From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph@earthlink.net>
Subject: (urth) Little, Big: fairy blood
Date: Mon, 01 May 2000 10:50:54 

alga wrote:

> Hi Alex:

Me, actually.  (The second Alex is really Alex.)
 
> > Could you explicate?  It's been a while since I last reread the book,
> > but I just looked at the genealogical chart, and I don't recall any of
> > Daily Alice's ancestors being fairies.
> 
> Well, to pare it down to barest simplicity, Violet Bramble is either wholely a fairy or mostly fairy. Her child with John Drinkwater, August, before being turned into Grandfather Trout, impregnates most of the girls in the Five Towns, the Hills, Dales, Meadows, Woods, etc. etc. So there is a great deal of fairy blood since all the cousins (who don't necessarily know they are cousins) intermarry.

I remembered the part about August being everyone's progenitor. And,
from a later post, you regard the single eyebrow as the sign of fairy
blood.  I'm no expert on fairy lore, but going solely by LB itself, it
seems to me that the single eyebrow might well be a sign of the ability
to see fairies, rather than of being a fairy.  And there are other
things in LB which make me skeptical of Violet's being a fairy or
part-fairy. For one thing, there is no explicit indication in LB (unlike
in earlier lore) that fairies do or can mate with humans.  (Dr.
Bramble's lecture is hardly reliable information.)  And the fairies
Crowley depicts don't seem the type to mate with humans.  Finally,
Violet is just depicted as too human to be of the same species as the
very inhuman Mrs. Underhill.

> > Actually a very Christian notion.  The Gnostic idea, I think, is that
> > only those who understand the secret knowledge of their true nature will
> > be saved.
> 
> The secret knowledge of true nature in LB is that of fairy blood. I would be willing to swear up and down that JC knew what he was doing here.

But (assuming the Drinkwaters have fairy blood), it's not knowledge of
having fairy blood that counts, it's the blood itself. George doesn't
know he has fairy blood, neither does Auberon, and Sylvie doesn't even
know she's a Drinkwater. It still sounds more like a parody of
Christianity than Gnosticism to me.

> Does [Eigenblick go in]? I had forgotten that, but of course he is an otherworldly creature too. Hawksquill goes in as a stork.

And in some sense, Eigenblick goes in as a fox.

--Adam

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