FAIRIES, FOLKLORE AND FORTEANA

SIMON YOUNG FILES A NEW REPORT FROM THE INTERFACE OF STRANGE PHENOMENA AND FOLK BELIEF

INVISIBLE PRESENCES

In November 1911, Walter Yeeling Evans Wentz, an American scholar who had studied at Oxford, published one of the great works of 20th-century folklore and forteana: The

Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. The book is chock-full of accounts from fairy believers in Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales. Now, Evans Wentz himself was a fairy believer – but was he also a fairy seer? Well, he certainly

wanted to meet fairies. There is, for example, a remarkable description of Walter and his Gaelic-speaking guide Michael on the heights of Barra, in the Hebrides, in 1908, waiting forlornly for a rock fairy door to swing open and reveal the people of the hollow hills. However, in The Fairy Faith, Evans Wentz is, otherwise, rather elusive about his own experiences. In the past few days, I’ve happily come across two forgotten pieces of fairy writing by or concerning Evans Wentz from 1912, that might shed some light on his own encounters (or lack thereof). The first is an interview in the Pall Mall

Gazette where Evans Wentz is asked whether he had ever seen a fairy. The American admitted that he had not but claimed: “I have commonly felt many strange psychical impressions when in places supposed to be possessed by [the fairies].” In an article, published almost simultaneously by the London Daily News, Evans Wentz writes: “I have wandered with [the Celts] into strange places where the fairies are said to dwell, and I am now obliged [curious expression?] to admit that when in those places I have felt invisible presences all round

about me [my italics]. Other persons… have had the same mysterious feeling in the same places, and the few, who are gifted with seership, have on rare occasions while there beheld beautiful tall beings, radiant and glorious, with auras of brilliant colours than any colours known to men.” This seems a rather long and highfalutin way of saying, “No, I haven’t seen a fairy”.

Evans Wentz, who dedicated his whole life to studying the spiritual world, does return, though, to this idea of ‘feeling’ presences. What does he mean? I’d be tempted to recall his references to “magnetic forces” in The Fairy Faith and those who are “susceptible to such things”. He was convinced that certain locations, including Carnac (a place to which he felt a personal connection) and the Isle of Man were junctures for these magnetic forces, and speculated that fairy paths might actually be “magnetic arteries”. Evans Wentz was, I suspect, very clear in his mind what these magnetic forces were, but never really explains the ‘science’ (if that is the right word) behind them: though there is, of course, a great hinterland of 19th-century writers on ‘magnetism’. Simon Young writes on folklore and history and runs www.fairyist.com

“I HAVE WANDERED INTO PLACESWHERE THE FAIRIES ARE SAID TO DWELLAND HAVE FELT INVISIBLE PRESENCES”