This thesis, ‘Fairy in Middle English romance', aims to contribute to the recent resurgence of interest in the literary medieval supernatural by studying the concept of ‘fairy' as it is presented in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English romances. This thesis is particularly interested in how the use of ‘fairy' in Middle English romances serves as an arena in which to play out ‘thought-experiments' that test anxieties about faith, gender, power, and death. The first chapter considers the concept of fairy in its medieval Christian context by using the romance Melusine as a case study to examine fairies alongside medieval theological explorations of the nature of demons. The thesis then examines the power dynamic of fairy/human relationships and the extent to which having one partner be a fairy affects these explorations of medieval attitudes toward gender relations and hierarchy. The third chapter investigates ‘fairy-like' women enchantresses in romance and the extent to which fairy is ‘performed' in romance. The fourth chapter explores the location of Faerie and how it relates as an alternative ‘Otherworld' to the Christian Otherworlds of Paradise, Purgatory, Heaven, and Hell. The final chapter continues to examine geography by considering the application of Avalon and whether Avalon can be read as a ‘land of fairies'. By considering the etymological, spiritual, and gendered definitions of ‘fairy', my research reveals medieval attitudes toward not only the Otherworld, but also the contemporary medieval world. In doing so, this thesis provides new readings of little-studied medieval texts, such as the Middle English Melusine and Eger and Grime, as well as reconsider the presence of religious material and gender dynamics in medieval romance. This thesis demonstrates that by examining how fairy was used in Middle English romance, we can see how medieval authors were describing their present reality.

The European Witch-Hunts reached their peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Betweeen 1590 and 1661, approximately 1500 women and men were accused of, and executed for, the crime of witchcraft in Scotland. England suffered the largest witch-hunt in its history during the Civil Wars of the 1640s, which produced the majority of the 500 women and men executed in England for witchcraft. Evidence indicates, however, that only three women were executed in Ireland between 1533 and 1670. Given the presence of both English and Scottish settlers in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the dramatic discrepancy of these statistics indicate that conditions existed in early modern Ireland that tended to suppress the mechanisms that produced witchcraft accusations and larger scale witch-hunts. In broad terms those conditions in Ireland were the persistence of Gaelic culture and the ongoing conditions of open, inter-religious conflict. In particular, two artifacts of Gaelic Irish culture had distinct impact upon Irish witchcraft beliefs. The office of the Poet, or fili (singular for filid), seems to have had a similar impact upon Gaelic culture and society as the shaman has on Siberian witchcraft beliefs. The Gaelic/Celtic Poet was believed to have magical powers, which were actually regulated by the Brehon Law codes of Ireland. The codification of the Poet’s harmful magic seems to have eliminated some of the mystique and menace of magic within Gaelic culture. Additionally, the persistent belief in fairies as the source of harmful magic remained untainted by Christianity throughout most of Ireland. Faeries were never successfully demonized in Ireland as they were in Scotland. The Gaelic Irish attributed to fairies most of the misfortunes that were otherwise blamed on witchcraft, including the sudden wasting away and death of children. Faerie faith in Ireland has, in fact, endured into the twentieth century. The ongoing ethno-religious conflict between the Gaelic, Catholic Irish and the Protestant “New English” settlers also undermined the need for witches in Ireland. The enemy, or “other” was always readily identifiable as a member of the opposing religious or ethnic group. The process of dual confessionalisation, as described by Ute Lotz-Huemann, facilitated the entrenchment of Catholic resistence to encroaching Protestantism that both perpetuated the ethno-religious conflict and prevented the penetration of Protestant ideology into Gaelic culture. This second effect is one of the reasons why fairies were never successfully associated with demons in Ireland. Witch-hunts were complex events that were produced and influenced by multiple causative factors. The same is true of those factors that suppressed witchcraft accusations. Enduring Gaelic cultural artifacts and open ethno-religious conflict were not the only factors that suppressed witchcraft accusations and witch-hunts in Ireland; they were, however, the primary factors.

<div> <div> <div> <p>Medieval fairies are chaotic and perplexing narrative agents—neither humans nor monsters—and their actions are defined only by a characteristic unpredictability. My dissertation investigates this fairy chaos, focusing on those moments in a premodern romance when a fairy or group of fairies intrudes on a human community and, to be blunt, makes a mess. I argue that fairy disruption of human ways of thinking and being—everything from human corporeality to the definition of chivalry—is often productive or generative. Each chapter examines how narrative fairies upset medieval English culture’s operations and rules (including, frequently, the rules of the narrative itself) in order to question those conventions in the extra-narrative world of the tale’s audience. Fairy romances, I contend, puzzle and engage their audiences, encouraging readers and hearers to think about and even challenge the processes of their own society. In this way, my research explores the interaction between a text and its audience—between fiction and reality—illuminating the ways in which premodern narratives of chaos and disruption encourage readers and headers to engage in a sustained, ethical consideration of the world. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Cette thèse examine d’abord les personnages merveilleux dans cinq lais de Marie de France, et reconnaît trois types de merveilleux : féerique, amoureux et lycanthropique. Sans motivation ni explicitation – donc par moyen d’un silence narratif – on reconnaît le personnage merveilleux « type ». Une analyse narratologique montre qu’un personnage peut être merveilleux sans être « type » et qu les cinq lais étudiés sont construits selon une focalisation sur le personnage humain. Examinant les actes magiques, cette thèse conclut que la magie des merveilleux « types » ne diffère d’un acte de celle des personnages non « types » que par la motivation psychologique. M’appuyant sur les lois universelles de la magie décrites par Hubert et Mauss, je conclus que Chievrefueil décrit en fait la construction d’une baguette magique. Dernièrement, l’altérité du personnage humain crée la possibilité d’une rencontre – d’habitude érotisée – entre le monde humain et le monde merveilleux et lance le récit.

[Material:] Uppsatsen analyserar och jämför hur övernaturliga väsen gestaltas i Yamazaki Kores mangaserie The Ancient Magus' Bride och i några av de vanligast förekommande folksagorna. [Syfte:] Syftet med analysen är att undersöka vilka sammanhang dessa övernaturliga väsen ursprungligen ingått i, hur de beskrivs i sitt gamla sammanhang och sin nya kontext, samt vilken funktion de har i sin gamla respektive nya kontext. Fokus är att ställa Yamazakis' serie mot folksagorna i det här avseendet. Dessutom undersöks på vilket sätt Yamazaki använder sig av motiv från välkända folksagor för att skapa en populärkulturell produkt som kan anspela på folklore, och således diskuteras vad som skiljer mellan en sådan populärkulturell produkt och folklore. Vidare har uppsatsen även ett didaktiskt syfte där mangans legitimitet och användningsområde i skolan diskuteras. [Teori/metod:] Komparativ litterär analysmetod. Med fokus på beskrivning, sammanhang och funktion jämförs motiv kring ett antal övernaturliga väsen i Yamazakis serie, samt i olika folksagor. Med hjälp av analysens resultat, och Michael Dylan Fosters begrepp "the folkloresque" diskuteras sedan på vilket sätt Yamazaki anspelar på folklore med sina motiv, samt vad som slutligen skiljer hennes serie från folklore. [Resultat:] Yamazaki integrerar motiv från flera olika folksagor för att gestalta sina övernaturliga väsen i beskrivningar och sammanhang. I sammanhanget tillskriver hon sina väsen en ny funktion för att de ska kunna bära hennes berättelse framåt. Sammanhang och funktion förändras och väsendet blir inte det samma som i folksagorna, utan något som "verkar" vara det. De motiv Yamazaki använder är förnyade men trots allt anspelar de på folklore. Motiven representerar, eller gör en avbild av hennes egna idéer, föreställningar och värderingar kring folklore. Serien ger uttryck för författarens tankar kring folklore, och inte "riktig" folklore. Serien är således en representation eller avbild, som befinner sig nära folklore utan att vara det.Manga kan utveckla både läs- och skrivförmåga och kan användas likt skönlitteratur i en skolsituation. Manga öppnar upp för genrediskussioner, och diskussioner kring andra kulturers erfarenheter, tankar, föreställningsvärldar och livsvillkor.

The topic of this paper is the disenchantment of the world and a possible ontological status of "mystical beings" such as fairies or power animals. I deal with this topic in three areas, namely in the positivist hegemony, where the existence of such beings is absurd, in the depth psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, where they are identified as archetypal symbols, and in the urban shamanism, where the existence of these beings is presented as a matter of fact. At first, I use the method of Foucault and the analysis of Adorno and Horkheimer to trace the ontological prescription that made the existence of such beings unthinkable for us, and I identify it in the select theories of John Locke and Henri Bergson. Here I find the prescription of homogeneity to be the principal ontological condition which allows only one possible mode of being and all beings that do not fulfill this condition can exist only as psychological entities. I read then Jung's work and urban shamanism as answers that aim to justify the status of these beings on this ontological ground. Jung finds in them an articulation of deep psychological forces in his theory of collective unconscious, and thus guarantees their significance but does not deny their ultimate psychological status. However, shamanism postulates their existence in a...

This thesis examines the Lady of the Lake as an active chivalric player in the thirteenth century Lancelot-Grail Cycle (also known as the Prose Lancelot) and in Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Le Morte Darthur. To study the many codes of chivalry, particularly in regard to women, I use two popular chivalric handbooks from the Middle Ages: Ramon Lull's Book of Knighthood and Chivalry, Geoffroi de Charny'sKnight's Own Book of Chivalry. Traditionally, the roles of women in medieval chivalry are passive, and female characters are depicted as objects to win or to inspire knights to greatness. The Lady of the Lake, I argue, uses her supernatural origins and nature to break with female chivalric conventions and become an instructress of chivalry to King Arthur's knights. As a purely human character, her power would be limited. As a guardian fairy and/or enchantress, the Lady is allowed to exercise more autonomy

<p>A close reading of a series of books by Eoin Colfer that enjoyed universal success showed a change in the language between the books especially with respect to minor linguistic features such as choice of location and abstract vs. concrete language. The books are about the boy Artemis Fowl, and were presumably conceived as children’s books.</p><p>My original thesis was that the writer could not be sure of the success of the first book, but would definitely be aware of a worldwide audience for at least his third book, due to, for example, questions raised by the translators. If the original audience was expected to be Irish, or British, with very much the same cultural background as the author’s, the imagined subsequent audiences would change with success. My hope was to be able to show this by comparing linguistic features. And indeed, even though some changes could be due to coincidence there was a specific pattern evolving in the series, in that the originally Irish cultural background became less exclusive and more universal. The writer also used more details concerning locations, with added words to specify a place. What could thus be expected in the translated versions would be omissions and additions in especially the first book, but less need for that in later books. This, however, could not be proven in the Swedish translations. I thus conclude that the books became easier to follow for a wider, in this case Swedish, audience mostly because of efforts by the author and less because of the translator.</p>

In his groundbreaking work of postcolonial theory, Orientalism, Edward Said puts forth the idea that imperial Europe asserted an identity by constructing the character of its colonized subjects. Said writes that his book tries to “show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). The object of this thesis is a related project, for it too is a search for imperial Britain’s surrogate or underground self. Yet rather than positioning this search within the British colonies, this thesis takes as its context a land and people that were at once more intimate and more alien: the races and landscapes of Fairyland. This Thesis attempts to situate the fairy folklore and literature from the Victorian era within the context of greater social and political ideologies of the age, specifically those pertaining to national identity, imperial power and race. In doing so it will analyze Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden concluding that the British self proposed by these works was an uncomfortable manifestation, and haunted by the anxieties and discontinuities that arose as imperial Britain attempted to navigate an identity within Victorian conceptions of race and power.

Zugl.: Trier, Univ., Diss., 2008