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The Fairy Mythology, Volume I
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Free material for the first volume of Keightley’s 1850 Fairy Mythology: the northern vocabulary the book uses without explaining, a reading list of the collectors he translates, a scorecard of what became of his claims, a measured concordance of the motifs he compares, and the insular alphabet the original was set in.
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The Northern Words
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Twenty-seven terms — <i>alfar</i>, <i>duergar</i>, <i>elle-folk</i>, <i>nis</i>, <i>tomte</i>, <i>kobold</i>, <i>nix</i>, <i>Servan</i> — with what each means and which language it is. Keightley writes for a reader who has Danish, German and a little Norse; this is the card for the reader who has none of them.
Open PDF63 KBWho Collected It
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Thiele, Faye, Afzelius, Arndt and Grimm, with what each of them published, when, and which parts of the volume are theirs. Keightley names his sources, which for 1828 is the remarkable thing about him; this sheet turns those citations into a reading list.
Open PDF63 KBRight, Wrong, Still Open
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Ten claims and what became of each. The collectors, the etymology of <i>fairy</i>, Oberon’s descent from Alberich and the Norse survival in Shetland all held. The Persian derivation, the Eddic elf-orders and the identity of the German and Scandinavian dwarfs did not.
Open PDF47 KBA Concordance of Motifs
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The changeling, the egg-shell test, the stolen bride, the midwife fetched to the hill, the fairy ointment, the gift of clothes — counted section by section across both volumes. The book is a comparison and never indexes what it compares; this is a measurement, not an argument.
Open PDF60 KBThe Letters He Set
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The insular Anglo-Saxon and Gaelic type of the original, letter by letter, with the word that identifies each one — <i>Munt-ælfen</i>, <i>Wulfes-fist</i>, <i>daine maiṫ</i>, <i>siaḃra</i>. The transcription this edition works from set them as pictures; here they are characters.
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About this material
Thomas Keightley lived 1789–1872 and this text is the enlarged edition of 1850, reprinted in 1892, so it is in the public domain on two independent grounds. The illustration layer was assessed separately. This volume carries the frontispiece of the 1850 Bohn issue, attributed to George Cruikshank (1792–1878) on the bibliographic record of that issue — the mark on the plate is not legible at source resolution and this edition does not claim to have read it — and six of the seven engraved script blocks, which are anonymous work published in 1850. All clear. One layer is REFUSED: the 141 one-letter images the 2012 transcribers made to stand for the insular and Gaelic letterforms are their work, not Keightley's, and this edition replaces every one with its Unicode character instead.