In this previous post I talked of Fleurus' L'Imagerie du Fantastique, a quite "famous" French kids' book, and how it presented the "prince charmings" of fairytales as "fairy-men" somehow... Now I want to tell you the reason why this is, the solving of the mystery of this book's seemingly unusual classification of "fairy men"... And other seemingly bizarre things when you think about it...
For example, as I said previously, the book adopts the old, now-criticized-and-subverted in fantasy wizard/witch divide. But, to not be misogynistic, it does nuance things by adding to the "wicked witch" its opposite, the "good witch" (though the "good witch" is still treated as an unusual, not-by-default witch, and there's no traces anywhere of any "evil wizard" as if all wizards are good).
Good witches are described to be, unlike wicked witches, beautiful women loving children, who make healing potion, love potions (yes love potions are treated as something "nice"... just... ignore it), protecting spells and help people find back lost children. With two different "origins" given to good witches: either they are former fairies (who for a reason or another stopped being fairies), either they are witches who, "with age", lost their wickedness and felt remorse... Which is an ironic choice given "good witches" are presented as younger-looking than "wicked witches". This book is full of surprises.
So, you have wicked witches, good witches and fairies... Should be enough? NO! Because the book adds this strange and additional category: the "enchantress".
With this strange description: they are beautiful ladies who learned some magic tricks out of an actual magic-user (wizard, witch or fairy). They dress very prettily because they want to be compared to fairies, and often gather by mountain-top castles. They are very kind with poor people, for example gifting them magically big, fat cows.
Where does this "enchantress" comes from? Well from the same place the "fairy men" come from... And this place is given to us when, listing specific individual entities, the book speaks of a certain "Snake Fairy"... whose description is very obviously the one of the vouivre (as opposed for example to Melusine, who is usually THE snake-fairy in French folklore). And not only that but look at the pictures:
It is a simplified copy of the famous Sabatier illustrations for the Vouivre in "The Encyclopedia of Fairies"!
And not only that, but if we return to the Imagerie du Fantastique, the Snake-Fairy is paired up with another "folkloric" character, named the "Water Witch". And the short description given of us will be familiar to French fairytale enthusiasts: a horrible witch living in an enchanted palace at the bottom of a lake... To attract young men she uses a bewitched boat and turns herself into a beautiful fairy... But when the man succombs to the temptation, she turns him into a fish that she will eat under her true, monstrous form...
It is the exact modus operanti of the famous Breton fairytale character known as "the Groac'h of the Isle of the Loch". And if you check Dubois's Encyclopedia for the page about the Groac'h... Oh look! Once again, Sabatier's illustrations, for the "monstrous" form of the Groac'h, is the one that the Fleurus illustrations were taking inspiration from (though it is less obvious - one has hair and two tales, the other no hair and one tail)
But this is where the answer to all this is kept... Pierre Dubois's "Great Encyclopedia of Fairies", which obviously was one of the main references for whoever wrote the Fleurus book. I told you before, I think, that this work was VERY influential in French turn-of-the-century/early 21st century culture, and this is a case of it:
And for those who have not heard yet about this book, two important things to know:
A) It is the second one of Pierre Dubois' best-selling trio of "Encyclopedia" of fae beings, illustrated by Roland Sabatier (with the help of his wife). It was part of the 90s/2000s revival-and-trend of fairy-fiction/fairy-enthusiasm in France (Brian Froud and Alan Lee's Faeries was translated around the same time). And these Encyclopedias became a reference in France, talked about and used by everybody - especially because of how pretty, poetic, vivid-in-imagination they were. Yet...
B) These Encyclopedias are not "accurate" or even "real" Encyclopedias. Mind you, they ARE encyclopedias, in a way. Pierre Dubois knows what he is talking. Everything in this encyclopedia comes from a specific literary work, a specific fairytale, a specific folklore, a specific mythology. And Dubois leaves a VERY heavy bibliography at the end of each encyclopedia while dropping many, many references through the pages... But these books cannot be used in a scholarly matter or for "serious" folklore-study the same way a book like Katharine Briggs' Dictionary of Fairies would. Because Pierre Dubois is by his own admission a storyteller more than folklorist, a fairy enthusiast and folklore fan, but not an actual literary expert or university authority. So in his Encyclopedias he gleefuly compiles and fuses various cultures, literary and oral otales, reinvents some figures to fit his personal tastes, adds various elements of his own imagination, and weaves a personal cosmogony, a full "multi-cultural worldbuilding", born out of his own "comparative folklore" work and personal appreciation/reception of legendary beings... And in this regard, these books are a bit closer to the Spiderwick Field Guide. It is... a bizarre hybrid, here to inform people and tell them stories and strike their imagination rather than actually teach them or reproduce faithfully sources. Think of it as bit as what the Dictionnaire Infernal was to demonology.
All of that being said: it is in this book that we find the famous "Enchantresses" of the Fleurus' kid book above!
Pierre Dubois presents "enchantresses" as mortal women who claim to be fairies and like to "pretend" being fairies, but are no real fairies. They are not supernatural beings, but ordinary people who learned, through "study and initiation", powerful enchantments and "some of the arts of the Fairies". Sometimes they obtain their powers because they have fairy blood through a distant ancestor ; other times they sought the fairies themselves to obtain their blessings ; and other times yet, "following the example of Viviane", they learned the art of enchanting from a wizard. Pierre Dubois further adds that they are usually marveously beautiful and sumptuously dressed thanks to magic, which allows them to fuel their vanity - though they are not above briefly turning themselves into hideous beings, just to make their beauty (once they return to it) look even greater. (The story retold in the article that illustrates this is a version of the "Loathsome Lady" tale, here implied to have been an enchantress purposefully making herself ugly to find the best husband). Dubois adds that outside of their habit of using "red magic, the magic of love", they tend to influence the destinites and future of men in their attempt to behave "just like the Fairies and the Fates". In fact, some of them are rumored to have been "fairying" so much they ended up turning into actual fairies... But Dubois warns that (unlike the Fleurus' Enchantresses, who are good) their mortal part makes them dangerous - for not all of them are benevolent, they are known to be capricious and jealous, and they usually behave out of either love, treachery or to gain one thing or another.
And our fairy men? Yes! Yes they are here too, with their own article explaining everything!
The "Fairy Men", that Dubois calls "Fatis" (based on the Latin "fata).
The article begins with Dubois pointing out how, yes there are some local folk-names, some regional appelations for male fairies in France, but they are rare, and there's no common, widespread, "normal" and ordinary word for a male fairy. Because the "fairy man" is not a true character in culture: it is a blur, with no specific appearance or personality. His role in folktales is limited to being the "husband of the fairy", the one who gives her children and then fetches the midwife for the delivery. Dubois rightfully points out that "what else would a fairy require from a husband", when they can lift dolmen stones with one hand, make golden palaces appear out of water, grow into giantesses, fly into the sky, or transform themselves into all sorts of animals and plants.
But he then points out there used to be "noble Fatis", more important characters, "fairy knights" present in the old legends and the medieval lais. His description of their activities fits EXACTLY the Fleurus description of what "fairy princes" do: fight dragons, hunt down monsters, send back demons to Hell, rescue and seduce fairies or mortal women... But Dubois warns that among them are some "dark knights" and shadow elves, who kill maidens rather than love them (and he mentions "Huon de Roptlande's Protheselaus" to remind people that Faerie always has a dark side).
However, the most important part of the article is how Dubois described THE greatest male fairy, THE perfect image of the fairy-knight, THE "Fatis by excellence" as... Aubéron/Obéron. Not the character of Shakespeare, but the character that inspired Shakespeare. The tiny but beautiful king of fairies, son of the fairy Morgue and Julius Caesar, the one who gifted magical items to Huon de Bordeaux... And now the Fleurus' description of the "fairy men" makes sense, fully and entirely? They took back all the elements of the Aubéron legend that Dubois dropped in a fragmentary way, and re-shaped them into a different logic. The fairy godmothers, the powers gifted at birth, the ivory-and-gold-horn, the unability to age, it's all there...
And Dubois' article concludes by saying that however all these "fairy knights" and their lord Aubéron are gone, forgotten, returned to distant Otherworlds "like King Arthur and his own knights", and now the "male fairies" are but the "pale husbans of fairies", when they're not mortal men enslaved by fairies... The last lines saying how nowadays it is hard to tell apart a "male fairy" from an enchanter, a lake genie, a wind-and-weather spirit, as they all get fused, confused and mixed with gnomes, demon and elves in a hard-to-clear-up mess. (Which is also an accurate observation)
