ABSTRACT
The theme of the fairy mistress, the other world woman, a human lover, demonstrates a Celtic mythological motif in medieval romance. The fairy mistress explores the fear of domesticity, of loss of masculinity, of the knightly honour, underpinned by general ecclesiastical mistrust of women and Church's elision of the female with the diabolical. It contradicts medieval romance that the project of medieval fantasy is to give assurance of transcendence, order and consolation for the trials of the knightly hero. Following the Celtic story, medieval fairy mistress's fall into two types, the woman who comes to the human world to marry or be with her lover, epitomized by the fairy Mélusinan tales, and the woman who takes a human away into another world, the type of Morgan le Fay. The fairy mistress may, at first sight, straightforwardly escapes fantasy in which immediately pressing problems solved at a stroke by a transcendent power.
