis- As a scholar, Lang repeatedly argues that tinctiveness of Scottish identity within the Union, and would no doubt have preferred a Britain unified under a Fairies are survivals of obsolete civilizational Stuart dynasty, he was not antagonistic to the principle beliefs and practices. In his introduction to of unification itself. Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth, he describes 7 Lang, ‘Literary Anodynes’, p. 105. fairies as ‘composite creatures’ assembled 8 Lang, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxi and lxv. from memories of a pre-Christian Hades, ancient beliefs in local spirits from Greece, Rome and Egypt, and half memories of an ancient cave dwelling race.8 The possibility that Lang never entertains is that fairies have survived into the modern age because they have an ongoing relevance to the present.