Not so awfully long ago, as the stars, who created
time, tell it, the Fair People withdrew from the Old
World (which they called the Middle Kingdom),
migrating across the Ocean Sea to dwell in the hills
and forests of the New Found Land.
The first to set foot on its shore (if he said so himself,
in the saga he often sang) was Ruddy Alf, a copper-
haired Sea-Troll of Nortland. It was he, he bragged,
who left Scandia to brave alone the teeth of the Hell-
hounds at sheer cliff’s lip of the flat Earth’s edge; he
the hero who pressed a single print from his rein-
deerhide boots on the beach there, and he who came
back to harp on it.
Next, or simultaneously, or (to hear his kin and
clan tell of it) years and years before, was Brandan,
a Leprechaun from Kerry, who zigzagged all the
way from the tip of the Dingle to the Brave New
World in a sealskin canoe, with naught but poteen
for provender.
But most of the Fair People deemed the exploits
of Alf and Brandan to be mere myth (even
Legends, it seems, look down on legends) and at-
tributed the Discovery of the New Found Land to
the Italian fairy Colon Savanelli, an intrepidly
nautical Folleto out of Genoa.
Savanelli had been commissioned by the Queen