Chapter 4 examines in detail the early medieval evidence for godlings in Britain, from both Brittonic and Old English sources, dealing in turn with the main categories of folkloric beings such as fauns, elves, the various categories of supernatural women, pygmies and giants. The chapter stresses the interaction between folk belief and learned commentary, identifying biblical commentary and the work of Church Fathers such as Isidore of Seville as the main source of discussions about godlings and, perhaps, as the source of much of the folklore itself. It is the argument of the chapter that by the time of the Norman Conquest, the various elements of fairy lore were present in British popular belief but had yet to be brought together into a single synthesis. These elements included a belief in wild ‘men of the woods’ gifted with prophetic powers; belief in elves; belief in supernatural women, often in a triad, governing the fates of human beings; belief in diminutive otherworlders, sometimes living beneath the earth and belief in heroes who have somehow become supernatural beings.

Chapter 4 turns to literary descriptions of explicitly British landscapes, but to examine ideas of the “foreign at home.” I discuss here how the ballad-romances Sir Colling the Knycht, Eger and Grime, and Thomas of Erceldoune, characterized Anglo-Scottish Border landscapes via rugged topography and extreme weather, and emphasized their proximity to the otherworlds of Fairy and Hell. In particular, I argue that these texts anthropomorphize non-human environmental forces as fairy adversaries, and in the process conflate contemporary ecological, economic, and political anxieties. I also examine how these topics get developed in the early modern ballads that are based on some of these romances, explaining how song-texts persist in communicating some of these same ideas regarding Scottish and northern English landscapes to later audiences. This chapter, then, allows me to consider how the issues I raise throughout the book form an important influence upon postmedieval understandings of human relationships with local and global landscapes.