Jerusalem, and afterwards travelled in western Asia and Egypt. In 1368 he settled in Mecca, where he remained for fifteen years. He next visited India and spent some time in Delhi, then remained in Mecca another ten years. The following three years were spent in Bagdad, in Shiraz (where he was received by Timur), and in Ta’iz. In 1395 he was appointed chief cadi (qadi) of Yemen, married a daughter of the sultan, and died at Zabīd in 1414. During this last period of his life he converted his house at Mecca into a school of Mālikite law and established three teachers in it. He wrote a huge lexicographical work of 60 or 100 volumes uniting the dictionaries of Ibn Sīda, a Spanish philologist (d. 1066), and of Sajānī (d. 1252). A digest of or an extract from this last work is his famous dictionary al-Qāmūs (“the Ocean”), which has been published in Egypt, Constantinople and India, has been translated into Turkish and Persian, and has itself been the basis of several later dictionaries. (G. W. T.)
FAIRY (Fr. fée, faerie; Prov. fada; Sp. hada; Ital. fata;
med. Lat. fatare, to enchant, from Lat. fatum, fate, destiny),
the common term for a supposed race of supernatural beings
who magically intermeddle in human affairs. Of all the minor
creatures of mythology the fairies are the most beautiful, the
most numerous, the most memorable in literature. Like all
organic growths, whether of nature or of the fancy, they are not
the immediate product of one country or of one time; they
have a pedigree, and the question of their ancestry and affiliation
is one of wide bearing. But mixture and connexion of races
have in this as in many other cases so changed the original
folk-product that it is difficult to disengage and separate the
different strains that have gone to the making or moulding of
the result as we have it.
It is not in literature, however ancient, that we must look for the early forms of the fairy belief. Many of Homer’s heroes have fairy lemans, called nymphs, fairies taken up into a higher region of poetry and religion; and the fairy leman is notable in the story of Athamas and his cloud bride Nephelē, but this character is as familiar to the unpoetical Eskimo, and to the Red Indians, with their bird-bride and beaver-bride (see A. Lang’s Custom and Myth, “The Story of Cupid and Psyche”). The Gandharvas of Sanskrit poetry are also fairies.
One of the most interesting facts about fairies is the wide distribution and long persistence of the belief in them. They are the chief factor in surviving Irish superstition. Here they dwell in the “raths,” old earth-forts, or earthen bases of later palisaded dwellings of the Norman period, and in the subterranean houses, common also in Scotland. They are an organized people, often called “the army,” and their life corresponds to human life in all particulars. They carry off children, leaving changeling substitutes, transport men and women into fairyland, and are generally the causes of all mysterious phenomena. Whirls of dust are caused by the fairy marching army, as by the being called Kutchi in the Dieri tribe of Australia. In 1907, in northern Ireland, a farmer’s house was troubled with flying stones (see Poltergeist). The neighbours said that the fairies caused the phenomenon, as the man had swept his chimney with a bough of holly, and the holly is “a gentle tree,” dear to the fairies. The fairy changeling belief also exists in some districts of Argyll, and a fairy boy dwelt long in a small farm-house in Glencoe, now unoccupied.
In Ireland and the west Highlands neolithic arrow-heads and flint chips are still fairy weapons. They are dipped in water, which is given to ailing cattle and human beings as a sovereign remedy for diseases. The writer knows of “a little lassie in green” who is a fairy and, according to the percipients, haunts the banks of the Mukomar pool on the Lochy. In Glencoe is a fairy hill where the fairy music, vocal and instrumental, is heard in still weather. In the Highlands, however, there is much more interest in second sight than in fairies, while in Ireland the reverse is the case. The best book on Celtic fairy lore is still that of the minister of Aberfoyle, the Rev. Mr Kirk (ob. 1692). His work on The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, left in MS. and incomplete (the remainder is in the Laing MSS., Edinburgh University library), was published (a hundred copies) in 1815 by Sir Walter Scott, and in the Bibliothèque de Carabas (Lang) there is a French translation. Mr Kirk is said (though his tomb exists) to have been carried away by fairies. He appeared to a friend and said that he would come again, when the friend must throw a dirk over his shoulder and he would return to this world. The friend, however, lost his nerve and did not throw the dirk. In the same way a woman reappeared to her husband in Glencoe in the last generation, but he was wooing another lass and did not make any effort to recover his wife. His character was therefore lost in the glen.
It is clear that in many respects fairyland corresponds to the pre-Christian abode of the dead. Like Persephone when carried to Hades, or Wainamoïnen in the Hades of the Finns (Manala), a living human being must not eat in fairyland; if he does, he dwells there for ever. Tamlane in the ballad, however, was “fat and fair of flesh,” yet was rescued by Janet: probably he had not abstained from fairy food. He was to be given as the kane to Hell, which shows a distinction between the beliefs in hell and in the place of fairies.
It is a not uncommon theory that the fairies survive in legend from prehistoric memories of a pigmy people dwelling in the subterranean earth-houses, but the contents of these do not indicate an age prior to the close of the Roman occupation of Britain; nor are pigmy bones common in neolithic sepulchres. The “people of peace” (Daoine Shie) of Ireland and Scotland are usually of ordinary stature, indeed not to be recognized as varying from mankind except by their proceedings (see J. Curtin, Irish Folk-tales).
The belief in a species of lady fairies, deathly to their human lovers, was found by R. L. Stevenson to be as common in Samoa (see Island Nights’ Entertainments) as in Strathfinlas or on the banks of Loch Awe. In New Caledonia a native friend of J. J. Atkinson (author of Primal Law) told him that he had met and caressed the girl of his heart in the forest, that she had vanished and must have been a fairy. He therefore would die in three days, which (Mr Atkinson informs the writer) he punctually did. The Greek sirens of Homer are clearly a form of these deadly fairies, as the Nereids and Oreads and Naiads are fairies of wells, mountains and the sea. The fairy women who come to the births of children and foretell their fortunes (Fata, Moerae, ancient Egyptian Hathors, Fées, Dominae Fatales), with their spindles, are refractions of the human “spae-women” (in the Scots term) who attend at birth and derive omens of the child’s future from various signs. The custom is common among several savage races, and these women, represented in the spiritual world by Fata, bequeath to us the French fée, in the sense of fairy. Perrault also uses fée for anything that has magical quality; “the key was fée,” had mana, or wakan, savage words for the supposed “power,” or ether, which works magic or is the vehicle of magical influences.
Though the fairy belief is universally human, the nearest analogy to the shape which it takes in Scotland and Ireland—the “pixies” of south-western England—is to be found in Jān or Jinnis of the Arabs, Moors and people of Palestine. In stories which have passed through a literary medium, like The Arabian Nights, the geni or Jān do not so much resemble our fairies as they do in the popular superstitions of the East, orally collected. The Jān are now a subterranean commonwealth, now they reside in ruinous places, like the fairies in the Irish raths. Like the fairies they go about in whirls of dust, or the dust-whirls themselves are Jān. They carry off men and women “to their own herd,” in the phrase of Mr Kirk, and are kind to mortals who are kind to them. They chiefly differ from our fairies in their greater tendency to wear animal forms; though, like the fairies, when they choose to appear in human shape they are not to be distinguished from men and women of mortal mould. Like the fairies everywhere they have amours with mortals, such as that of the Queen of Faery with Thomas of Ercildoune. The herb rue is potent against them, as in British folk-lore, and a man long captive among the Jān escaped from them by observing their avoidance of rue, and by plucking two handfuls
