Faerie, The Fair Lands or The Twilight Realm is one of two
fictional
Fiction is any creative work, chiefly any narrative work, portraying individuals, events, or places
Place may refer to:
Geography
* Place (United States Census Bureau), defined as any concentration of population
** Census-designated place, ...
otherdimensional homelands for the Faerie, as published by
DC Comics
DC Comics, Inc. (doing business as DC) is an American comic book publisher and the flagship unit of DC Entertainment, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Discovery.
DC Comics is one of the largest and oldest American comic book companies, with thei ...
. The
Vertigo Comics
Vertigo Comics, also known as DC Vertigo or simply Vertigo, was an imprint of American comic book publisher DC Comics started by editor Karen Berger in 1993. Vertigo's purpose was to publish comics with adult content, such as nudity, drug use, ...
realm of Faerie is an amalgam of the mythological realms of
Álfheimr
In Norse cosmology, Álfheimr (Old Norse: , "Land of the Elves" or "Elfland"; anglicized as Alfheim), also called "Ljósálfheimr" ( , "home of the Light Elves"), is home of the Light Elves.
Attestations
Álfheim as an abode of the Elves is men ...
,
Otherworld
The concept of an otherworld in historical Indo-European religion is reconstructed in comparative mythology. Its name is a calque of ''orbis alius'' (Latin for "other Earth/world"), a term used by Lucan in his description of the Celtic Otherworld ...
, the
Fortunate Isles
The Fortunate Isles or Isles of the Blessed ( grc, μακάρων νῆσοι, ''makárōn nêsoi'') were semi-legendary islands in the Atlantic Ocean, variously treated as a simple geographical location and as a winterless earthly paradise inhabit ...
,
Tír na nÓg
In Irish mythology Tír na nÓg (; "Land of the Young") or Tír na hÓige ("Land of Youth") is one of the names for the Celtic Otherworld, or perhaps for a part of it. Tír na nÓg is best known from the tale of Oisín and Niamh.
Other Old Iri ...
and
Avalon
Avalon (; la, Insula Avallonis; cy, Ynys Afallon, Ynys Afallach; kw, Enys Avalow; literally meaning "the isle of fruit r appletrees"; also written ''Avallon'' or ''Avilion'' among various other spellings) is a mythical island featured in the ...
. This mix is heavily influenced by
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
's play ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream
''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' is a comedy written by William Shakespeare 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict amon ...
''. It is home to the faeries and other mythical races, ruled over by the Seelie Court and
King Auberon and
Queen Titania. Faerie debuted in ''
The Books of Magic
''The Books of Magic'' is the title of a four-issue English-language comic book mini-series written by Neil Gaiman, published by DC Comics, and later an ongoing series under the imprint Vertigo. Since its original publication, the mini-series has ...
'' #3, and was created by
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon GaimanBorn as Neil Richard Gaiman, with "MacKinnon" added on the occasion of his marriage to Amanda Palmer. ; ( Neil Richard Gaiman; born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, gr ...
and
Charles Vess
Charles Vess (born June 10, 1951) is an American fantasy artist and comics artist who has specialized in the illustration of myths and fairy tales. His influences include British "Golden Age" book illustrator Arthur Rackham, Czech Art Nouveau pain ...
.
Publication history
As part of his comic ''
The Sandman
The Sandman is a mythical character in European folklore who puts people to sleep and encourages and inspires beautiful dreams by sprinkling magical sand onto their eyes.
Representation in traditional folklore
The Sandman is a traditional charact ...
'', writer
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon GaimanBorn as Neil Richard Gaiman, with "MacKinnon" added on the occasion of his marriage to Amanda Palmer. ; ( Neil Richard Gaiman; born 10 November 1960) is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, gr ...
planned a small arc involving
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
entering a deal with the
Dream King to write plays that would live on after him. Having introduced Shakespeare,
Gaiman then decided to tell the story of the first play that the writer wrote for Dream in payment of the bargain. He turned to his favourite of Shakespeare's plays, ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream
''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' is a comedy written by William Shakespeare 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict amon ...
'' creating analogues of the play's main otherworldly characters and inventing the fiction that Shakespeare wrote the play to Dream's instructions to ensure that humans never forgot Faerie and its rulers.
Having created her, Gaiman used
Queen Titania as a recurring character throughout the series, and when he was asked part way through his run on ''The Sandman'' to write a four-issue miniseries to introduce DC's magical characters to a new audience
he gave her a guest role in one of the issues of that as well. ''
The Books of Magic
''The Books of Magic'' is the title of a four-issue English-language comic book mini-series written by Neil Gaiman, published by DC Comics, and later an ongoing series under the imprint Vertigo. Since its original publication, the mini-series has ...
'' miniseries showed Titania in her kingdom, meaning Gaiman had to create the realm of Faerie in more depth than he had previously shown it.
Gaiman showed a land known as the Fair Lands, Avalon, Elvenhome, Dom-daniel, the Land of Summer's Twilight or Faerie, based very much on classical representations of the fairy kingdom: faeries tempted children to live with them in the Twilight Country, with even Titania being waited on by Shakespeare's son Hamnett
having tempted him to come with her at their first meeting.
The realm is governed by strict rules of bartering, with the giving of gifts requiring the receiver to give a gift of equal value in return or forfeit their property or life to the giver; good manners are paramount. Nothing ages or dies, but nothing truly lasts either; the food available in the realm is extremely dangerous to the incautious
and if eaten will make it impossible for the eater to consume real food again, forcing them to remain in Faerie forever.
But Gaiman also acknowledged that his Faerie was a fiction, a land where metaphor was made real but also remained metaphor: when Timothy Hunter was taken to the land by
Doctor Occult
Doctor Occult (sometimes dubbed the Ghost Detective, one time referred to as Doctor Mystic) is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (known commonly as the creator ...
, the mystic admitted that in some ways the two of them were still sitting in a field exploring only their inner landscapes. Gaiman also showed an ambiguous section that was interpreted by some to suggest that Queen Titania was the mother of the comic's main character,
Timothy Hunter
Timothy Hunter is a fictional character, a comic book sorcerer published by DC Comics. He first appeared in ''The Books of Magic'' #1 (January 1990), and was created by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton.
Publication history
Tim Hunter was created by ...
, which ensured that the realm of Faerie was further explored when the mini-series became an ongoing series.
When he was chosen to replace Gaiman as the writer of the ongoing ''The Books of Magic'' series,
John Ney Rieber
John Ney Rieber is an American comic book writer.
Career
John Ney Rieber's first professional work in comics was scripting over the finished pages of the graphic novel ''Tell Me, Dark'', conceived by his late friend and mentor Karl Edward Wagner ...
discovered that a gaming guide to the DC universe had listed Titania as Hunter's mother: he also knew that a key part of the character's appeal, however, was that he was a normal teenaged boy. Instead of simply denying the possibility of Tim being part Faerie, Rieber decided to use the idea as one of his ongoing storylines, whilst gently debunking it.
This meant utilizing Titania and her
cuckold
A cuckold is the husband of an adulterous wife; the wife of an adulterous husband is a cuckquean. In biology, a cuckold is a male who unwittingly invests parental effort in juveniles who are not genetically his offspring. A husband who is aw ...
ed husband Auberon as supporting characters for most of his run on the comic,
which in turn meant frequent visits and explorations to Faerie: the first storyline in the book showed Tim visiting a forgotten corner of the realm and introduced the idea that the land was slowly dying since it had been cut off from the Earth,
and later storylines delved deeper into Faerie's past and present to build up a clearer picture of the Twilight Kingdom.
Such was the importance of Faerie to Rieber's version of ''The Books of Magic'' that when its popularity caused DC to release a spin-off miniseries, they decided that a three issue mini-series about the early history of the kingdom (and Titania's rise to power) would be most suitable.
Three volumes of ''
The Books of Faerie
''The Books of Faerie'' was a series of three mini-series spun off from Vertigo Comics' series ''The Books of Magic'' written by Bronwyn Carlton (two series) and John Ney Rieber (one series). It featured characters used predominantly in the paren ...
'' were eventually published, each giving more detail and colour to DC's version of Faerie, and at one point there were even plans for an ongoing series to be set there.
However, the series was never published, and Faerie's appearances in the DC universe have been brief since then.
Fictional history
The faerie race was born and lived in the
Mundane World for many centuries until frosty relationships with the growing race of men caused them to leave the world forever some time before the 16th century.
Upon leaving the realm of their birth, the nine rulers of faerie led them on a search for a new world to call their own. The band of refugees were met by
Lucifer
Lucifer is one of various figures in folklore associated with the planet Venus. The entity's name was subsequently absorbed into Christianity as a name for the devil. Modern scholarship generally translates the term in the relevant Bible passage ...
, who offered them a corner of
Hell
In religion and folklore, hell is a location in the afterlife in which evil souls are subjected to punitive suffering, most often through torture, as eternal punishment after death. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hell ...
to have as their own in exchange for the payment of a tithe. Lucifer claimed he was moved by sympathy for the faeries, having been forced to leave his own birth-realm, but when the faeries agreed to the deal the true nature of the tithe was revealed: eight of the nine rulers were taken to Hell to be tortured, leaving the last - Huon the Small - to remain as the first King of Faerie.
In order to keep their land, Faerie was required to send nine of its fairest and best subjects to Hell every seven years,
or risk war with the armies of Hell.
The faeries, unaware of the true price, settled into their new home; the land was transformed into lush world of happiness and nature, with the faeries maintaining links with the Mundane World and mortals often visiting the Twilight Kingdom. King Magnus came to the throne, instigating a dark time for the carefree realm: he believed in the innate superiority of pure-blood faeries and this led to the persecution of the other races, with
Brownies becoming little more than slaves in the royal household. Magnus also discovered a worrying problem; a disorder in purebred faerie blood meant that it was extremely difficult for them to produce children naturally. He began secret experiments, trying to refresh the bloodline by interbreeding with mankind.
Ironically, Magnus' dalliances with other faeries did lead to a birth – an illegitimate and unrecognized son called the Amadan
who grew to become Fool to the Seelie Court and mastermind of a thousand intrigues and manipulations. Magnus used to Amadan to provide contestants in gladiatorial games between the races, and was killed trying to prove the superiority of faeries fighting against a troll. This left a power vacuum in the Court that was eventually filled when Lord Obrey sought out the rightful heir to the throne, a young boy faerie called Auberon who was being looked after in the outskirts by his cousin Dymphna and brownie nursemaid Bridie.
Obrey helped Auberon to overcome challenges from rival Lords and succeed to the throne, but grew unhappy with his role as the Amadan's manipulations drove a wedge between him and the throne.
Aware of the growing danger,
the boy-king ran away from the Court to find his missing sister, leaving Obrey as his Regent to look after Faerie and her subjects. Obrey slipped into the role of king unchallenged, his own position made stronger by his marriage to Auberon's cousin Dymphna,
and the two ruled for several years, reversing some of Magnus' more prejudiced practices to bring all the races of Faerie together.
However, Obrey was also told of Magnus' discovery by the Amadan, and grew increasingly concerned for the survival of the faerie race. He adopted the same solution as Magnus, trying to promote interbreeding by encouraging human children to be enticed to stay in Faerie. One such child was the young girl Maryrose, who after being trapped in Faerie quickly became the favourite of Queen Dymphna. Assured by the Amadan that Maryrose would bear him a child, Obrey transformed Dymphna into a tree and took Maryrose as his new wife. Using a glamour stolen from the previous queen, Maryrose assumed the appearance of being a purebred Faerie and took the name Titania at her coronation.
When Auberon returned as a young man, Obrey refused to relinquish the throne and the Wars of Succession began. Shortly after his marriage, Obrey was killed in battle and - seeking to reunite the warring kingdom - Auberon took Titania as his wife as he reclaimed the throne. For political reasons, Auberon expected his wife to produce an heir as soon as possible. When she became pregnant, it was the result of an affair she had been having with a human falconer called Tamlin. When the child was born, it was clearly a purebred human, and Titania and her nanny conspired to convince Auberon that the child had been stillborn, with the nanny taking the child into the Mundane World to grow into adulthood.
Together, Titania and Auberon ruled Faerie through turbulent times: they made the final Severing between their world and Faerie
and forbade their subjects to travel to other realms without their direct permission.
This caused problems for the realm when it started to wither and die, forcing Titania and the Court to hide its true state behind powerful glamours. Eventually, the intervention of Tamlin brought an Opener (
Timothy Hunter
Timothy Hunter is a fictional character, a comic book sorcerer published by DC Comics. He first appeared in ''The Books of Magic'' #1 (January 1990), and was created by Neil Gaiman and John Bolton.
Publication history
Tim Hunter was created by ...
, who was possibly Titania's abandoned son) to the realm whose spilled blood restored its previous vigor.
They also withstood a flitling rebellion, led by Briar Rose who was banished and transformed as a punishment.
When Lucifer decided to quit his realm, Titania and Auberon hoped that they could convince the new owners to forfeit the tithe Faerie owed
- their own son and heir Prince Taik having been claimed as payment - but this didn't come to fruition. The tithe was eventually annulled, however, when Huon the Small returned to the realm to judge its right to survive: thanks to the belief and loyalty of a flitling called Yarrow who was chosen as "The Leveller", the realm was recreated anew as the lush and fun-filled paradise it had always seemed to be with the connection to Hell severed forever.
Faerie faced further danger when the demon Barbatos used the magical gemstone called Twilight to bewitch a garden frog into a giant. Barbatos enslaved the faeries, forcing them to work themselves to death constructing a massive pond for the demon's "master". The intervention of
Molly O'Reilly
Molly O'Reilly is a fictional character created for the Vertigo comic-book series ''The Books of Magic'' by writer John Ney Rieber and artist Peter Gross. Although she was written out of the main series, she was brought back by popular demand in ...
(ex-girlfriend of Timothy Hunter) released the faeries and banished Barbatos to an obscure corner of the Dreaming, and in return the gemstone Twilight chose her as its new owner and the chosen protector of Faerie and its peoples.
The nature of faerie
Time moves different in Faerie than it does in the real world, and someone spending an hour there might find that they have been missing for weeks on their return.
An example of this is that Titania's illegitimate son was born and taken to Earth shortly after her marriage,
an unspecified amount of time before Auberon and Titania watched the first performance of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' on Earth sometime in the 1590s.
Tim Hunter was born in 1983,
and yet Titania has no difficulty in believing that he may be the same child.
Inhabitants of Faerie
Faerie is home to a wide number of different races and creatures, some born on the Earth and escaping over to Faerie as man's influence grew, others coming from elsewhere and being tricked into staying, or deciding to settle of their own accord.
Notable residents
*
Titania
*
Auberon
*
Faeries in ''The Sandman''
*
Faeries in ''The Books of Magic''
Brownies
Brownies appear as small, leather-skinned humans and enjoy helping out with domestic chores around the home. They were particularly abused during the reign of King Magnus, whose prejudice towards them led to them being treated as little more than domestic slaves.
Flitlings
Flitlings are small, winged faeries who otherwise appear to be human, similar in appearance to the
Cottingley Fairies. Flitlings are generally meek and unassuming, happy to flatter and fawn over the Seelie Court: Queen Titania has a small group of Flitling followers, and reacts jealously to anything that takes their attentions away from her.
However, these roles may be social rather than innate, as Flitlings have also shown great courage and strength: it was the Flitling Yarrow who stopped the riots following the
"Burning Girl" attacks, and also ended the Faerie tithe to Hell,
whilst the Flitling Briar Rose also led her race in rebellion against the condescension of the Seelie Court.
The Seelie
The dominant race of Faerie, also called the Theena
Sidhe, seeming to be normal human beings save for certain cosmetic differences - horns, different coloured skin, or other minor differences.
They can control their appearance through the use of magical glamours, and have a natural mastery of certain magics: they can escape from any prison, and some have the gift of prophesy. Their powers can be negated through the use of cold iron,
and the metal is unwelcome in the Faerie realm.
The Seelie find it particularly difficult to bear children with each other, and miscarriages and stillbirths are common. They are also able to interbreed with other races, such as humans. The Seelie Court rules over the other races of Faerie, modeled in the fashion of traditional European royalty.
The Unseelie
The wild and primal faeries of darkness, the Unseelie are seldom seen but are engaged in a perpetual war against the Seelie Court.
Trolls
Trolls are large creatures, exceptionally strong and usually with tusks. They are used in battle and for heavy lifting work, and are not often exceptionally intelligent.
See also
*
Gemworld
Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld is a superhero published in American comic books created by DC Comics. Created by writers Dan Mishkin, Gary Cohn and artist Ernie Colón, she debuted in ''The Legion of Superheroes'' #298 in April 1983.
Born in ...
References
External links
DCU Guide: Timothy HunterDCU Guide: Queen TitaniaDCU Guide: Auberon
{{A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Sandman (comic book)
The Books of Magic