Where have all the elves, fairies and gnomes gone?
A long, long time ago, the earth belonged to the creatures of the
wood. The creatures of the wood were gnomes, elves and fairies . They
tended it and took care of it, played in it, danced and sang in it,
cared for wounded animals, worked out disputes between species, sat on
mushrooms discussing matters of importance and drinking Labrador tea,
rode down streams on leaves and bark, parachuted from trees on dandelion
seeds. This was the world into which mankind was born.
These early days, when man was but a newly arrived dinner guest who
hadn’t yet taken over the house, are fairly need to go into it here.
What I am interested in, and what I am asking you to be interested in,
is the question, “Where did all the gnomes, elves, and fairies go?”
The friction between man and the wood creatures began with the
discovery of agriculture. With this discovery civilisation arose and
spread. The forests were cleared to provide wood for shelters and fields
for pastures and crops. Mankind had set up camp.
No longer just a visitor in someone else’s world, he pushed the wild
back from his newly built doorstep. At first, this wasn’t a problem.
Gnomes moved into the barn houses and helped with the gardening chores.
The rest of the wood creatures just backed off into the wood,
occasionally playing tricks on the new settlers, like turning the milk
sour, rearranging furniture, tipping cows, tickling people’s faces in
their sleep and once in a while stealing babies and leaving bundles of
wood in their place.
But man’s dominion spread (and spread and spread and spread) and the
forests got smaller and smaller and smaller.
Things got real crowded in the woods, and things were getting worse
in civilization. Most farmers weren’t listening to the spirits anymore.
People found they could increase their output by disregarding the needs
of the earth. They were raising productivity and killing the soil.
Petrochemicals were just a step away.
Most of the spirits and gnomes fled. The trolls stayed. Today, they
live mostly under bridges and in the shallow mucky ditches beneath the
metal grating on farm roads that cows are afraid to cross. Be sure to
honk your horn before driving over one of these.
A troll may be hanging from the grate, swinging over its living room,
as they are apt to do after rolling in muck and manure.
If you don’t give a warning honk, you may run over its fingers, and
it’s not a great idea to get either your name or your license plate
number on a troll’s shite list.
Now, there is little wild land left at all, and even that is
shrinking at an unprecedented rate. There is simply not enough wild
space for all the gnomes and elves, fauns and fairies, goblins, ogres,
trolls and bogies, nymphs, sprites, and dryads.
So where are they? Are they dead?No. So, where did they go?
The answer is a bit surprising. They didn’t go anywhere. We did.
Early humans had an intuitive knowledge of their role in nature, just as
bears and raccoons and mice and every other critter does. They
understood, from the ways of the wild around them, that nothing ever
comes from nowhere and nothing ever just disappears. Things change form.
Death is necessary for life to continue. They offered up their kills as
sacrifices to the gods of nature.
They offered praise, prayer, sacrifice and song to the spirits of the
wild, to brother buffalo, brother deer, and brother tree.
Somewhere not so far from here, in the real world, the ancient
forests are still standing, the buffalo roams the prairies, the sky is
full of condors, the deer and the antelope play, and dodo birds still
wander the sandy beaches, bumping into things.
Where there are still wild lands in our dream world, strong
connections still exist. Bridges, tunnels, portals. Occasionally a
traveller will get lost in the wilderness and find himself in the real
world, returning the next day to find that a hundred years have passed,
or never returning at all.
These are excerpts of an article originally published in Fireheart 6.
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