NORTHROP FRYE AND THE CHILDREN OF NATURE

The characters who elude the moral antithesis of heroism and villainy (in the epic genres, ie chivalric romance, high fantasy, space opera...) generally are or suggest spirits of nature. They represent partly the moral neutrality of the intermediate world of nature and partly a world of mystery which is glimpsed but never seen, and which retreats when approached. Among female characters of this type are the shy nymphs of Classical legends and the elusive half-wild creatures who might be called daughter-figures, and include Spenser's Florimell, Hawthorne's Pearl, Wagner's Kundry, and Hudson's Rima. Their male counterparts have a little more variety. Kipling's Mowgli is the best known of the wild boys; a green man lurked in the forests of medieval England, appearing as Robin Hood and as the green knight of Gawain's adventure; the "savage man," represented in Spenser by Satyrane, is a Renaissance favorite, who, awkward but faithful with unkempt hair, has shambled amiably through the epic genres for centuries (I might like, decades after Frye, recognise him all the way from Sumerian Enkidu to 20th-century Wookiees like the most famous Chewbacca! Probably this character was born already in the Ice Age, as a result of the first Sapiens-Neanderthal reports).

Such characters are, more or less, children of nature, who can be brought to serve the hero/ine, like Enkidu or Friday, but retain the inscrutability of their origin. As servants or friends, they impart the mysterious rapport with nature that so often marks the central figure of epic (chivalric romance, high fantasy, space opera...). The paradox that many of these children of nature are "supernatural" beings is not as distressing in the epic genres as in logic. The helpful fairy, the grateful dead, the wonderful servant who has just the abilities the hero/ine needs in a crisis, are all folk tale commonplaces. They are epic intensifications of the comic tricky slave (ie the servus currens of Plautine comedy), the author's architectus. In James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks this character type is called the "Golux," and there is no reason why the word should not be adopted as a critical term.

... In the nature-spirits just referred to we find the parallel in epic to the buffoon or master of ceremonies in comedy: that is, their function is to intensify and provide a focus for the chivalric mood. 


(Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. p. 196)