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#fée
lepetitdragonvert · 6 months
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The Fairy of the Moon
1891
Artist : Hermann Kaulbach (1846-1909)
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mask131 · 2 months
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I was thinking about the difference between the British "fairy" and the French "fée", and suddenly the perfect comparison struck me.
The "fairy" from British folklore is basically Guillermo del Toro's take on the fair folk, trolls, goblins and other fairies in his movies, from "Pan's Labyrinth" to "Hellboy II". You know, all those weird monsters and bizarre critters with strange laws and customs, living half-hidden from humans, and coming in all sorts of shapes and sizes and sub-species and whatnot. Almost European yokai.
But the "fée" of French legend and literature? The fées are basically Tolkien's Elves. Except they are all female (or mostly female).
Because what is a "fée"? A fée is a woman taller and more beautiful than regular human beings. She is a woman who knows very advanced crafts and sciences, and wields mysterious unexplained powers. She is a woman who lives in fabulous, strange and magical places. She is a woman with a natural knowledge or foresight of the past and the future, and who can appear and disappear without being seen. Galadriel as she appears in The Lord of the Rings is basically the best example I can use when trying to explain to someone what a "fée" in French folklore and culture actually is.
(As a reminder: the fées of France are mostly represented by the Otherwordly Ladies of the Arthurian literature - Morgane, Viviane, bunch of unnamed ladies - or by the fairy godmothers of Perrault or d'Aulnoy's fairytales, to give you an idea of how they differ from the traditional "fae" or "fair folk". All female, and more unified, and so human-like they can pass of or be taken for humans. The "fées" are cultural descendants of the nymphs and goddesses and oracles/priestesses of Greco-Roman-Germanic-Gallic mythologies. That's why they are so easily confused with witches when they turn evil, and when Christianity arose most fées were replaced by the figure of the Virgin Mary, the most famous "magical beautiful otherwordly woman" of the religion)
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imweepin · 10 months
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My World is Yours
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lasaraconor · 10 months
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John Atkinson Grimshaw - Spirit of the Night de John
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l-yggdrall · 4 months
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フェアリーが存在しない
Les fées n'existent pas.
fairies don't exist.
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vaelyane · 10 months
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🇬🇧 Hello there, and Happy Pride month! :D I hope you're not melting too much. 🫠 My watercolour piece for this year is a trans faerie, trying on a long rainbow cloth amidst the bellflowers in my garden. I hope you'll like him and his pet hoverfly! 🧚‍♂️🏳️‍🌈
I wouldn't recommend painting a transparent Pride flag with watercolours unless you're extremely well prepared! As it turns out, I was not. Imagine me screaming and crying internally while covering my sins with white acrylic gouache. 😂 On a slightly more serious note, it hasn't been an easy year for LGBTQ+ people. If you're queer in any way, I want you to feel safe and welcome here. You matter more than you know. Take care! 💖 ~~~~~~~~~~ 🇫🇷 Bonjour, et Joyeux Mois des Fiertés ! :D J'espère que vous n'êtes pas trop en train de fondre. 🫠 Mon aquarelle pour ce mois-ci représente une fée trans essayant un pan de tissu arc-en-ciel, parmi les campanules de mon jardin. J'espère que vous aimerez ce charmant trublion et son syrphe de compagnie ! Je ne recommande à personne de peindre un drapeau arc-en-ciel transparent sans être bien préparé. Je ne l'étais manifestement pas ! Imaginez-moi en train de hurler intérieurement en recouvrant mes crimes à la gouache acrylique blanche. 😂 Pour finir sur une note plus sérieuse, ça n'a pas été une année facile pour la communauté LGBTQ+. Si vous êtes queer, quel que soit votre drapeau, je veux que vous vous sentiez bienvenu•e ici. Vous comptez plus que vous n'imaginez. Prenez soin de vous ! 💖
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sunthroughdarkclouds · 5 months
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Morgan le Fay
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sabinerondissime · 8 months
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Je vends mes dessins, 5 euros pièce, vous pouvez les acheter sur ebay (lien ci dessous) sur leboncoin ou me laisser un message en commentaire.
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philoursmars · 5 months
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Il y a une petite quinzaine, je suis allé avec Julien et Katie, au Louvre-Lens pour une expo temporaire : “Animaux Fantastiques”. Une très belle expo ! Ici des griffons :
Martin Schongauer - "Le Griffon"- Alsace, 1490
Philippe Druillet - "Le Chevalier Aurore"
Gustave Moreau - étude de griffon pour ''Oreste et les Erinyes"
Gustave Moreau - '"Fée au griffon"
Arthur Rackham, illustration pour le livre de Lewis Caroll - "Alice au Pays des Merveilles"
les 2 dernières : Claire Fanjul - "sphère céleste en calice"
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lepetitdragonvert · 5 months
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Mischief (détail)
Artist : Ida Rentoul Outhwaite
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mask131 · 2 months
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Arthurian myth: Morgan the Fey (1)
Loosely translated from the French article "Morgane", written by Philippe Walter, for the Dictionary of Feminine Myths (Le Dictionnaire des Mythes Féminins)
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MORGANE
Morgane means in Celtic language “born from the sea” (mori-genos). This character is as such, by her origins, part of the numerous sea-creatures of mythologies. A Britton word of the 9th century, “mormorain”, means “maiden of the sea/ sea-virgin”, et in old texts it is equated with the Latin “siren”. A passage of the life of saint Tugdual of Tréguiers (written in 1060) tells of ow a young man of great beauty named Guengal was taken away under the sea by “women of the sea”. The Celtic beliefs knew many various water-fairies with often deadly embraces – and Morgane was one among the many sirens, mermaids, mary morgand and “morverc’h” (sea girls/daughters of the sea).
Morgane, the fairy of Arthurian tales, is the descendant of the mythical figures of the Mother-Goddesses who, for the Celts, embodied on one side sovereignty, royalty and war, and on the other fecundity and maternity. In the Middle-Ages, they were renamed “fairies” – but through this word it tried to translate a permanent power of metamorphosis and an unbreakable link to the Otherworld, as well as a dreaded ability to influence human fate. The French word “fée” comes from the neutral plural “fata”, itself from the Latin word “fatum”, meaning “fate”.
There is not a figure more ambivalent in Celtic mythology – and especially in the Arthurian legends – than Morgane. She constantly hesitates between the character of a good fairy who offers helpful gifts to those she protects ; and a terrible, bloodthirsty goddess out for revenge, only sowing death and destruction everywhere she goes. Christianity played a key role in the demonization of this figure embodying an inescapable fate, thus contradicting the Christian view of mankind’s free will.
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I/ The sovereign goddess of war
It is in the ancient mythological Irish texts that the goddess later known as Morgane appears. The adventures of the warrior Cuchulainn (the “Irish Achilles”) with the war-goddess Morrigan are a major theme of the epic cycle of Ireland. The Morrigan (a name which probably means “great queen”) is also called “Bodb Catha” (the rook of battles). It is under the shape of a rook (among many other metamorphosis) that she appears to Cuchulainn to pronounce the magical words that will cause the hero’s death.
The Irish goddesses of war were in reality three sisters: Bodb, Macha and Morrigan, but it is very likely that these three names all designated the same divinity, a triple goddess rather than three distinct characters. This maleficent goddess was known to cause an epileptic fury among the warriors she wanted to cause the death of. The name of Bodb, which ended up meaning “rook”, originally had the sense of “fury” and “violence”, and it designated a goddess represented by a rook. The Irish texts explain that her sisters, Macha and Morrigan, were also known to cause the doom of entire armies by taking the shape of birds. Every great battle and every great massacre were preceded by their sinister cries, which usually announced the death of a prominent figure.
The Celtic goddesses of war have as such a function similar to the one of the Norse Walkyries, who flew over the battlefield in the shape of swans, or the Greek Keres. The deadly nature of these goddesses resides in the fact that they doom some warriors to madness with their terrifying screams. One of the effects of this goddess-caused madness was a “mad lunacy”, the “geltacht”, which affected as much the body as the mind. During a battle in 1722 it was said that the goddess appeared above king Ferhal in the shape of a sharp-beaked, red-mouth bird, and as she croaked nine men fell prey to madness. The poem of “Cath Finntragha” also tells of the defeat of a king suffering from this illness. The place of his curse later became a place of pilgrimage for all the lunatics in hope of healing.
The link between the war-goddess and the “lunacy-madness” are found back within folklore, in which fairies, in the shape of birds, regularly attack children and inflict them nervous illnesses. These fairies could also appear as “sickness-demons”. Their appearance was sometimes tied to key dates within the Celtic calendar, such as Halloween, which corresponded to the Irish and pre-Christian celebration of Samain. Folktales also keep this particularly by placing the ritualistic appearances of witches and of fate-fairies during the Twelve Days, between Christmas and the Epiphany – another period similar to the Celtic Halloween. Morgane seems to belong to this category of “seasonal visitors”.
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II) The Queen of Avalon
In Arthurian literature, Morgane rules over the island of Avalon, a name which means the Island of Apples (the apple is called “aval” in Briton, “afal” in Welsh and “Apfel” in German). Just like the golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperids, in Celtic beliefs this fruit symbolizes immortality and belongs to the Otherworld, a land of eternal youth. It is also associated with revelations, magic and science – all the attributes that Morgane has. Her kingdom of Avalon is one of the possible localizations of the Celtic paradise – it is the place that the Irish called “sid”, the “sedos” (seat) of the gods, their dwelling, but at the same time a place of peace beyond the sea. Avalon is also called the Fortunate Isle (L’Île Fortunée) because of the miraculous prosperity of its soil where everything grows at an abnormal rate. As such, agriculture does not exist there since nature produces by itself everything, without the intervention of mankind.
It is within this island that the fairy leads those she protects, especially her half-brother Arthur after the twilight of the Arthurian world. Morgane acts as such as the mediator between the world of the living and the fabulous Celtic Otherworld. Like all the fairies, she never stops going back and forth between the two worlds. Morgane is the ideal ferrywoman. The same way the Morrigan fed on corpses or the Valkyries favored warriors dead in battle, Morgane also welcomes the soul of the dead that she keeps by her side for all of eternity. Some texts gave her a home called “Montgibel”, which is confused with the Italian Etna. The Otherworld over which she rules doesn’t seem, as such, to be fully maritime.
The ”Life of Merlin” of the Welsh clerk Geoffroy of Monmouth teaches us that Morgan has eight sisters: Moronoe, Mazoe, Gliten, Glitonea, Gliton, Thiten, Tytonoe, and Thiton. Nine sisters in total which can be divided in three groups of three, connected by one shared first letter (M, G, T). In Adam de la Halle’s “Jeu de la feuillée”, she appears with two female companions (Arsile and Maglore), forming a female trinity. As such, she rebuilds the primitive triad of the sovereign-goddesses, these mother-goddesses that the inscriptions of Antiquity called the “Matres” or “Matronae”. In this triad, Morgane is the most prominent member. She is the effective ruler of Avalon, since it was said that she taught the art of divination to her sisters, an art she herself learned from Merlin of which she was the pupil. She knows the secret of medicinal herbs, and the art of healing, she knows how to shape-shift and how to fly in the air. Her healing abilities give her in some Arthurian works a benevolent function, for example within the various romans of Chrétien de Troyes. She usually appears right on time to heal a wounded knight: she is the one that gave a balm to Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, to heal his madness. In these works, Morgane does not embody a force of destruction, but on the contrary she protects the happy endings and good fortunes of the Round Table. She is the providential fée that saves the souls born in high society and raised in the “courtois” worship of the lady. However, her powers of healing can reverse into a nefarious power when the fée has her ego wounded.
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III/ The fatal temptress
In the prose Arthurian romans of the 13th century, Morgane can be summarized by one place. After being neglected by her lover Guyomar, she creates “le Val sans retour”, the Vale of No-Return, a place which will define her as a “femme fatale”. This place transports without the “littérature courtoise” the idea of the Celtic Otherworld. Also called “Le Val des faux amants” (The Vale of False Lovers), “le Val sans retour” is a cursed place where the fée traps all those that were unfaithful to her, by using various illusions and spells. As such, she manifests both her insatiable cruelty and her extreme jealousy. Lancelot will become the prime victim of Morgane because, due to his love for Queen Guinevere, he will refuse her seduction. The feelings of Morgane towards Lancelot rely on the ambivalence of love and hate: since she cannot obtain the love of the knight by natural means, she will use all of her enchantments and magical brews to submit Lancelot’s will. In vain. Lancelot will escape from the influence of this wicked witch. In “La Mort le roi Artu”, still for revenge, Morgan will participate in her own way to the decline to the Arthurian world: she will reveal to her brother, king Arthur, the adulterous love of Guinevre and Lancelot. She will bring to him the irrefutable proof of this affair by showing her what Lancelot painted when he had been imprisoned by her. The terrible war that marks the end of the Arthurian world will be concluded by the battle between Arthur and Mordred, the incestuous son of Arthur and Morgan. As such, Morgan appears as the instigator of the disaster that will ruin the Arthurian world. She manipulates the various actors of the tragedy and pushes them towards a deadly end. It should be noted that any sexual or romantic relationship between Arthur and Morgane are absent from the French romans – they are especially present within the British compilation of Malory, La Mort d’Arthur.
Behind the possessive woman described by the Arthurian texts, hides a more complex figure, a leftover of the ancient Celtic goddess of destinies. Cruel and manipulative, Morgan is fuses with the fear-inducing figure of the witch. Despite being an enemy of men, she keeps seeking their love. All of her personal tragedy comes from the fact that she fails to be loved. Always heart-sick, she takes revenge for her romantic failure with an incredible savagery. Her brutality manifest itself through the ugliness that some text will end up giving her – the ultimate rejection by this Christian world of this “devilish and lustful temptress”. “La Suite du Roman de Merlin” will try to give its own explanation for this transformation of Morgane, from good to wicked fairy: “She was a beautiful maiden until the time she learned charms and enchantments ; but because the devil took part in these charms and because she was tormented by both lust and the devil, she completely lost her beauty and became so ugly that no one accepted to ever call her beautiful, unless they had been bewitched”. In this new roman, she is responsible for a series of murders and suicides – and as the rival of Guinevere, she tries to cause King Arthur’s doom by favorizing her own lover, Accalon. Another fée, Viviane, will oppose herself to her schemes.
The demonization of the goddess is however not complete. Morgan appears in several “chansons de gestes” of the beginning of the 13th century, and even within the Orlando Furioso of the Arisote, in the sixth canto, in which she is the sister of the sorceress Alcina. She is presented as the disciple of Merlin. Seer and wizardess, she owns (within Avalon or the land of Faerie) a land of pleasure, a little paradise in which mankind can escape its condition. At the same time the Arthurian texts discredit her, she joins a strange historico-pagan syncretism, by being presented as the wife of Julius Caesar, and as the mother of Aubéron, the little king of Féerie.
After the Middle-Ages, the fée Morgane only mostly appears within the Breton folklore (the French-Britton folklore, of the French region of Bretagne). There, old mythical themes which inspired medieval literature are maintained alive, and keep existing well after the Middles-Ages. Morgane is given several lairs, on earth or under the sea. In the Côtes-d’Armor, there is a Terte de la fée Morgan, while a hill near Ploujean is called “Tertre Morgan”. There is an entire branch of popular literature in Bretagne (such as Charles Le Bras’ 1850 “Morgân”) where the fée represents the last survivor of a legendary land and the reminder of a forgotten past. She expresses the nostalgia of a lost dream, of a fallen Golden Age. True Romantic allegory of the lands and seas of Bretagne, she most notably embodies the feeling of a Bretagne land that was in search of its own soul.
However, it is her role of “cursed lover” that stays the most dominant within the Breton folklore. The vicomte de La Villemarqué, great collector of folktales and popular legends, noted in his “Barzaz Breiz” (1839) that the “morgan”, a type of water spirits, took at the bottom of the sea or of ponds, in palaces of gold and crystal, young people that played too close to their “haunted waters”. The goal of these fairies was to kidnap them to regenerate their cursed species. This ties the link between these “morganes” (also called “mary morgand”) and the Antique “fairy of fate”. Similar names, a same love of water, and the presence of the “land below the waves”, of a malevolent seduction – these are the permanent traits of Morgane, who keeps confusing and uniting the romantic instinct for love, and the desire for death. More modern adaptations of the legend (such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novels) weave an entire feminist fantasy around the figure of this fairy, supposed to embody the Celtic matriarchy.
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crystal--snow · 9 months
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✧ Contexte ✧
Savez-vous qui déchaîne vents et tempêtes ? Qui éclaire les cieux et les parent de mille couleurs ? Qui colore la nature au fil des saisons ? Vous les verrez peut-être, si vous essayez ... car c'est là l'œuvre des fées. Depuis la nuit des temps, contes et légendes circulent aux quatre coins du monde. Tantôt surnommée fée, nymphes ou encore dryades, ces petites créatures ailées sont connues pour apporter chance et  à quiconque en apercevait une.
En vérité, la réalité en est légèrement différente, du moins à quelques détails près. Et si je vous disais, que par-delà les océans et les Mers, loin de l'agitation de notre monde évoluait un univers parallèle au nôtre ? Un univers où les fées règnent en maîtres sur leurs destinées ? Et que non loin de là,  entourée par une forêt brumeuse et protégée par une barrière magique, s'élèvent les tours et les murs lumineux du magnifique château d'Alféa. Vieux de plusieurs milliers d'années, ce château accueille depuis sa construction les fées les plus puissantes de la Dimension Magique. Originellement destinée à former les futurs gardiens et bienfaiteurs du monde magique et non magique, Alféa se dessine alors comme le but ultime de toute une vie. Chaque année, ce sont des centaines d'yeux remplis d'espoir et de rêve qui se déposent sur ces quelques mots rédigés à l'encre dorée Bienvenue à Alféa ... C'est donc en passant le portail menant à l'université que les nouveaux élèves s'apprêtent à explorer le plein potentiel de leur propre magie; et ainsi se préparer à combattre les potentielles menaces planant sur l'Autre Monde...
Mais, il y a de cela trente ans déjà la toute jeune directrice Daphné A. fit le choix audacieux d'élargir les ambitions de l'université, et c'est ainsi que les premiers spécialistes firent leur rentrée universitaire aux côtés de leurs homologues fées. Pendant bien longtemps cette décision fut critiquée et remise en question par une majorité de la population qui refusait catégoriquement d'offrir aux spécialistes une place au cœur de la Dimension Magique. De nos jours les choses ont bien changé, les tensions semblent s'être apaisées bien que les rancœurs secrètes subsistent encore ...
Alors qu'attendez vous pour traverser le portail qui vous mènera là où votre vie commence
N'oubliez pas ... Deuxième étoile à droite et tout droit jusqu'au matin  !
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adarkrainbow · 1 year
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Fée VS Fairy
As I was writing my previous post about Dubois’ theory of the “May Queen of fairy tales”, I realized I forgot to talk here of a VERY important point that needs to be clarified if I go further into a dissection of fairy tales. 
The French “fée” is not at all the same thing as the English “fairy”.
The English word “fairy” is basically a catch-all term for every kind of supernatural entity or inhabitant of the “Otherworld” in the folklore of the British Isles. Heirs of the many species of the Aos Si, the Otherworlders (Banshees, Leprechauns, Cluricans, Pucas, Dullahans...), fairies include as much the tiny little winged female imps of Victorian poetry and the miniature flower-girls of Shakespeare, as the selkies, kelpies and black hounds of folklore. It is a very wide and complex world.
The French “fée”, while the equivalent and French translation of the English “fairy”, doesn’t mean the same thing at all. A “fée” is a much more delimited, classified, clarified type of supernatural entity. In fact, to distinguish the British “fairy” from the French “fée”, people sometime use the term “Dame Fées”, “Lady Fairy”, because the Fée is ALWAYS female (the word itself is female) and usually appears human-like (either with a few small traits to separate her from humans, or with no traits at all to distinguish her from humans - unlike the more monstrous and alien fairies). The Fée is still however a creature of magic, but rather in the sense that she is a mistress of spells and enchantments - in fact, the French “fée” is equated and confused with witches and enchantresses. They basically are otherworldy sorceresses that look human and have human desires, and yet perform inhuman feats and usually live in domains of marvel, magic or horrors. 
The French “fée” were originally the “pagan goddesses”, the “druidesses and priestesses” of the old religions and the various nymphs and female spirits said to protect or inhabited sacred areas and natural landscapes - in fact, the fées were said to inhabit or manifest always within a specific landmark: a fountain, a spring, a tree, a rock, a grotto... And in turn, as Christianity grew in France, the Church decided to cover and eradicate these “superstitions” and the “relics of paganism” by either denouncing fées as witches OR by turning fées into female saints (this notably explains the unusual approach of French people to Catholic saints, that often only exist as a cover up of a wizard or fairy). 
Taking all of this in consideration, the figure of the fairy in French fairytales (and in fairytales in general, as the French fairytales heavily influenced the genre that THEY ACTUALLY CREATED) makes much more sense. 
It is also very interesting to see that as the French fairytale genre shaped itself, it actually defined the very archetypal division of the “good fairy” and the “bad fairy” (which wasn’t a thing before, when the fées were ambiguous entities). The French fairytale introduced a manicheist moral dimension to the fée, through the two archetypes of the “Fairy Godmother” (good fairy) opposed to the “Carabosse” (evil fairy). 
Before the French fairytales of the Renaissance, in medieval times (as the Middle-Ages were THE age of fées, where the fée figure was shaped, created, popularized) there was actually a “duality” between two different types of fées - but it was not one based on morality. Across the many medieval texts, from medieval folktales to Arthurian myths, the “fée” was divided into two archetypes: the “fairy godmother” and the “fairy lover”. The “fairy godmother” is actually an anachronism, as the position of “godmother” came from the fairytales ; but it was the “fata”, the “fairy of destiny”, the fairy as the shaper of fates, deliverer of prophecies, giver of curses - the inheritor of the Moirae, Parcae and Norns. The other archetype, the “fairy lover” (la fée amante, opposed to the fée marraine) is pretty self-telling: it is the fée as a supernatural lover or a seducing woman from the otherworld. 
If you want to have a better grasp of the French fée, the medieval fée and how it evolved into the “fairytale” fée, you just need to look at the three most famous and major “medieval fées” that embody all of the archetypes and elements talked above: Morgan Le Fay and Viviane from the Arthurian myth, and Melusine the legendary half-snake bride. They are the “holy trinity” (if I dare say so) of the French fée in the Middle-Ages. 
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motsauclairedelune · 9 months
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𝓛𝓾𝓷𝓮
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sarah-ayadi · 11 months
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Toujours à la recherche de Mélusine, je termine ma première session de résidence à @moulin_boissard !
...On peut dire que Mélusine c'est un peu mon mermay 🐍+🧜‍♀️ à moi ?
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theshadowwalkers · 1 year
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The Races of Enschka - Height Chart
This was created a few months ago for the supporters on Patreon and I’m releasing it in preparation for the demo release. The announcement will come very soon! As usual, I’m always up to answer worldbuilding questions if you have any, it’s literally my favourite part of creating and writing in this universe that’s so important to me.
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