In case you were wondering:

[xiphias]

Fairies can travel at Mach 49.

Data and assumptions:

In Act II, Scene 1 of Midsummer Night's Dream, when sent on a mission by Oberon, Puck says that he will "put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes."

Now, as a girdle goes around the widest point of a person, we can assume that Puck is saying that he can do an equatorial circumnavigation of the Earth in 40 minutes. The equatorial circumference of the earth is pretty darned close to 24900 miles, or 40075 km. (The polar circumference is 40036, by the way. They attempted to define the kilometer as 1/10000 the distance from the equator to the pole, but some error crept in, and they didn't hit it quite. Still, as an off-the-cuff number to remember, "40000 km circumference" is a fine approximation.)

24900 in 40 min is 37350 mph, which is just about Mach 49. Therefore, fairies can travel at Mach 49 sustained for forty minutes.

Comments

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Turtles, on the other hand, can only travel at the speed of sound.

Oh, and can I metaquotes you?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Feel free, although I think this is a trivial enough calculation that I don't know why people would be interested.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Just because it's fun :)

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

And here

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

IIRC, Puck never has occasion to travel that fast during the play, so we don't know if fairy sonic booms are a problem. Or, of course, he might be boasting, but that wouldn't be any fun.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

My assumption is that he goes incorporeal in order to go that fast, so that there isn't a sonic boom problem.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

I suspect that Puck might not always consider a sonic boom a "problem". :)

[cellio]

C'mon, Puck is craftier than that. He wouldn't make a promise like that unless he'd already done 90% of the work. :-)

[michele-blue.livejournal.com]

That makes fairies a LOT more interesting.

[navrins]

You're assuming Shakespeare is an authoritative source. We know that a lot of what Shakespeare put in the mouth of Richard III, for example, has no basis in historical reality. It seems naive to assume that everything he puts in the mouth of Puck is exactly, literally, what Puck actually said.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well -- that's what the Richard III society says, anyway. The problem is that, when you look at the facts -- Tricky Dick is probably a bit more like the guy in the play than the Richard III society would like people to think. . .

(He did have the Princes in the Tower killed, for instance. Oh, I don't have enough evidence to absolutely prove it in court, if Richard had a good enough lawyer, but I'm convinced.)

[(Anonymous)]

No one killed the Princes in the Tower; that's just Tudor propaganda from after the fairly short reign of Richard IV. The BBC had a whole thing on it in the early 80's.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The bodies were found in 1674. Oh, sure, the Richard III folks have TRIED to claim that those weren't REALLY the bodies, but their arguments have never sounded too convincing to me.

See, the Princes disappeared. No bodies were produced, and they were never heard from again. What happened to them?

That suggests that they were dead, and, the fact that no bodies were produced and no explanation was provided for their death suggests that they were murdered. Later, bodies that looked like they could have been the Princes were found in a reasonable location for the Princes' bodies to have been disposed of. That seems to confirm the hypothesis.

Therefore, I am convinced that they were murdered.

Richard was the only person who significantly benefited from their death. It would be possible to figure out other suspects for the murder, but it seems to me that Richard had the best means, motive, and opportunity.

The arguments against this have always struck me as rather thin.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

GIGO. You're basing your calculations on the tales of the guildmaster of liars... :)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Puck, or Shakespeare?

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Do you the Puck a liar call?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Of course not! That would be foolish.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

I always thought a "girdle round about the earth" would be up in the air a bit, not at sea level - which would after all, require a lot of going through the earth (well mountains anyway, and anything above sea level); not that Puck couldn't do that, if he goes incoporeal to avoid the sonic boom... but it's certainly not consistent with the image presented.

Also, it might be going a bit too far to assume that all fairies can reach a specific speed based on a single data point, especially when the fairy in question has made so many boasts about his own prowess in relation to other fairies. Humans can't all run at the same speed, why should fairies (who seem to vary a great deal more than humans).

So I'd say that Puck can go at least Mach 49 (but maybe faster if he does an airborn girdle); and other fairies can probably break the sound barrior and then some, even if they can't match Puck's speed.

And all of this, of course, assumes that Midsummer Night's Dream is a good source - which really can't be proven one way or another.

Kiralee

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

Puck can travel at Mach 49. Puck isn't a fairy, though. He's a woodland sprite.

[rebmommy.livejournal.com]

Please explain the difference between these beings. I would like to know just who is living in our garden.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

As with anything in mythology, of course, the answer depends upon whom you ask. I would tend to say that, as Shakespeare probably thought of them, fairies typically have wings, and are sometimes invisible and sometimes give off light and other magical stuff depending upon the legend. Woodland sprites, OTOH, typically are elflike creatures that come from or are somehow magically tied to the trees.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

*pictures Puck, tied to a tree*