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Informationen zum Autor Edited by Lynne Greenberg Klappentext A wide-ranging and appealingly fairy-sized treasury of fantastical poems from across the centuries and around the world, in a gorgeously jacketed small hardcover Fascination with fairies spans centuries and cultures. With ancient roots in pagan belief, fairies have long populated mythology, folklore, and oral and written poetry. They have seen repeated surges of renewed popularity from the Renaissance to the present fantasy-besotted moment. Elves, changelings, mermaids, pixies, and sprites, England’s Queen Mab, France’s Morgana, Scandinavian nixies, and Irish banshees: these magical creatures are sometimes mischievous, sometimes dangerous, but always enchanting. This collection brings together a diverse array of literary fairies: here are Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare‘s Titania, and Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” but also Arthur Rimbaud’s “Fairy,” Goethe's "Erlking," Claude McKay’s “Snow Fairy,” Denise Levertov’s “Elves,” Sylvia Plath’s “Lorelei," and Christopher Okigbo's "Watermaid." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Leseprobe Foreword With deep roots in pagan traditions and religions, fairies are ubiquitous in mythology and folklore in all periods of recorded history. Their wings’ breadth spans continents, and anthropologists, ethnographers, and folklorists have traced belief in fairies worldwide. The origin stories of fairies are diverse. In Irish tradition, fairies were said to have descended from the Tuatha Dé Danann, a superior race of beings and rulers. Others believed that fairies were fallen angels, of neither heaven nor hell. In the seventeenth century, Robert Kirk, one of the first Gaelic folklorists, wrote: “Siths, or Fairies, they call Sluagh Maith, or the Goodpeople . . . are said to be of a middle nature betwixt man and angel, as were demons thought to be of old.” To still others, fairies were the descendants of monstrous Pre-Christian beings or of Cain. They have alternatively been characterized as restless spirits of the dead. While their origin stories differ, certain attributes of fairies appear in a number of cultures, including superior strength, uncanny intelligence, invisibility, supernatural gifts, and otherworldly physicalities. Fairies, indeed, are endowed with powerful abilities, one of which is their capacity to soar into every literary genre. Transmitted originally through oral cultures, fairy stories are extant in ballads, songs, myths, and legends. Later, fairies become principal characters in epics, romances, dramas, and lyric poetry. Poets, inspired and haunted by fairies, both benevolent and wicked, have created a lasting canon of fairy poetry. This volume offers a sampling of classic works as well as lesser-known works, including traditional ballads, from a range of genres and places, focusing on the English and Irish traditions. Modern and contemporary poems about fairies attest to their enduring influence at the level of myth. The poems sing of “Faerie,” the enchanted places in which fairies were thought to dwell: Tir Na N’og, the land of youth; HyBrasil, the fabled isle of the blessed; Avalon; forest; fl ower; cairn; body of water; the air itself. “Fairy” as a generic term encompasses a world of creatures, regionally and even locally named. Encyclopedias are devoted to classifying the different fairies, their appearance, behavior, and dwellings. A number of these creatures—elves, pixies, mermaids, and goblins, to name but a few—populate the poems. The characters, from Queen Mab to Robin Goodfellow, are as diverse as the types of fairies. They are kings and queens, helpful domestics, p...
