Sprite

A woman leans on her churn in the grey of the morning, arms aching, and works the dasher until her breath runs short, and the cream slaps and sloshes and refuses to turn. No butter comes. In the village she would have blamed the weather or the cow. In a wood outside Athens that Shakespeare stocked with English hedgerows, a fairy knows exactly whom to blame, and says so to his face: either she has mistaken his shape and making entirely, or he is that shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow, the one who frightens village girls, skims the milk, spoils the churning and leads night walkers astray and laughs at them.

That line is worth reading twice, because of what the word is doing in it. She is not naming a species. She is naming a reputation and sticking a label on it. Sprite, in English, has always been a label.

The word came first. It arrives around 1300 as sprit, a variant of spirit, carried in through Old French esprit from the Latin spiritus, whose first meaning is breath. In Middle English it covered an unruly spread of things: breath itself, the principle of life, the Holy Ghost, the mind and intellect, a person’s character or mood or will. By the middle of the fourteenth century it had taken on the sense that stuck, an immaterial being of any kind, angel or demon, elf or fairy, apparition or ghost. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was often spelled spright, and that spelling is gone now except inside sprightly, which since the 1590s has meant full of spirit, brisk, quick on its feet.

So a sprite could be the dead as easily as the fairy. Shakespeare uses it both ways. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck’s closing speech has the graves gaping wide at midnight and every one letting forth its sprite to glide along the church-way paths. In The Winter’s Tale a small boy, asked for a story, decides that a sad tale is best for winter and offers one of sprites and goblins. The word is the same. The creature underneath it is whatever the speaker needs.

Spenser needed demons. Early in The Faerie Queene the enchanter Archimago sits over his magic books and calls up out of deep darkness legions of sprights, which flutter about his head like little flies. He picks the two falsest of them. One he sends down to Morpheus, the god of sleep, to fetch a false dream that will deceive a sleeping knight. The second he keeps back and works on with his arts until it has taken the likeness of Una, the lady the knight has sworn to protect, so that the knight will see her false and ride away. Here the sprite has no nature of its own at all. It is raw material, cheap and plentiful, and it takes whatever shape a stronger will presses into it.

The shrinking happened in the theatre and on the page, and it can be dated. Mercutio’s Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet is no bigger than an agate stone on an alderman’s forefinger, drawn by a team of little atomies, with wagon spokes of spiders’ legs and a cover of grasshoppers’ wings. Titania’s quarrel in the Dream frightens her elves so badly that they creep into acorn cups to hide. Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia of 1627 took the joke as far as it would go. Oberon’s palace has walls of spiders’ legs and windows of cats’ eyes and a roof of bat skins gilded with moonshine, and the fairy knight Pigwiggen rides an earwig to court and sends Queen Mab a bracelet of emmets’ eyes, with an assignation in a cowslip.

Then Alexander Pope gave the sprite wings. When he expanded The Rape of the Lock in 1714 he added a whole invisible cast of sylphs, borrowed, as he told Arabella Fermor in his dedicatory letter, from a French book called Le Comte de Gabalis, in which the four elements are peopled by Sylphs, Gnomes, Nymphs and Salamanders. His chief sylph introduces himself to the sleeping Belinda as a watchful sprite, and Ariel is his name. Pope used the two words as one. Some of the sylphs unfold insect wings to the sun and waft on the breeze; when the moment of danger comes, a thousand sprites rush to the lock of hair and a thousand wings blow it back out of harm’s way.

They were still only words until Thomas Stothard illustrated the poem in 1798 and gave the sylphs butterfly wings. He may not have been quite the first artist to put wings on a fairy, but he was prominent and the poem was loved, and his picture is the one the next century copied. Katharine Briggs, the great cataloguer of English fairy lore, noted how rare wings are in genuine folk tradition, where fairies flew by magic, sometimes astride ragwort stems or on the backs of birds. The diminishing came at a price. Diane Purkiss observed that shrinking the other to miniature makes it manageable and then laughable, and Carole Silver traced how, as the elfin peoples became staples of children’s books, people came to think of them as childish too. The winged, hand-high sprite is poetry and engraving. The older sprite is a dead man on a church path, or a demon wearing a lady’s face.

What a sprite can do follows from what the word always meant. Breath goes where it likes. A sprite can be sent across the world in a night, can carry a dream into a sleeper’s head, can take on a borrowed shape convincing enough to fool a knight of Holiness, and can be everywhere in a room without anyone seeing it. It is very hard to injure. When the Baron closes the shears on Belinda’s lock, a sylph flings itself between the blades and is cut clean in two, and Pope adds, almost with a shrug, that airy substance soon unites again.

The weakness comes from the same place. Something made of breath has very little grip on the world. Spenser’s sprights belong to whoever summoned them. Ariel, for all his watchfulness, can only warn: at the crucial moment he looks into Belinda’s heart, finds an earthly lover lurking there, and gives up, resigned to fate, and withdraws with a sigh. The sprite can guard, tease, deceive and haunt. It cannot decide anything. Every sprite in the English record is waiting on a human will, a churn, a spell or a pair of scissors, before anything actually happens.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a sprite?

A sprite is an English word for a spirit of the lesser kind, used over the centuries for ghosts, fairies, demons and airy guardian spirits alike. It is a general label rather than the name of one creature. Shakespeare calls both the wandering dead and the trickster Robin Goodfellow sprites.

Where does the word sprite come from?

Sprite entered English around 1300 as sprit, a variant of spirit, taken from Old French esprit and ultimately from Latin spiritus, meaning breath. By the mid-14th century it could mean any immaterial being, including angels, demons, elves, fairies and ghosts. The old spelling spright survives in the word sprightly.

Do sprites have wings?

Not in the older record. Alexander Pope gave his sylphs, which he also calls sprites, insect wings in the 1714 Rape of the Lock, and Thomas Stothard’s 1798 illustrations of the poem gave them butterfly wings. Katharine Briggs noted that wings are rare in folk tradition, where fairies flew by magic.

Is Puck a sprite?

Yes. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream a fairy identifies Puck as “that shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow.” The same speech credits him with skimming milk, spoiling the churning and leading night travellers astray.

What is the difference between a sprite and a sylph?

A sylph is specifically a spirit of the air in the scheme of four elemental spirits that Pope took from the French book Le Comte de Gabalis. A sprite is the broader English word, and Pope uses it for his sylphs too: his chief sylph, Ariel, calls himself “a watchful sprite.”

Related Entries

Puck, Atomy, Hobgoblin, Brownie, Pixie, Spriggan, Fairy, Elf, Ghost, Water sprite, Sylph, Gnome, Undine, Salamander, Nymph