Fairy

• 1. Introduction

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  Fairies have haunted the human imagination for centuries. They are blamed for tuberculosis, for stolen babies, for travelers lost in bogs following ghostly lights. A farmer in Scotland might leave his corn unmilled rather than risk offending the creatures he believed worked his mill at night. A road in Scotland sat unwidened for seventy years because a single thorn tree stood in the way, and no one dared cut it down.

  The word itself descends from Latin fata, meaning fate, arriving through Old French as faerie, a term for a being in the form of a beautiful woman who could shape human destinies by magic. From that root came an entire taxonomy of supernatural life: sprites, elves, gnomes, the Seelie Court of Scotland, the Tuatha De Danann of Ireland, the diwata of the Philippines. What binds them together, and where did they come from? The answers are as contradictory as the creatures themselves.

• 2. Where They Came From

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  Barthélemy d'Herbelot and other historians traced one thread of fairy lore to the peris of pre-Islamic Persia, winged nature spirits mentioned as far back as the Achaemenid Empire and later described in detail in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. These beings were fair, beautiful, and extravagant. Whether they reached European folklore through migratory contact or through a shared Proto-Indo-European mythology remains an open question.

  Christian theology offered its own account. One story held that during an angelic revolt, God shut the gates of heaven; the angels still inside remained angels, those in hell became demons, and those caught between became fairies. King James I, in his Daemonologie, defined "faries" as illusory demonic spirits that prophesied to and transported the people they served. A 17th-century Reformed Church tradition went further, classifying all fairies as demons outright, which recast even the formerly friendly hobgoblin as a wicked creature.

  The folklorist tradition produced different explanations altogether. Some scholars proposed that fairies were the unworthy dead, drawing on the fact that the Irish word for fairy mounds, sídhe, also named ancient burial grounds. Diane Purkiss observed that fairies were equated with the untimely dead, those who left "unfinished lives". One tale told of a man among the fairies who found that, when he looked steadily at any of them, each appeared as a dead neighbor.

  The most important modern advocate of a fourth theory, that fairies descended from folk memories of a defeated prehistoric people, was the Scottish folklorist David MacRitchie. His case rested partly on 19th-century archaeological discoveries of underground rooms in the Orkney islands that resembled the Elfland described in the ballad Childe Rowland, and on the tradition of cold iron as a charm against fairies, which he read as a cultural memory of iron-armed invaders displacing Stone Age peoples.

• 3. Fluid Shapes, Fixed Fears

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  On Orkney, fairies were described as short in stature, dressed in dark grey, and sometimes seen in armour. In some folklore they had green eyes. Wings, now inseparable from the modern image, are nearly absent from historical accounts; fairies flew by magic, sometimes sitting on ragwort stems or on the backs of birds. The Victorian era introduced dragonfly and butterfly wings into illustration, and the image shrank accordingly.

  This diminishment was not accidental. Andrew Lang, in his 1910 introduction to The Lilac Fairy Book, complained bitterly about "the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms," writing that "these fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed." What had once been creatures capable of causing tuberculosis and stealing newborns had, for Victorian children's literature, been prettified into garden ornaments.

  Before that transformation, fairy sickness was a genuine fear. Consumption, now called tuberculosis, was sometimes attributed to fairies who forced young men and women to dance at revels every night until they wasted away from exhaustion. Any form of sudden death might be explained as a fairy kidnapping, the corpse left behind seen as a magical replica made of wood. Children born with abnormalities were commonly said to be changelings, fairy substitutes left in place of a stolen human infant. In pre-industrial Europe, where a family's survival depended on the labor of every member, a child who could not work was a genuine crisis, and the changeling explanation carried a grim practical weight.

• 4. Wards and Weapons

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  Church bells, four-leaf clovers, rowan trees, and clothing worn inside out were all regarded as protection against fairies. In Newfoundland, bread was the most popular ward of all, varying from stale bread to hard tack to a fresh homemade slice. Bread was linked to the hearth and to the human taming of nature, qualities that certain fairies were said to dislike. A source from County Wexford, Ireland, recorded in 1882, noted that if an infant was carried out after dark, a piece of bread was wrapped in its clothing to protect it from harm.

  The logic of protection extended to spatial avoidance. Fairy paths, fairy forts, and fairy trees were left alone. Homeowners knocked corners off buildings because the corners blocked a fairy path; cottages were built with front and back doors aligned so fairies could pass straight through without being obstructed. One thorn tree in Scotland was left standing, blocking a road from being widened for seventy years, because no one would risk cutting it.

  The protective charms sometimes worked in more than one direction. Bells guarded humans against fairies, yet fairies on horseback, including the fairy queen herself, often wore bells on their harness. Some scholars read this as a distinction between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts of Scottish lore, suggesting that the more beneficent fairies used bells to shield themselves from the more malicious ones. Brownies, helpful household spirits, were driven off by the gift of clothing, though the reason varied: some tales said they were offended by the poor quality of the garment; others said they were simply delighted and departed with it.

• 5. Courts and Classifications

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  W. B. Yeats gave names to two broad categories: trooping fairies, who appeared in groups and formed settlements, and solitary fairies, who kept to themselves. Scottish lore divided the same territory differently, into the Seelie Court, more beneficently inclined but still capable of harm if offended, and the Unseelie Court, which brought harm to humans for entertainment. Both courts were considered dangerous to provoke.

  British folklore historian Simon Young urged caution about how far such systems should be trusted. Classification schemes varied widely from researcher to researcher, he noted, and he pointed out that "those people living hundreds of years ago did not structure their experience as we do." The Irish Tuatha Dé Danann offer a sharp illustration: in ancient sources they were gods and goddesses, victorious in battle against otherworldly rivals before being defeated by the ancestors of the Irish people and retreating into the sídhe. By the time of modern storytelling, those same divine beings had been recast as fairies. The Tuatha Dé Danann were associated with Otherworld realms including Mag Mell, the Pleasant Plain; Emain Ablach, the place of apples; and Tír na nÓg, the Land of Youth.

  The alchemist Paracelsus contributed yet another framework, classifying gnomes and sylphs as elementals, meaning entities that personify a particular force of nature. Folklore accounts sometimes described fairies simply as "spirits of the air," a phrase that sits equally well in Paracelsus's system and in the earlier traditions.

• 6. Literature and the Lasting Image

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  The historian Gervase of Tilbury wrote the oldest surviving English descriptions of fairies in the 13th century. From there, fairies moved steadily through literary tradition: in Le Morte d'Arthur of 1485, Morgan le Fay carries her connection to Faerie in her very name. Edmund Spenser's 1590 The Faerie Queene built a sustained allegory around the court of fairy. The playwright William Shakespeare set A Midsummer Night's Dream simultaneously in the woodland and in Fairyland, and according to Maurice Hunt, Chair of the English Department at Baylor University, the blurring of fantasy and reality in that play produces "that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play."

  Shakespeare's contemporary Michael Drayton featured fairies in his Nimphidia, and those characters fed directly into Alexander Pope's sylphs in his 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock. In the mid-17th century, French writers of the précieuses style elevated fairy tales into literary form, and Madame d'Aulnoy invented the term contes de fée. The Brothers Grimm initially included fairies in their collection but later revised the language, changing each Fee to an enchantress or wise woman on the grounds that fairies were not authentically German.

  In 1902, J. M. Barrie introduced an origin story for fairies in The Little White Bird: "When the first baby laughed for the first time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies." By 1911, in Peter and Wendy, Tinker Bell had arrived as a character who would become a pop culture icon. Victorian flower fairies were given a parallel visual life through Cicely Mary Barker's series of eight books, published between 1923 and 1948, a project partly driven by Queen Mary's keen interest in fairy art.

  Photography injected brief intensity into the art world's interest. Interest in fairy-themed art enjoyed a brief revival following the publication of the Cottingley Fairies photographs in 1920. Arthur Conan Doyle devoted an entire 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies, to the question of their reality, citing the theosophist E. L. Gardner's description of fairies as luminous clouds with a "brighter sparkish nucleus," essential links between the energy of the sun and the growth of plants.