An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland

Here’s a great map that has had a bit of attention recently, and is a really fun work to explore. I’ve been trying to make it fit the work-in-progress, but in one place it just gets in the way and in another it repeats insights from other maps and just unnecessarily bulks up the manuscript. I’m therefore laying out the core story here, combining elements from a number of sources, to get it out of my head.

Bernard Sleigh, “An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland” (1917). Click on image to see high-res version at the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, University of Southern Maine.

In December 1917, the British artist and wood engraver Bernard Sleigh (1872–1954) published a six-foot long, panoramic map of Fairyland in three sheets. Its style was that of the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic championed by William Morris (1834–1896) in the second half of the nineteenth century, in reaction to the apparent destruction of individual skills and traditional designs by mass industrialization. Arts and Crafts generated intricately detailed designs and a retrogressive appeal to folk aesthetics. Sleigh, trained by one of Morris’s followers, cultivated a stylized mediaevalism in both the design and the subject matter of his drawings, prints, murals, and stained glass (Cooper 1997).

Sleigh had originally engaged with the subject of folklore and fairy tales in 1909. To entertain his young children when wet weather soured a holiday, he drew a planimetric Anciente Map of Fairie-Land:

Sleigh’s “Anciente Map of Fairie-Land” (1909). Click on image for high-res version on Roderick Barron’s website

Sleigh imagined Fairyland as an island, making it broadly rectangular in shape so that it fit a single sheet of paper. Some elements were plainly fantastical—such as some headlands shaped like the heads of a woman, a dragon, and a swan—and others mundane, such as Blackadder Lake, perhaps modeled on Blackadder Water in the Scottish Borders. Sleigh also added the several elements required of a proper map, including a scale not of miles but of thoughts, a compass rose (clockwise: “North of Nowhere”; “West of the Moon”; and “East of the Sun”), and a legend (king’s seat; hostelry; village; elfin shrine; holy well; and fairie temple). Sleigh published the work in short order, but it seems not to have sold well and today is quite rare (Barron nd).

Sleigh fully embraced fantasy and myth in reaction to World War I. He turned away from medieval themes, but not from his Arts and Crafts, medievalist graphic style. As he recollected in his unpublished autobiography, “the Peter Pan in me emerged in full strength” in 1916, “chiefly I suppose as a mental refuge from the hideous militarism of the time” (quoted by Hall 2019). The first product of this shift was the three-sheet panorama. Like the earlier planimetric map, An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland was effectively a natural history of British folk tales and legends (in part filtered through Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.), nursery rhymes, and anti-industrial children’s fantastical literature, notably J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies. To this nationalistic mythology he added elements of European folklore collected by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Sleigh went on to produce a series of prints, books, and even wallpaper that illustrated Fairyland and the existence of fairies, all of which tapped into and greatly promoted popular interest in Britain in all things fairy (Owen 1994; Young 2013, esp. 140–41).

Mounted on cloth and with wooden rods at either end, Sleigh intended the panorama as a removable wall hanging for children’s nurseries. Capturing as it did the contemporary antipathy towards the horrors of the Great War, the panorama sold well in Britain; it was then reissued in a reduced format in the USA where it was again popular (see Knapp 1924). Its popularity rested on its overt antithesis to the modernist aesthetics that came to dominate public culture after the war, which emphasized smooth lines, functional design, and a progressive, forward-looking ethos (think art deco and Bauhaus).

Of special interest to me is how, despite his overtly anti-modernist subject matter and style, Sleigh nonetheless gave structure and system to his fictive panorama by giving it the trappings of normative maps and of realistic imagery more generally. He repeated the key elements from the 1909 map—the compass rose (now with “South of Sirius” added), legend (now identifying signs used for wishing well; dwarf’s treasure; elfin temple; fairie shrine; and village inn), and scale of thoughts—which he explained in the accompanying guide (Sleigh 1918).

He also repeated many of the details from his earlier work. Among the great deal of new material that Sleigh added is my favorite touch. Just above Banbury Cross, Old Mother Hubbard’s Home, Miss Muffet’s House, and the site where Jack and Jill were married, is a subtle commentary on pictorialness and map scale: “Tom Thumb is somewhere here but he is too small to draw.”

This comment encapsulates the modernist combination of observation and measurement, of pictorialism and metricality, that underpins the normative map concept. But more on that in the next book!

References

Barron, Roderick M. nd. “[Bernard Sleigh, An Anciente Map of Fairie Land (1909)].” Barron Maps.

Cooper, Roger. 1997. “Bernard Sleigh, Artist and Craftsman, 1872–1954.” Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850–the Present 21: 88–102.

Hall, Kathryn. 2019. “Bernard Sleigh.” The Iron Room: Archives and Collections @ the Library of Birmingham. 1 July 2019.

Knapp, Elizabeth. 1924. “Reviewed Works: Mappe of Fairyland by Bernard Sleigh; All Mother Goose Panorama by Luxor Price.” Elementary English Review 1, no. 3: 115.

Owen, Alex. 1994. “‘Borderland Forms’: Arthur Conan Doyle, Albion’s Daughters, and the Politics of the Cottingley Fairies.” History Workshop Journal 38: 48–85.

Sleigh, Bernard. 1918. A Guide to the Map of Fairyland. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

Young, Simon. 2013. “A History of the Fairy Investigation Society, 1927–1960.” Folklore 124, no. 2: 139–56.