Faërie

Whilome it was (as Faëries wont report) / Dame Venus Girdle, by her ’ſteemed deare / What time ſhe us’d to live in wively ſort, / But layd aſide whenſo ſhe us’d her looſer ſport.

From Burnsal’s tower the midnight hour / Had toll’d, and its echo was still, / And the elfin band, from faërie land, / Was upon Elboton hill.

The Granddaughter of France was the real head of the people, and as the faëries had been present at her baptism, obstacles and monsters vanished at her approach.

Trying to pursue a contemporary sense of the poem, we can readily imagine that when in a paradise garden in May a fair woman falls prey to the king of faëries, resulting in her husband’s wending forth from his former glorious condition to “hard heþe” (243), “grete malaise” (240) and to “al day digge & wrote/Er he finde his fille of rote” (255–56), that it would be possible for a medieval reader to see in the story some sort of suggestion of the Fall and the beginning of human erôs-longing in Judaeo-Christian terms.

Despite their magic talismans and enchanted weapons, and even with the great powers they possessed, the faëries were eventually conquered.