THE NATURE OF FAIRY FOOD
What is the food given by fairies? Though it often has the appearance of baked goods, wine, or milk, legend alludes to the use of glamour, or illusion, used by fairies to make themselves appear different from how they truly look, and similar spells are cast upon what they offer as food. Alasdair MacGregor wrote in The Peat-Fire Flame: Folk-tales and Traditions of the Highlands and Islands of a woman who abstained from food in fairyland, and afterwards “came to examine the food… [and] she found it to consist ‘only of the refuse of the earth.’” 1
Such concepts can be traced back to early legend. The Scandinavian hero Väinämöinen (pictured at right), upon rejecting beer in the Underworld, “gaz’d awhile upon the tankard; Lo! Within it frogs were spawning, worms about its sides were laying.” 2 In the story of St Collen, the seventh-century Welsh saint visited the King of Fairies, and declared, “I do not eat the leaves of a tree!” when he saw the ‘food’ for what it truly was. 3 Witches, conflated with fairies by the Church, ascribed similar attributes to the Devil’s food – one of the famous Pendle witches reported in 1612 that “although they did eat [at their Masses], they were never the fuller nor better for the same.” 4
This theme reappears in modern accounts. Abdul Mutalib disappeared in January 1982 from his guard post at a recruit training centre near Kuala Lumpur. A search was mounted to no avail, and locals whispered of the buni, elemental beings who, in their minds, were responsible for several such disappearances. Abductees who returned spoke of “a distant place” and “delicious food” – although when they vomited, only worms and grasses came up. 5
If the food offered by fairies is illusory, what do they themselves actually consume? Varying reports point to “barley meal, poisonous mushrooms, goat milk, red deer meat, silver weed roots, heather stalks, toadstools, and weeds”. 6 Ufologist Jacques Vallée often identified meat and pure water as the primary food source of the fairies, citing the writings of anthropologist WY EvansWentz.
Most literature, however, posits that they feed on the essence, also called the toradh or foyson, of food. 7 Parallels to the foyson concept can be found with the Arabic djinn, which “eat human food, stealing its energy.” 8 Food without its foyson is unfit for human consumption. Evans-Wentz, in his seminal The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, was told that food left for fairy offerings was “not allowed to be eaten afterwards by man or beast, not even pigs... The underlying idea seems to be that the fairies extract the spiritual essence from food offered to them, leaving behind the grosser elements.” 9 The book also details housecats who drank milk left out for piskies and became sick. The folklore bears similarities to a 1970 case in Chile, where a small creature was seen gliding through a family’s livestock pasture. The next day, 10 of their llamas were found exsanguinated. The family attempted to cook one of the animals, but the meat tasted foul; even the vultures who ate the remaining carcasses were seen to vomit, and the family had no choice but to burn all that remained. 10
Subsiding on foyson allows fairies to consume living animals without apparent harm. One Welsh farmer watched the Verry Volk slaughter his ox, then resurrect it, minus a piece of leg bone they had misplaced. The next day the animal appeared healthy, save for a slight limp. 11
It is easy, and perhaps sensible, to write off the concept of foyson as a way to explain why most offerings left for fairies remain physically untouched.