Faery Tale (12 page)

The atmosphere at these sites was said to be both moving and mysterious. It was interesting to me that Jo linked the world of faeries with these ancient sites. I'd read a fair amount on ancient burial sites in Ireland, and for the rural Irish, these burial sites were always known as “faery haunts.” Now I'd learned, at least from one local woman's perspective, that this connection between ancient gravesites, stone circles, and faeries seemed to exist in England, too. But
why
? Nothing I read gave me any clue. Researchers suspected that the standing stones were built as early as 3300 BC. At least nine hundred stone circles were known to still exist, though it was thought that many more would have once decorated the landscape. They were destroyed throughout the centuries—farming, war, increases in settlement.

I had also thought that the stone circles were somehow connected to the Druids. But hard facts pointed out that this was an impossibility—stone circles predated Druids by thousands of years. So why did I have the impression that Druids and faeries might be connected anyway? Maybe because if faeries weren't a Christian convention, they had to be a pagan one. And Druids were pagans. But then again, wasn't everyone back then who wasn't a Christian considered a pagan?

More mysterious was the purpose of the standing stones. A lot of outrageous claims had been made regarding the function of the circles. Some thought they were UFO landing pads, while others contested they were astronomical observatories for a highly evolved class of pagan priests. Historians and researchers suspected they were more likely used as multipurpose tribal gathering places, where people would come to conduct rituals having to do with the seasons and the fertility of the earth. I looked at the clock on the dresser. It was two thirty a.m., my head was filled with questions, but I was wonderfully exhausted. I stacked the books in the windowsill and reached over to switch off the light.

 

I headed out for the Frouds' house on foot. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and I walked out of town on the narrow road, past a gathering of local townspeople preparing for an annual race up the steep hillside known as Meldon Hill. The morning was bursting with activity, and I couldn't help but get swept up in the utter charm of the bustling village—the combination of sweet early summer air, sheep grazing on dew-wet grass, and the shouts from the bottom of the hill below gave me a surge of happiness as I continued out of town on the narrow little lane.

As I approached the tiny hamlet of Stiniel, the leaves from the towering oaks overhead dappled the road with patterns that danced in the sunshine. A tall hedge ran, ten feet if not taller, on both sides of me, and I couldn't help but feel as though I was walking a lordly green corridor that led all the way to the ancient “Stone Hall.” At last the hedges ended and I came to a rusted fence that ran alongside a field of tall grass and wildflowers. Beyond, the cluster of cottages that made up Stiniel came into view. A two-story house had been clipped from the pages of a Grimms' fairy tale and duly pasted onto the horizon. Tall and hewn out of hefty stone, a thatched-straw roof arched across it from which two chubby stone chimneys protruded. Just gazing at it made me . . . hopeful. Who knew places like this could really exist?

Turning down the dirt road I came at last to the Frouds' gate. Their drive was lined with wild bluebells that gave off a delicate, heady scent like hyacinth, and their house, like the one I'd seen from the road, was a marvelous thatched-roof beauty. Taking a deep breath, I found my way to the sturdy oak door and lifted the knocker.

A moment later I was standing face-to-face with Wendy Froud.

—
BRIAN FROUD'S WORLD OF FAERIE

 

 

 

 

W
ENDY was a red-haired beauty with gorgeous blue eyes and a wide, warm smile. As she ushered me inside and called to Brian that I'd arrived, I noticed that everywhere around this airy, enchanting space were little creatures. (Aside from their little terrier, aptly named Elfie, that is.) Wendy's creature creations, some beauteous, some wizened and gnarled-looking, decked tables here and there. Brian's paintings hung from the walls, the very paintings I'd seen as simple pages in his books. I heard a shuffling coming down the hallway and a moment later Brian appeared, leaning a bit on a wooden walking stick.

“I seem to have wrenched my back,” he explained, giving my hand a hearty shake as we moved over to the big kitchen table.

I thanked him for seeing me, especially given his injury, and as I settled in, taking out my notebook and recorder, I couldn't help but marvel at the two of them.

Their clothes were simple, ordinary—but there was something about the way they looked that made them seem somehow timeless. Maybe it was Wendy's long, wavy red hair, or Brian's mustache, glasses, and rosy cheeks. But something told me I had stumbled into faery land. A rather complicated woman once asked me, “What are we here for, if not to live our own fairy tales?” Sitting at the table with Brian and Wendy Froud, I knew I'd been led to exactly the right place.

I told them a little more about the book I was working on, even sharing my bizarre experience in the cabana in Mexico. Then, clicking on the recorder, I settled in with my tea, and began.

“So,” I said with a smile. “Tell me about the faeries.”

Brian chuckled. He told me his interest in the faery world had first been piqued by the art of Arthur Rackham. The trees that Rackham painted had faces, and Brian realized quite suddenly that was precisely how he felt about nature. As a little boy he'd spent his free time playing in woods: climbing up trees, crawling through secret places in the undergrowth. Even then, although he didn't know how to explain it, he believed there was an
inner
life to trees, that trees had soul, personality.

“It was when I began to wonder what was going on
behind
the drawings that I began to reexamine fairy tales. I wanted to understand the reality of faeries. I started doing some exploration, reading other people's theories on the faery world. At first I thought,
I don't know . . . all this sounds a bit weird
.” He laughed. “And at the same time, a lot of it sounded like common sense. It's very typical of faery, actually. In one way it simplified everything for me, and at the same time, it suddenly made everything very complicated.”

I asked what he meant.

“Well, the most basic belief is that there is spirit behind everything.
Everything
has life and soul. And the complication is, of course, is that if everything has life and soul, then everything is very individual. It meant I had to have a relationship with everything now, in a very precise, individual way. If you start to believe in faeries, it's a reengagement with the world. It's a reengagement with the minutia of this world.”

“Okay, I can understand that,” I replied. “But what do you mean when you say there's spirit behind everything?”

Brian sat back in his chair a moment and then explained that the Mystics from
The Dark Crystal
are derived from the spirits of the trolls he felt on Dartmoor. When Jim Henson had seen Brian's first painting of a troll, he wanted some of that feeling in the movie. The Mystics were the spirits of rock and earth all around him, which Brian began to recognize when his eyes were opened to the world of faery.

As for Wendy, faeries were always a part of her life. As a child her mother read her Tolkien and the Chronicles of Narnia and Wendy believed in them so much it never occurred to her that there
wasn't
another world. After all, her parents
had
named her Wendy after the Wendy in
Peter Pan
.

“I was devastated when I got old enough to realize that Peter was never going to come and take me away to Never Never Land.” She smiled. “But as I got older, I realized that through my work, I had actually helped to
create
the world I myself wanted to escape to. Now I'm one of those people that helps other people get there.”

“Yes, it's very sad,” Brian agreed. “As children, we're very involved with the faeries. But there comes a time when adults say, ‘Don't be silly, dear.' And so our belief is eroded. When we rediscover our belief, it results in a reawakening. At my readings and signings, people express it to me by saying they feel they are coming home. They tell me they want to go away and write, or make something, or they want to write a letter to somebody. They wanted to reengage with friends, or family, or themselves. It reminded them of connection . . . to everything.”

“So often people have a creative response to our work,” Wendy added. “And what could be better than that? In my puppet-making workshops, we begin by doing a meditation, where my students see something that comes from their own creative mind. Then we work to take that image and make it three-dimensional. It's a bit of the faeries, a bit of magic, that they've created and can take away with them. And of course, now they can have a relationship with that being.”

“What do you mean by ‘a relationship'?” I asked. “With a puppet?”

“It's beyond what they create,” Brian explained. “Within the meditation, you do actually genuinely touch faery land—you're in it, whether you realize it or not. So when you come back, and make a figure, it's imbued with its own personality. After all, the being itself has helped you to make it. It wants to be brought into our very human world. And very often, this is because there is some interaction or relationship that needs to take place between the human that is making the figure and the being that wants to inhabit it.”

“You are essentially imbuing those figures with spirit. Not unlike,” Wendy mentioned, “the stick figures you mentioned from Mexico. People were creating those figures and bringing them into our physical human world, and in doing so, they were imbuing them with spirit.”

My mind flicked back to the stories about the Alux. The Mayans created the scarecrow-like figures, gave them offerings, prayed to them, honored them. But really, who was the creator and who was the doll? Perhaps humans become the conduit that the faery world can orchestrate in order to create something . . . or get what they need or want. Wasn't that what I was doing in putting my entire life on hold to come halfway around the world, searching for answers, searching for this elusive thing called magic . . . on what level was I also doing their bidding?

“Sure, it's just . . . sticks and stones or, in our case, material stuff,” Brian continued. “But somehow, it contains the
magic
. It contains
spirit
. They've essentially gone into faery, and what they're bringing back . . . well, it's not just a puppet, not just a toy.”

“Ha!” I exclaimed. “I wonder if the word hasn't gotten out . . . the faeries know they can come to Brian to get their portraits painted, or they can come to Wendy to be given a portal into our world.”

Brian and Wendy seemed to think this was one of the funniest things they'd ever heard. I found I delighted in making them laugh.

“I suppose there is some truth to that.” Brian chuckled. “In my work, there is typically a central figure . . . and round the edges of the picture come crowding all of these faces. It's like they all want to be in the painting. They don't jostle, because the way that I paint, each thing has a relationship to the thing close to it, but they all sort of . . .
get in
.”

In
Brian Froud's World of Faerie
, Brian wrote he truly felt the beings that visited him came to impart a message to the human world. He was, in a way, only their bridge. But what I hadn't expected was to be so taken in by the book. I mean, sure, it's beautiful. It's a large, glossy coffee-table book, filled with shimmering paintings of a fantasy realm. But as I turned, gazing deeply, page after page, something struck me. It was their eyes. Something about their eyes alone grabbed hold of me, and drew me in. There was something about those eyes that was so incredibly individual, so incredibly real, so incredibly wise. It was as though for a moment, in returning their gaze, I was almost able to recapture something long forgotten. I remember thinking, so this is what it might be like to be gazing into the eyes of a real, live faery.

When I shared my impressions of his work with Brian, he smiled and bowed his head a moment. “It's important that I talk about this,” he began, his voice soft. “I'm an artist. And I use any trick I can possibly use to make you believe. In reality, there's no such thing as painting faeries as precisely as they look, because they are changeable, mutable, and often you're trying to paint impressions. My experience with faeries is that you can feel their presence very strongly, you understand that they're there, you understand what they look like, but pinning it down to a precision is impossible.”

He explained that when he painted, he tried to do it intuitively—trying a series of lines until one felt right. Eventually he'd notice something emerge; a face that now had its own personality.

“I really don't have an imagination.” He smiled. “I don't picture things in my head and then paint them. I paint what it
feels
like. Hopefully I'm getting it right. When you're looking into the eyes of the faeries I paint, you are, in fact, looking into the soul of faeries, the soul of the world and beyond, into the very cosmos itself. Because faeries, like the cosmos, are infinite. Faeries possess an unimaginable depth.”