Home Songs Speeches Blog

The Fae

By James Babcock

The original Eldritch horrors, before Lovecraft, were fairies - the fae. In stories, the morality of the Fae is amoral and capricious - not black and white, but orange and gray. They aren’t chaotic–they follow rules, just, rules that are unintuitive, not the sorts of rules humans would normally follow. And if you squint a little, at the mythology of ancient people defeating the Fae by understanding their rules, it matches pretty well to slightly-less-ancient people defeating aspects of physics by understanding its rules.

In myth, the Fae are vulnerable to iron and salt. The challenges of physics were vulnerable to machines and iodization. In myth, the fae cast strange curses which humans defeat with seemingly equally-arbitrary rituals. We protect ourselves by wash our hands before we eat, and injecting small amounts of diseases into our blood.

In myths, the Fae present problems that seem impossible. This song, Scarborough Fair, presents such a series of seemingly-impossible challenges:

edit