The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #153110   Message #3583758
Posted By: GUEST
13-Dec-13 - 01:09 AM
Thread Name: Fairies and Irish Music
Subject: RE: Fairies and Irish Music
The False Knight on the Road
Sir/King Orpheo
Some of it's symbolically quite subtle. Neil Gow's daemon passed from his mother, a harper, but is sometimes presented as a fairy gift. Although that's a modern reference, I've seen older. Most revealing in the matter is the way the Scots - in True Thomas, for example - turn the Christian dogmatic binary State of Grace into a trinary by adding a "neither of the above" and transferring fiddling from a diabolical gift to a faerie one. Or was it the other way around? Fiddling only started within documented history, after the Crusades brought the rebec back, so there should be a trace of it happening. Was it a Victorian myth?