Sitting here touching up some wedding photos from the other weekend, made me thing how easy it is to alter things in this day and age. When I first started in photography techniques like burning and dodging as well as sandwiching negatives were common and to some, altering a photo and then re-taking it. All these required skill in the darkroom or a good eye as an artist. They say the camera cannot lie (although with some modern cameras that is not true today) but Photoshop can. Even so, I thought about one of the best camera tricks known, the Cottingley Fairies.
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| The Cottingley Fairies |
In 1917, two Yorkshire girls, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths even managed to fool Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creator of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes, into believing they had photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden. Frances explained, "The first time I ever saw anything was when a willow leaf started shaking violently, even though there was no wind, I saw a small man standing on a branch, with the stem of the leaf in his hand, which he seemed to be shaking at something. He was dressed all in green..... They were real fairies. Some had wings and some not…. They were once sitting in a patch of sunlight on a low bank…. It all seemed so peaceful and friendly…. Sometimes they came up, only inches away, but I never wanted to join in their lives." The hoax wasn’t explained until 1982, when the pair finally admitted to photographing paper cut-outs supported by hat-pins. The Cottingley Fairies photographs fetched £6,000 at auction earlier this year, surely an indication that people still wish to believe in them. These days with Photoshop and similar software the creation of these abstract possibly believable images is easy if not something for experienced users.
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| Photoshop fairy |
Even J R R Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, had a love affair with fairies and in his paper “On Fairy Stories” he wrote:
Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil's tithe.
O see ye not yon narrow road
So thick beset wi' thorns and briers?
That is the path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
And see ye not yon braid, braid road
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
And see ye not yon bonny road
That winds about yon fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.
I recognized these as the words used by the English folk rock group Steeleye Span in their song Thomas the Rhymer recorded in 1974, so looking a little deeper I found that it was Child Ballad 37 - The Child Ballads are a collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century. The collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1882 and 1898 by Houghton Mifflin in 10 volumes.
Thomas himself was born Thomas Learmonth (c. 1220 – c. 1298) better known as Thomas the Rhymer or True Thomas and was a 13th century Scottish laird and reputed prophet from Earlston (then called "Erceldoune"). He is the protagonist of the ballad. He is also the probable source of the legend of Tam Lin. Popular esteem of Thomas lived on for centuries after his death, to the extent that several people have fabricated Thomas' "prophecies" in order to further the cause of Scottish independence. His reputation for supernatural powers for a time rivalled that of Merlin.
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| Thomas meets the Queen of the Fairies |
All this might have been if Sir Thomas of Erceldoune had been no more historical than Merlin. But the name is known to have belonged to a real person. Thomas Rymor de Ercildune is witness to a deed whereby one Petrus de Haga obliges himself to make payment to the Abbey of Melrose. Petrus de Haga is, in turn, witness to a charter made by Richard de Moreville. Unluckily, neither of these deeds is dated. But Moreville was constable of Scotland from 1162 to 1189. If we suppose Moreville's charter to have been given towards 1189, and Haga to have been then about twenty years old, and so born about 1170, and further suppose Haga to have made his grant to Melrose towards the end of a life of threescore, or three score and ten, the time of Thomas Rymer's signature would be about 1230 or 1240. If Thomas Rymer was then twenty years of age, his birth would have been at 1210 or 1220.
It never ceases to amaze me how one can jump from Photoshop and wedding photographs to folk music and the mystical worlds of fairies and elves, as some say everything is intertwined and the circle becomes complete.
J R R Tolkien – On Fairy Stories
Credit for the Photoshop Image
Credit for Thomas picture
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