Name: Guide to Sleigh's Faerie-Land
Author: Bernard Sleigh

Ex Carta

Sleigh’s companion pamphlet explains the Anciente Map, identifying its forests, castles, and borders between mythic kingdoms. It functions as both commentary and gazetteer, extending literary cartography into playful pseudo-scholarship.

Bernard Sleigh (1872–1954) grew up in Birmingham, an industrial heartland of England, and was ‘indelibly inspired after seeing Peter Pan performed on stage’. He was also profoundly influenced by William Morris’s aesthetic vision and left school at the age of fourteen to take an apprenticeship as a wood engraver. This led to work on projects including Arthur Gaskin’s (1862–1928) edition of Stories & Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen (1893), as well as work for such popular periodicals of the age such as The Yellow Book and The Studio.

Building on his 1909 pictorial map, An Anciente Map of Faerie-Land, Sleigh’s iconic Fairyland panorama might seem an unlikely creation in 1917, its shimmering Arts and Crafts fantasy emerging at the height of the Great War. Yet such engagement with the supernatural proliferated during this period of existential crisis. In the same year, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) publicly endorsed the authenticity of the ‘Cottingley fairies’ photographs, while Arthur Machen’s (1863–1947) story ‘The Bowmen’ contributed to the emergence of the ‘Angels of Mons’ legend, which imagined supernatural assistance being granted to British troops. Like Conan Doyle – whose claims on the subject he supported – Sleigh’s interest in fairy lore was not solely artistic. In the 1890s he was treated for an inner-ear abscess by trepanning – a hole being drilled in his skull. This resulted in Sleigh experiencing ‘sudden, overpowering, colour visions’ and what seemed to be encounters with other realms of existence, which he explained in psychic terms. Sleigh’s belief in other worlds was literal, despite being visually expressed by him using the traditional cultural framework of the fairy tale.

Published by Sidgwick & Jackson, An Anciente Map of Faerie-Land was issued with a sixteen-page explanatory booklet, A Guide to the Map of Fairyland, which offered readers a key to the multitude of literary, folkloric, and mythical references depicted. The list includes several personages, items, and locations present elsewhere in this collection: Asgard, the Holy Grail, Peter Pan, and Never Never Land.