I was working on my BOS and researching stuff about the Poetic Edda and other Norse poems. I then decided to research the Fae and found out that they have their own language. Is that true? Does the Fae really have their own language?
It would help if you cited your sources: who expressed these ideas, what qualifies them, and in what context. And of course, how it compares to your own experiences.
The way I sense the Fae is telepathically and empathically. In that sense, everything that I say so-and-so fae "said" is a translation from those ideas and into spoken or written language.
Not everything translates, though, so sometimes I have to make up words or rearrange conventional grammar. I might as well be speaking a different language, to "translate" from spiritual to physical, but the physical form of the language isn't theirs. Probably isn't theirs, entirely. It's not entirely something I just made up either, except that it kind of has to be?
I stumbled onto a website that specifically mentions the Fae language, it was this link: http://www.darkages.com/community/lore/Whisper_Fae_Abc.html
My brother told me about the Fae several years ago. I just remembered, and wanted to know more about them.
If you truncate a URL, you'd usually be able to see in what context that it's written in. The URL that you provided, for example, shows that it's part of a multiplayer online gaming website called Dark Ages. That Fae language is the lore of Temuair, the fictional world, and claims to mix Hermeticism with tarot, runes (that I don't actually see the Norse of), and... English, apparently English text speak, to produce the Fae language.
I'll put my occult cred on the line here and say that just because it's for a fiction doesn't necessarily make it inapplicable to magical practice. I like J.M. Barrie's fairy lore an awful lot, while I don't believe that fae are the creations of the laughter of small children, I can believe in the musical quality of the language. That his Neverland has been misconcepted in modern times to be closer in description to Tir Nan Og, is pretty cool. I take that to mean that stories have a shape of their own, that can be an avenue for spiritual gnosis. It's still fiction, though--in the case of Peter Pan it's classist, racist fiction; a true product of its time, just like a lot of mythology . That's my argument for fictional reconstructionism and pop culture paganism.
But, I don't know... this particular setup is a little too deliberated and cerebral for me to see much use for it? Then again, it's not like I had the patience to learn Enochian or anything, which is an angelic language probably made by a similar process. If you love Hermeticism then it just might work for you, and maybe something that calls itself Fae would respond; but it's not for me and my fae because I follow Yeats and Keightley as folklorists.
In my opinion, you'd probably hit closer to what you're looking for learning Tolkien's Tengwar or Sindarin (elvish languages.) (Still fictional, take that as you will.)
The Fae are Celtic spirits, not Scandinavian. Please don't mix them up unless you are an eclectic Celtic/Norse Pagan or something to that effect.
I forget which poem cites this, but the individual races of spirits in (at least) Icelandic lore do have their own languages. However, it isn't really delved into beyond that unless you go into personal experience.
According to Keightley, the Fae are French, probably Roman/Italian, and only became Celtic through a quirk in (human) language whereby "fae" replaced the Icelandic/Germanic-English "elf" and for a while the two were used interchangeably, so I'd taken syncretism as a given.
Of course, I agree that the lore around the Tuatha de Danann are miles away from Icelandic elves.
There's was nothing that replaced Alfar in Icelandic language except in English translations where Fae has errenously been applied to Alfar, Dvergar, Jotnar, and the like. While there are similarities to the idea of an Alfr and the idea of a Faery, I would not say they are the same. It would be like comparing a Titan, a Jotunn, and a Tartalo simply because of their larger statures.
ahh no, no, no, I meant that according to Keightley, Fae is a newer word to English than Elf and the former replaced the latter in popular usage. So, the way to refer to probably animistic spirits used to be Elf before Fae got into the vocabulary of English. So sorry for the confusion!
While there are similarities to the idea of an Alfr and the idea of a Faery, I would not say they are the same. It would be like comparing a Titan, a Jotunn, and a Tartalo simply because of their larger statures.
I agree, cultural context is very important to consider. However, if you get personal gnosis or metaphysical experiences involving a Very Big Spiritual Creature, then how would you know what to call it (Jotun, Titan, Tartalo, Annuaki, giant?) without knowing which earthly region it's associated with, or even if it's not associated with any earthly region or culture? That's not a rhetorical question, by the way: "cultural appropriation" and "just a language to refer to the same entity in metaphysics" are two ideas that I struggle to balance a lot. The best real-life example I've read was if a German-speaking person refers to a tree as "baum" and an English speaking person calls it a "tree", the thing is still the same.
