Faery Tale Read Free Page A

describes, as well as urns that stored grains and foodstuffs—in such great quantity that historians concluded the inhabitants were trying to store up for years while their walled city was under siege.
    In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth paid ten thousand pounds—about the cost of an entire castle—for a unicorn horn. I kid you not. Ancient Greek natural-history writers had begun describing the creature as early as the fifth century BC. Soon thereafter, writings chronicling the discovery of this mythical beast could be found across the world, from China and Japan to the streets of Israel in texts from the Old Testament. By the sixteenth century, the existence of unicorns was so generally accepted that the average medieval person would have been able to speculate on a unicorn’s height, weight, and even their diet. It wasn’t until later in human history that we discovered these sea creatures called narwhals with proboscises that look suspiciously similar to the horn of the fabled unicorn. But by then, the hunting and trading of the narwhal tusk had allowed the myth of the unicorn to thrive for centuries. Queen Elizabeth would have been none too pleased, I imagine, to learn she’d forked over the price of a castle for a mere whale tusk.
    As time passes and we continue to find empirical evidence of the various truths that underlie myth, I continue to wonder if the whole idea of faeries couldn’t somehow fit into a similar equation.
    That faeries were a part of my imaginary world growing up was not surprising. As a professor at Cornell University, my father nourished me and my older sister with Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, and pretty much any other magical, swashbuckling tale from his meticulously alphabetized library (or the depths of his fanciful imagination). There were make-believe games and long walks in the woods, where he’d tell us tales of trolls, giants, brave Native Americans, or the Greek gods with their water nymphs and torrid affairs. At playtime I’d imagine I could talk to the faeries, that I could see them flying around our vegetable garden on little transparent wings. The highlight of my after-school career was playing Wendy in Peter Pan , sporting a bright blue flannel nightgown my mother bought me at Woolworths. I was devastated that Tinker Bell could despise me.
    Our family wasn’t particularly religious in any traditional sense, which is probably why, as an adult, I didn’t feel so weird taking an interest in the truth behind the existence of magical beings. In fact, for me, “religion” boiled down to conversations with God in the bathroom.
    It sounds bizarre, I’m sure, but I began to associate God and bathrooms when I was in third and fourth grades, in the years when my parents were constantly arguing, or when my father, beet red on a Tuesday morning, yelled at me for leaving my shoes in the middle of the living-room floor or for not drinking all of my orange juice. In those days, I was in tears most mornings before breakfast. I don’t delight in describing my father this way; he was an exceptional man. He could quote Chaucer at length in Middle English. He taught us to swim, ski, hike, rock climb, survive in the wilderness. But my father possessed a deep-seated frustration that seemed to eat at him. Disappointment simmered in a vat somewhere beneath his skin until it erupted explosively in terrible bouts of anger. More than anything, Alan Pike wanted to be a great American novelist. Stories lived in him—hauntingly broken tales about Tibetan Longumpas and lone explorers, and he wove them aloud from time to time for friends over a glass of whiskey. But he never put a single word to paper. He couldn’t.
    When you have a gift and you stifle it, it will consume you. My father tried to force it down by smoking marijuana, by drinking double Gibsons with extra onions, you know, just enough to take the edge off. And at