Fulfilling a request from my cats ... of the faery kind .......

    Some of my Cats have got together and left me a note, tied with a mouse tail; requesting a Cat / Faery feature so that they may admire it next time they thumb through this blog.
   Not a common-or-garden 'witchy-cat' entry, but something to underline the fact that they are magick in their own right!

Here is the crew in question - from left Mister Bojangles, Mitzel, FlorenceFlo and Jimmy

    So here, I have done my best - searching my collections for a poem from the mistress of faery-poetry Rose Fyleman, that you may not know ....  and some of the very best work from the 'fairy-artists' without a witch or a booted-puss in sight ......

Timothy

My cat Timothy who has such lovely eyes

Is really not a cat at all; it's only a disguise,

A witch cast a spell on him a long time since

And changed him to a pussy-cat; but once he was a Prince.

Illustration from Eila Mackenzie's 'The Cat & the Fairy' by Margaret Tarrant 1937

On warm clear nights when a big moon is out

he steps into the garden and never turns about,

But walks down the path with his quiet proud air -

He knows that the fairies are waiting there.

From the Tomten Tales by brilliant Swedish artist Harald Wiberg 1965

The fairies go a-dancing, a-dancing in a ring,

He sits in the middle with a crown like a king,

High on a throne in the middle of the grass,

And the fairies stop capering to curtsey as they pass.

'Cat among the Fairies' John Anster Fitzgerald c1864

Some day, some day, when the spell is done

He will be a Prince again. Won't that be fun?

He will come to seek me and kiss my lily hand

And take me on his foaming steed to reign in fairyland.

Rose Fyleman

first published 1921

From 'Catskill Fairies' written & illustrated by Virginia Johnson 1876

   I couldn't resist one little 'witchy black cat' though, sorry cat tribe! From the master himself - Arthur Rackham, a tiny illustration from the margins of 'Sleeping Beauty', published by Heineman in 1920.

  If you like to know about the cat / faery relationship, my cats have also published a 'Cat Full Moon Names' list - you can find it at the bottom of the page, here on my website.

 Plenty to see of the English Folklore Traditions kind for this month of May, over on the main Muddypond Diaryblog.