In ‘The Blameless Triangle’, for example, we follow a group of fairies who have little value in their German home kingdom of Wirre Gedanken, as they leave to wander among humans. In this they are not unlike the Grimm Brothers’ tale of the Musicians of Bremen, four downtrodden creatures, a donkey, a rooster, a cat and a dog, who win for themselves a home through solidarity, courage and guile. In contrast, Warner’s ‘discards’ — Ludo, Moor, Tinkel, Nimmerlein and Banian — search for a place where they might engage in the ‘Socratic scrabbling’ (44) which they have come to enjoy after their abandonment by their court, a place where they might follow the ‘wish to meditate’ which ‘took hold of them’ (45). They find a ‘disused chapel on a lonely hillside’ which is ‘dirty and cluttered with Christian odds and ends’ (46–47), but which would do. In the Grimms’ template of the story, finding this refuge would be the ending, the rejects having found a home, but Warner makes this their new beginning. We see the Brotherhood of the Blameless Triangle learn to meet their daily material needs, squabble Socratically, inadvertently cause the death of a priest who comes to exorcise their occupation of the church, and travel through south-eastern Europe where they observe human activities. ‘Once, alighting in a park, they found a burned-out mansion and a row of impaled cadavers tottering on a fence’. But lest we think that this is a principled indictment, a little further on ‘they saw the country-side grow calm, well tilled, prosperous, coloured by the blue-green of poppy fields’ (53). Their new host, the local governor Mustafa Ibrahim Bey, is proud of acquiring some fairies for his needs, and ‘he had thought of having their wings torn out. Common sense prevailed; none of them showed the slightest inclination to fly away, so why go to extremes?’ (62). However, such stereotypical cruelties of the East are here as unreliable as anything else in this fickle world, for Ludo cannot bear to leave this place where ‘“for the first time in my life I have lived in comfort without fearing and scheming”’ (63). In turn, the Governor longs for a friend, ‘“a disinterested European friend, the real article”’, and is delighted by Ludo’s decision, and the story ends in a way that no reader could have foreseen at the beginning. It is also one in which the ethics of the solution are kept coolly out of the picture.