AWAY WITH Fairies THE
Forget Tinker Bell, fairies could be capricious, powerful and terrifying, as this enchanting history reveals. If only it got to the truth behind the magic...
Magical Folk Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook Gibson Square €23.80 ★★★★★
Do you believe in fairies? If you believe, clap your hands!’ The audience does as Peter Pan bids and the ailing Tinker Bell revives.
It’s a charming moment in JM Barrie’s ever-popular play but, as this collection of essays on fairy lore across Britain, Ireland and beyond shows, the fae folk of earlier centuries were not the glittery-winged do-gooders that we tend to think of today. Rather, they were capricious, powerful and often terrifying.
They stole human babies, leaving behind sickly fairy changelings in their place. They put out the eyes of people who accidentally caught sight of them. They could spirit away a farmer’s cattle and harass his horses.
Certainly they could be kind if the mood took them: mending broken tools in the night; undertaking onerous agricultural chores; leaving troves of silver and gold to be found by the favoured. But it was always touch and go.
They inveigled their way deep into our language and literature. A daydreamer is ‘away with the fairies’. A story of great good fortune, or an untruth, is ‘a fairy tale’. ‘Fairy rings’ – circles of fungus – are best avoided.
The trickster sprite Puck is a central figure in Worcestershire folklore, as local lad William Shakespeare knew. JRR Tolkien heard tales in Warwickshire about that county’s elusive earthy spirits known as Hobs. J K Rowling was presumably aware that Master Dobbs was the Sussex name for a helpful household fairy. Encounters with fairies dropped off sharply in the mid-19th century, with the advent of the industrial age, but belief didn’t disappear altogether.
In a tragic case here in Ireland, in 1895, 26-year-old Bridget Cleary was burned to death by her family who believed she was a changeling.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, the greatest sceptic of them all, so wanted to believe that in 1920 he was duped – as were many others – by crudely faked fairy photographs taken by a couple of Yorkshire schoolgirls.
Magical Folk also includes accounts of recent sightings such as one from 2006, when two men sitting in a Worcestershire pub’s beer garden saw a goblin the size of a human toddler climb over the fence and disappear into the field beyond. They had drunk no more than two pints – although of what, we are not told. Magic mushroom tea, perhaps?
What the book lacks is analysis and depth. What was really going on in that beer garden? For that matter, what are fairies?
One of the contributors, historian Richard Suggett, suggests that ‘in England fairy beliefs were probably already ancient by the Reformation and have been characterised as an amalgam of traditions of ancestral spirits, ghosts, sleeping heroes, fertility spirits and pagan gods’. But that’s the most we get in the way of explanation.
Also, because Scottish fairies have much in common with Cornish piskeys, Sussex pharisees, Irish sidhe and all the other inhabitants of Fae, there’s a fair bit of repetition throughout the geographically arranged chapters.
But if you do believe in fairies – maybe even if you don’t – you’ll find much that’s enchanting in this little book about the wee folk.