Many will remember Sørina Higgins’ playfully entitled paper, ‘King Arthur was an Elf!’, which she has described as “the seed” of The Inklings and King Arthur. But how have various Arthurian writers down the ages envisaged elves – and other ‘folk’? Earlier in the series, Dale Nelson introduced us to Lewis’s young friend, Martyn Skinner, and the lively futuristic epic poem Lewis encouraged him to write, The Return of King Arthur. Now Dale takes us back to the 1930s to encounter Skinner’s first book, another long poem in a distinctly different Arthurian setting, with intriguing points of contact with both Lewis’s scholarship and, especially, Tolkien’s varying practice and theory.
David Llewellyn Dodds, Guest Editor
C. S. Lewis is notorious for writing so engagingly about dozens of authors in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama that readers have hastened to read them, only to be disappointed; but Lewis could make you ashamed of yourself if you liked the Nimphidia of Michael Drayton (1563-1631): it is “dear to some who do not care for ‘faerie’ and hateful to all who do.”
J. R. R. Tolkien discussed the fairy-story in decay, in which the “glamour of Elfland” has become “mere finesse,” and invisibility has become “a fragility that could hide in a cowslip.” Shakespeare (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Drayton shared in the guilt for this.
“Drayton’s Nymphidia is, considered as a fairy-story (a story about fairies), one of the worst ever written. The palace of Oberon has walls of spider’s legs…The knight Pigwiggen rides on a frisky earwig, and sends his love, Queen Mab, a bracelet of emmets’ eyes, making an assignation in a cowslip-flower. But the tale that is told amid all this prettiness is a dull story of intrigue and sly go-betweens” (J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”).
At last, drinking the waters of Lethe brings the men, if not the ladies, forgetfulness, so that court life can go on. Tolkien growls,
“It would have been better if Lethe had swallowed the whole affair.”
With two such formidable witnesses as Lewis and Tolkien against the genre of tiny fairies, we might, without further inquiry, dismiss it without qualm – perhaps retaining a fondness for the Shakespeare play, wherein the tininess of the fairies is conveniently neglected once Nick Bottom is on the scene.
But let’s recollect the subtitle of Drayton’s poem, which is “Court of Fayrie.” This suggests that the poem doesn’t mean to be taken as a story of heroic adventures and otherworldly enchantment, but, as Tolkien says, as a burlesque epic of assignations and marital intrigues (also of minuscule combats due to jealousy).
Martyn Skinner’s Sir Elfadore and Mabyna (privately printed, 1935) takes up Drayton’s aaabcccb rhyme scheme and, if you like, the “prettiness” of Nimphidia / Nymphidia: here, a dewdrop is a mirror, snail shells are watercraft, and the mice that pull Elfadore’s chariot are descendants of those who – in allusion to the nursery rhyme — “ran up and down the clock.” But while the insect-like fairies and their trappings remain, Skinner’s story is more worthy than Drayton’s.
Sir Elfadore’s love, Mabyna, lady-in-waiting upon the fairy queen, has been abducted by a gnome, Frecklebrass. At Oberon’s command, everyone dresses mournfully. Compared to the fairies, the gnome is as big as a hill, or as big as the Cyclops was to Odysseus, and his environs of toadstool and squirrel-bones is a dismal enough demesne. We don’t learn about Mabyna’s capture till almost halfway through the poem, but have been prepared for a story of chivalric rescue by a reference to the medieval Faërie-poem of Sir Orfeo and Heurodis. Skinner’s poem, for all its light-hearted invention of a miniature world, celebrates love and courage, even though with tongue in cheek.
Stout was that elf, and once had stood
Beneath a hive of bees, and view’d
Where drones, and wings of drones were strew’d;
But e’en that elf half doubted
When, to that clearing now drawn nigher,
Far round he saw what trophies dire
Of monstrous strength and monstrous ire
Were in its moonlight routed.
Skinner’s poem is four cantos in 42 pages of verse. Some or all of it is reprinted in Skinner’s Alms for Oblivion: Passages Selected from His Fine Long Poems by Martyn Skinner (1983), which I have not seen.
Tolkien himself didn’t resist the attraction of tiny-fairy writing, as readers of “Errantry” will remember. In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), “Errantry” is attributed to Bilbo Baggins. Now Bilbo was acquainted with, and liked by, the Elves of Rivendell, and he knew much of their lore, but still he could compose this lively mock-epic, apparently without provoking grave offense.
It seems that we may interpret those “facts” thus: according to Tolkien, the matter of Faërie is a high thing, worthy to be the object of poetic genius and disciplined craftsmanship; but artistic liberty extends to works that include verbal play and the charm of the fanciful. Anyone who likes “Errantry” might also like this poem by Skinner. Indeed, I wondered if Skinner might have been inspired, not only by Drayton’s Nymphidia, but by Tolkien’s poem, which was published originally in the Oxford Magazine in 1933.
Readers will be wondering if Lewis or Tolkien ever read Sir Elfadore and Mabyna. I doubt that Tolkien did. However, Lewis might have read it. Lewis’s library contained all (so far as I’m aware) of Skinner’s other books of poetry that had been published in CSL’s lifetime: namely, the three volumes of Letters to Malaya; Two Colloquies; and the three books eventually united in the 1966 Return of Arthur. Lewis might not have owned Sir Elfadore and Mabyna, because it had been printed in, I suppose, a small edition, but he might have been able to borrow a copy from Skinner. No allusion to such borrowing and reading, however, appears in Lewis’s published letters. Skinner was personally acquainted with Lewis and Joy. Perhaps Skinner brought along a copy to the Kilns once, Lewis and Joy read it, and then the Lewises and Skinner talked about it, and Skinner took it home again. I hope something like this did happen.
Sir Elfadore and Mabyna won an entry in the 1990-1995 Supplement at the back of the New Arthurian Encyclopedia (ed. Norris J. Lacy, 1996), but its Arthurian claims must rest upon passing references to Avalon, Camelot, Sir Tor, the “Stroke of Dolour,” Sir Lancelot, and Sir Tristram. It’s an enjoyable revival of, and improvement on much of, the miniature-fairy genre.
Dale Nelson’s collection of ghostly tales, Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Stories, was published in Fall 2017 under Douglas Anderson’s Nodens Books imprint, which will also publish his J. R. R. Tolkien: Studies in Reception this year. Nelson is a columnist for CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society and the Tolkienian newsletter Beyond Bree.