Lud-In-The-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

These are not the normal activities of mortal men. What kind of beings peopled the earth four or five centuries ago, what strange lore they had acquired, and what were their sinister doings, we shall never know. Our ancestors keep their secret well.

Their long, meandering tales of humble normal lives were like the proverbial glimpse of a snug, lamp-lit parlour to a traveller belated after nightfall.

EBENEEZOR SPIKE BAKER WHO HAVING PROVIDED THE CITIZENS OF LUD-IN-THE-MIST FOR SIXTY YEARS WITH FRESH SWEET LOAVES DIED AT THE AGE OF EIGHTY-EIGHT SURROUNDED BY HIS SONS AND GRANDSONS How willingly would he have changed places with that old baker! And then the disquieting thought would come to him that perhaps after all epitaphs are not altogether to be trusted.

the new rulers considered that the eating of fairy fruit had been the chief cause of the degeneracy of the Dukes. It had, indeed, always been connected with poetry and visions, which, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common sense of a burgher-class in the making.

The songs and legends described Fairyland as a country where the villages appeared to be made of gold and cinnamon wood, and where priests, who lived on opobalsum and frankincense, hourly offered holocausts of peacocks and golden bulls to the sun and the moon. But if an honest, clear-eyed mortal gazed on these things long enough, the glittering castles would turn into old, gnarled trees, the lamps into glow-worms, the precious stones into potsherds, and the magnificently-robed priests and their gorgeous sacrifices into aged crones muttering over a fire of twigs.

In out-of-the-way country places it was still believed that corpses were but fairy cheats, made to resemble flesh and bone, but without any real substance – otherwise, why should they turn so quickly to dust? But the real person, for which the corpse was but a flimsy substitute, had been carried away by the Fairies, to tend their blue kine and reap their fields of gillyflowers.

The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the ‘Silent People’; and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which the dead were carried to Fairyland.

Another tradition said that their only means of communication was poetry and music; and in the country poetry and music were still calle...

fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose. But, whereas fairy magic and delusion were for the cozening and robbing of man, the magic of the law was to his intention and for his welfare.

the very word ‘fairy’ became taboo, and was never heard on polite lips, while the greatest insult one Dorimarite could hurl at another was to call him ‘Son of a Fairy’.

Traces of Fairy in the Inhabitants, Customs, Art, Vegetation and Language of Dorimare.

By Winckelmann

tradition taught that all the cattle of Fairyland were blue, and that fairy gold turned into dung when it had crossed the border. Tradition also taught that all the flowers of Fairyland were red, and it was indisputable that the cornflowers of Dorimare sprang up from time to time as red as poppies, the lilies as red as damask roses.

to a stranger, it certainly produced an odd impression to hear such high-flown oaths as; by the Sun, Moon and Stars; by the Golden Apples of the West; by the Harvest of Souls; by the White Ladies of the Fields; by the Milky Way, come tumbling out in the same breath with such homely expletives as Busty Bridget; Toasted Cheese; Suffering Cats; by my Great-Aunt’s Rump; or to find names like Dreamsweet, Ambrose, Moonlove, wedded to such grotesque surnames as Baldbreech, Fliperarde, or Pyepowders.

as the drought burned relentlessly on, in the country districts an ever-increasing number of people succumbed to the vice of fairy fruit-eating . . . with tragic results to themselves, for though the fruit was very grateful to their parched throats, its spiritual effects were most alarming, and every day fresh rumours reached Lud-in-the-Mist (it was in the country districts that this epidemic, for so we must call it, raged) of madness, suicide, orgiastic dances, and wild doings under the moon. But the more they ate the more they wanted, and though they admitted that the fruit produced an agony of mind, they maintained that for one who had experienced this agony life would cease to be life without it.

there was not a farm or village that had not at least one inhabitant who swore that he had seen him, on some midsummer’s eve, or some night of the winter solstice, galloping past at the head of his fairy hunt, with harlequin ribbands streaming in the wind, to the sound of innumerable bells.

All the world over we are very conscious of the trees in spring, and watch with delight how the network of twigs on the wychelms is becoming spangled with tiny puce flowers, like little beetles caught in a spider’s web, and how little lemon-coloured buds are studding the thorn. While as to the long red-gold buds of the horse-chestnuts – they come bursting out with a sort of a visual bang. And now the beech is hatching its tiny perfectly-formed leaves – and all the other trees in turn.

Moongrass was a village of Dorimare famous for its cheeses – and rightly so, for to look at they were as beautiful as Parian marble veined with jade, and they had to perfection the flavour of all good cheeses – that blending of the perfume of meadows with the cleanly stench of the byre.

Master Nathaniel, of course, had a well-stored cellar, and the evening began with glasses of delicious wild-thyme gin, a cordial for which that cellar was famous. But, as well, he had a share in a common cellar, owned jointly by all the families of the ruling class – a cellar of old, mellow jokes that, unlike bottles of wine, never ran dry. Whatever there was of ridiculous or lovable in each member of the group was distilled into one of these jokes, so that at will one could intoxicate oneself with one’s friends’ personalities – swallow, as it were, the whole comic draught of them. And, seeing that in these old jokes the accumulated irritation that inevitably results from intimacy evaporated and turned to sweetness, like the juice of the grape they promoted friendship and cordiality – between the members of the group, that is to say. For each variety of humour is a sort of totem, making at once for unity and separation. Its votaries it unites into a closely-knit brotherhood, but it separates them sharply off from all the rest of the world.

The first dish was called The Bitter-Sweet Mystery – it was a soup of herbs on the successful blending of which the cooks of Lud-in-the-Mist based their reputation. This was followed by The Lottery of Dreams, which consisted of such delicacies as quail, snails, chicken’s liver, plovers’ eggs, peacocks’ hearts, concealed under a mountain of boiled rice. Then came True-Love-in-Ashes, a special way of preparing pigeons; and last, Death’s Violets, an extremely indigestible pudding decorated with sugared violets.

Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person, a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a world of human flowers. For Master Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness, alarm.

He knew so well both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like the antennæ of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase, when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its hunters – like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon.

‘And once,’ went on Ranulph, sitting up in bed, his cheeks flushed, his eyes bright and feverish, ‘in the garden in full daylight I saw them dancing – the Silent People, I mean – and their leader was a man in green, and he called out to me, “Hail, young Chanticleer! Some day I’ll send my piper for you, and you will up and follow him!” And I often see his shadow in our garden, but it’s not like our shadows, it’s a bright light that flickers over the lawn. And I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go, some day, I know I shall!’ and his voice was frightened and, at the same time, triumphant.

Each generation had its own jokes and its own secrets; but they were always on the same pattern; just as when one of the china cups got broken, it was replaced by another exactly like it, with the same painted border of squills and ivy.

had we kept one eye on the sky we should have noticed that a star was quenched with every flower that reappeared on earth.

Then Duke Aubrey raised his arms high above his head and cried out in a loud voice, ‘By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West!’ At these words the uplands became bathed in a gentle light and proved to be fair and fertile – the perpetual seat of Spring; for there were vivid green patches of young corn, and pillars of pink and white smoke, which were fruit trees in blossom, and pillars of blue blossom, which was the smoke of distant hamlets, and a vast meadow of cornflowers and daisies, which was the great inland sea of Faerie. And everything – ships, spires, houses – was small and bright and delicate, yet real. It was not unlike Dorimare, or, rather, the transfigured Dorimare he had once seen from the Fields of Grammary. And as he gazed he knew that in that land no winds ever howled at night, and that everything within its borders had the serenity and stability of trees, the unchanging peace of pictures.

And this is but another proof that the Written Word is a Fairy, as mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice. So let all readers of books take warning! And with this final exhortation this book shall close.