Capricious, amusing, fearsome, and delightful, the topsy-turvy look beyond the surface, to rediscover the magical in the everyday and glimpse the extraordinary in the ordinary. Prepare to venture into the fairy realm, where nothing is ever quite as it seems …
What are Fairies?
Quite simply, the answer to this question will depend on whom you ask. It’s like the story of the lady and the vicar, viewing the moon through a telescope, who see two shapes inclined toward each other. “Methinks,” says the lady, “they are two fond lovers, meeting to pour forth their vows by earth-light.” “Not at all,” says the vicar, taking his turn at the glass, “they are the steeples of two neighboring churches.”
What is seen is often determined by who is doing the looking.
So, what are fairies? Memories of a conquered race of pygmy people? Feared and venerated spirits of ancestors? Remnants of ancient mythology? Nature spirits? Depending on whom you ask, fairies are bound up with all—or none—of these things.
A Pygmy People
Some folklorists and anthropologists, mostly nineteenth-century ones, have suggested that fairy beliefs sprang from memories of conquered races of dwarvish people who lived in caves or mounds and used flint arrows. Stories about fairies, according to this theory, were the result of a clash of cultures. In Britain, this race of small people was conquered by the ancestors of the modern British, who had iron weapons. The conquered people retreated to the hills, or were driven into remote areas such as mountains and swamps, as the larger, more powerful, better-armed race advanced. Some hold this to be why iron is still used as protection against pernicious fairies today.
John Webster, writing in the same era as Shakespeare, expressed a view that was popular at the time:
… fairies are pigmy creatures which really exist in the world, and are and may be still in islands and mountains that are inhabited, and that they are not real daemons. But that either they were truly of the human race, endowed with the use of reason and speech, or, at least, that they were some kind of little apes or satyrs, having their secret and recesses and holes in the mountains.
Jakob Grimm, best known as one half of the Grimm brothers, who famously collected fairy tales throughout Germany and Europe, theorized that once there had been a widespread dwarf population across Europe, which had given rise to many traditions associated with supernatural elves and fairies.
David MacRitchie, a Scottish folklorist and antiquarian, popularized the “pygmy theory” in his controversial book The Testimony of Tradition (1890). In Fians, Fairies and Picts (1893), he used the science of archeology, which was then just developing, to provide evidence for his theory of an ancient dwarflike people. He argued that the Fians, the people preceding the Scots, and the Picts, of Irish and Scottish history, had been skilled in medicine, magic, music, and masonry, and had lived in hidden underground earth houses, which were later known as fairy hills or fairy forts, such as the chambered mounds of Maes-Howe in the Orkneys and New Grange at Boyne in Ireland. The fires that could be glimpsed at night through the tops of their underground dwellings were the “fairy lights” that appeared in folklore across Britain as lights that led humans astray. Stories of women, men, and children taken away by the “fairies” were in fact the result of stealthy raids carried out by the defeated race as acts of retaliation against their oppressors.
This belief was found in other Celtic regions too. In Cornwall around the end of the nineteenth century, the local secretary for the Society of Antiquarians believed the original inhabitants of the area to have been “a strange and separate people” who still lived in the Cornish wilds. Once thought to be witches and wizards, they were, he believed, really the descendants of the Pictish tribes, and thus the Picts had become pixies, or “piskies,” as the Cornish called them.
Spirits of the Dead
W. Y. Evans-Wentz, an American anthropologist and folklorist of Celtic descent who went on to translate The Tibetan Book of the Dead, explored the Celtic lands of Ireland, the Highlands of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, and Brittany at the turn of the nineteenth century, collecting fairy stories, experiences, and beliefs from the people he met. He discovered a strong connection between fairies and the dead.
In Ireland, there was a belief that fairies were the spirits of the departed, returning with wisdom, warnings, or messages. The dead of the ancient tribes of Ireland are known as the Gentry. In Wales, the Tylwyth Teg, or Fair Folk, are ancestor spirits, often envisaged as being 6 feet (nearly 2 meters) tall. In Scotland, distinction was made between the Host, or Sluagh, and the Sith (Shee). The Sluagh, “hosts” of the spirit world, are the spirits of mortals who have died. According to one account in Evans-Wentz’ The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), “they fly about in great clouds, up and down the face of the earth like starlings, and come back to the scenes of their earthly transgressions. No soul of them is without the clouds of the earth, dimming the brightness of the works of God, nor can any win heaven, till satisfaction is made for the sins of the earth.” The Sith, literally “people of the hills,” were fairy beings believed to dwell in the hollow hills or fairy mounds of Scotland. They were known as the Sidh, or Daoine Sidh, in Ireland.
Fairy ancestor spirits bestowed flags, banners, and gifts on Scottish clans, such as the famous “fairy banner” of the MacDonalds, the “fairy flag” of the MacLeods of Skye, and the Luck of Edenhall, a glass beaker decorated with enamel, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is said to have been crafted by the fairies and gifted to the Musgrave family of Edenhall in what is now Cumbria. “If this cup shall break, or fall/Farewell the luck of Edenhall” goes the famous saying. As yet, the glass remains intact.
In Cornwall, the story of The Fairy Dwelling of Selena Moor explains that fairies are the spirits of the dead not good enough for heaven, not bad enough for hell. They are shapeshifters and can take the form of beasts or birds, but every time they return to their proper shape, they are a little bit smaller than they were before. Over time, their senses and emotions dull, and they live on the memories of past feelings.
It was said, too [of the Fair Folk], that those who take animal forms get smaller and smaller with every change, till they are finally lost in the earth as muryans (ants) and that they pass winter, for the most part, in underground habitations, entered from cleves or carns. And it is held that many persons who appear to have died entranced are not really dead, but changed into the fairy state.
“The Fairy Dwelling of Selena Moor” in William Bottrell, Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (Vol. II, 1873)
Fallen Angels
Folk and religious beliefs, including beliefs about fairies, became intermingled with the coming of Christianity, and in Carmina Gadelica (1900), a collection of charms, incantations, prayers, poems, and songs from Gaelic-speaking regions of Scotland gathered by folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912), there is a vivid account of the belief in the Scottish Highlands and Ireland that fairies are fallen angels.
According to this, when the Angel Michael threw the Hosts of Satan out of Heaven, they were followed by an almost endless stream of angels who had been seduced by Satan’s cunning wiles. Seeing that the Shining Hosts of Heaven were rapidly diminishing, the Son cried: “Father, Father, the City is being emptied!” and God raised his hand and the