Illustration by Emily Taylor
Sylfia is the most fairy-like creature in the Honey Mountain story.
I say that because her description suggests every expected feature of fairyness.
“ She was the most beautiful butterfly fairy they had ever seen. She had long silver hair and her grey eyes sparkled like diamonds. Her shy smile was so sweet that no one could fail to fall in love with her.”
At the beginning of the story, she seems too ephemeral to have an adventure, too timid, too shy, to delicate but, as the story progresses, she accepts a succession of challenges and makes steady progress (a bit of teacher-speak creeping in there) towards the status of hero.
She witnesses a kidnap and then falls from the sky after accidentally bumping into a flittermouse. She identifies the kidnappers in scary mugshots and joins the group of friends on their journey to rescue Pim. She has a terrifying experience when she is captured by a whacky witch, tends devotedly to the injured Flum, goes bravely into the hive to whisper to the bees and, at the end of the story, she flies out with the rescuers in the teeth of a storm to pluck her friends from the sea and take them to safety.
You’ve got to admire such a fragile, timid little thing, a stranger from another region who leaves her home near the coast to visit a forest and then goes adventuring through other strange terrains, ending up inside a mountain in danger of all sorts of unpleasant consequences! No wonder the witch identified her most vulnerable characteristic as home-sickness and played on it with some success.
I have to say that until I made that list I didn’t myself realise just how much Sylfia had contributed to the adventure. It dawned on me then just how busy and important she was throughout. Fancy that! And I’m the one who wrote it!
