Quote:
Originally Posted by lwcamp
Some reading I was doing touches on this. In the Eddas, by the act of murdering the god Kvasir, some treacherous dwarfs managed to brew the god's blood into a mead that gave poetry to the world, where previously it had been absent. In this way, these fae were not only creative, but responsible for the birth of one of the arts celebrated by mankind.
It is worth mentioning, though, that the only reason poetry reached mankind was because the dwarfs were forced to pay the mead as weregild, and eventually it ended up in the hands of the gods who doled it out to men at their whim.
There were also the muses. Part fae, part divine (with the Greek myths, there was never an obvious divide), they were the very genesis of creativity for mortal artists.
Chiron was also noted as a fine musician. Pan, of course, invented the pan pipes.
Luke
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I don't see how we could call the muses 'fae', though they had some mythic role in common. They were divinities. Pan looks a little closer, though.
On balance, though, I'm not sure Classical Civilization even had a concept like 'fae', as such. Centaurs, river gods, etc., yeah, but the context was rather different than what we think with the word 'fae', though modern Westerners sometimes throw in entities from Classical belief, like fawns and centaurs, with the fae in fiction.]
The 'context' that we think of as fae seems to be a specific element of Western Civilization, derived in much from northern Germanic ideas and reshaped by contact with Christianity.
Most of the Germanic languages of northern Europe have, or once had before it was displaced by the English import, a word that is cognate with 'elf', and that carries some of the contexts of what we call 'the fae'. If we can trust our very limited sources on the matter, the pre-Christian Germanic peoples seem to have made a distinction of some kind between gods and fae, too.