Matthias Egeler's "Elves and Fairies"

Matthias Egeler is professor of Old Norse literature and culture at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, after years at Oxford, Cambridge, and Munich. His research focuses on Old Norse literary, cultural, and religious history; the literary and religious history of medieval Ireland; and the world of Icelandic folk tales.

Egeler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld, and reported the following:

Page 99 starts with Shakespeare – Puck is speaking – and the impact of Shakespeare’s fairies on the later development of their cultural history, but then switches over to King James I (he of the King James Bible) and the role of fairies in the Scottish witch trials.

King James saw himself as the foremost enemy of Satan on earth, and in this capacity he both acted as a persecutor of witches and wrote a theoretical treatise about the wiles of the Enemy (his Daemonologie, 1597), which among many other unpleasant things also elucidates how Satan creates illusions of fairies that seduce human beings to all manner of unchristian acts. In the writings of King James, we meet the perspective of a ruling elite that condemned fairies and any kind of interaction with them as satanic and deserving the harshest punishment possible. Puck, on the other hand, is a figure of English folk belief that is attested already in early medieval documents, centuries before King James; and Shakespeare does not condemn Puck, but playfully uses this figure to create a delightful world of miracles and illusions. So page 99 opens up a triangle between folk belief, its condemnation by the ruling powers, and its transformation into art – and these are exactly the three basic pillars around which the book is constructed. I am astonished that this test works so well. It must be fairy magic!

Learn more about Elves and Fairies at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue