N I G H T B R I N G E R . S E
|
EDRIC
A tale was told in Shropshire of a knight who paid through many a long year for his capture of a fairy bride. His name was Edric and his story was this -
Edric rode out hunting one afternoon and lost his way in a wood. Night fell, and he rode out in the darkness for hours. Finally, he came upon a palace, ablaze with festive lights. Through the windows he saw dancing maidens, taller and more lovely than any mortal maid could be, and one of them taller and lovelier than the rest. Edric, overcome with passion, burst into the palace and tore her from the ranks of her sisters, although they fought him as best they could.
In the morning, Edric rode home with his prize. But not all of his wooing could gain a look or word from her. Three days passed. At last the fairy turned to him and said:
"You have captured me for a wife, and I must bride with you. But if you once name my sisters or the place that I come from, I will have my freedom and you will lose your fortune and your life."
So the fairy captive stayed with Edric as his wife. She vanished from time to time, and the mortal bore this as patiently as he could, for she always returned. One day, however, jealous of her absence, Edric reproached his wife, crying that her love for her elvish sisters was greater than what she owed her husband.
She vanished at once, as she had warned him she would, to rejoin her fairy kind. But it was said that when Edric died - which he soon did - she returned to claim his soul. Condemned to a restless existence in Faerie forever afterward, he periodally led an armed host through the English countryside, and people who saw that company called it a portent of war.
Some fairies were less attached to their own world than Edric's bride. They loved mortals of their own free will and could be wooed and won. Nonetheless, conditions were imposed upon these marriages - conditions that served, like the symbolic rituals in marriages between unrelated mortals, to emphasize the alien character of man and wife. A mortal man who married a fairy woman, for example, might be forbidden to touch her with iron - always an anathema to fairies, for reasons no one knew - or, as with Edric's wife, to speak of her fairy origin, or to strike her, even lightly. And these conditions were no mere sybols. They were charged with power. The fairy's continued stay in the mortal world depended on the rigorous observation of them.
|
