The Reign of King Oberon

Here are some more stories from the wonderful Annals of Fairyland. How they were first told at the Court of King Oberon, and how they came to be recorded you will learn at the beginning, and much as you love the little people you will, I think, like them even better when you have learned all that this volume has to tell. Mr William Canton has told you the stories properly belonging to “The Reign of King Herla,” Mr J. M. Gibbon showed you how a famous merry old soul and his court found entertainment in story-telling in “The Reign of King Cole,” and now it is my pleasant privilege to put before you, from the inexhaustible Annals, those tales which properly belong to “The Reign of King Oberon.”

Of course you may have already met some of these stories before, for most of our best writers have been made free of Fairyland and have written of the wonderful things they learned there; Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm have long since been famous for all that they have told of their visits to the marvellous land, and some of the stories which they brought back will be found to belong to the reign of Oberon and Titania, while others have been told by Ben Jonson, by Thomas Hood, by Charles Perrault, by Thomas Crofton Croker, by Douglas Jerrold, by Benjamin Thorpe and by Sir George Dasent—but old or new all have the perennial youthfulness of the fairies themselves, and as long as we can truly enjoy them we shall not grow old. In all the annals of Fairyland nothing is more wonderful—and the annals are found in many hundreds of volumes—than that chapter which tells of the reign of the true fairy King Oberon and his beautiful wife Titania, who is sometimes called Queen Mab. Marvellous are the doings of Oberon’s little subjects in every land—good fairies and bad fairies, dwarfs, elves and sprites, brownies, pixies and gnomes, pucks, trolls and kobolds and Robin Goodfellow—and marvellous are the tales which have been told of them by travellers in the fairy realms. Now, once upon a time there was sadness throughout the whole kingdom of Oberon—and his kingdom has no boundaries—because of a quarrel which had arisen between the king and the queen. It was a very small matter to begin with, but the king was a king and did not think it consorted with his dignity as such that his will should not be law, while the lovely Queen Titania thought that even the powerful king of the fairies should give way to her wishes. A small Indian prince, a dusky child, son of a mighty monarch of the East, had been stolen and a fairy baby left in its place and King Oberon wanted the changeling to be one of the knights of his train, while Queen Titania insisted on keeping him as one of her pages. Long and bitter was the quarrel but neither king nor queen would give way, and at length they parted and half the fairies marched off under the banner of the king and half under the banner of the queen. Now you know of course that it was the fairies that looked after all things, the flowers and the trees, the streams and lakes, the little birds and beasts, and even—though they might not be aware of it—after the doings of many men and women; thus when it befel that their king and queen quarrelled and all the fairies rallied to their separate courts everything was neglected: the corn died unripened, the grass withered in the fields, so that the flocks and herds starved, the summers were cold and wet, the winters were sickly and mild, and many good men, women and children lost their tempers and became troublesome and unhappy they knew not why, and certainly never imagined that it was all because of a quarrel between the rulers of the world-wide kingdom of Fairy.