Fairies, Folklore and Forteana
SIMON YOUNG FILES A NEW REPORT FROM THE INTERFACE OF STRANGE PHENOMENA AND FOLK BELIEF
SOCIAL FAIRIES
It is a commonplace among fairyists that the fairies seen today in midnight walks are not the same as those seen 800 or even 100 years ago. Twenty-first century fairies are smaller: they are often doll-sized, or even butterflysized. They frequently have wings. They are connected much more closely to plants and to vegetation. But after having pushed, over several years, through scores of descriptions of fairy experiences, I’m increasingly struck by another, I think, more important change.
Fairies in the 13th and indeed in the 19th century, were, over large parts of Britain and Continental Europe, social. They lived in groups: fairyland was a community, be it under that rock or behind that waterfall. Fairies had hierarchies: there were fairy kings and queens, courtiers and commoners. Fairies carried out social activities: they cooked, they washed, they took care of children, they flirted, they made love, they married, they had funerals, they hunted, they danced, they fought battles... Our earliest mediæval fairy accounts show us fairy societies, and this element is still dominant in British fairy experiences into the late 19th century. It is still there in the extraordinary lived experiences in Irish, Scottish and Manx accounts in Evans-Wentz’s Fairy Faith in Celtic Lands. But the social fairy did not properly
FAIRIES LIVED IN GROUPS: FAIRYLAND WAS A COMMUNITY, BE IT UNDER THAT ROCK OR BEHIND THAT WATERFALL
survive the Great War. Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, with accounts from the 1930s to the 1990s (see FT321:38-45), and my Fairy Census ( FT362:30-37) offer little in the way of social fairies. If you listen to someone’s fairy experience today, it is far more likely to be a run-in with the spirit of a rose bush or a tree, than a glimpse of, say, a fairy wedding party. Even when fairies are seen in groups, they tend to be what I think of as ‘hive’ fairies: gnomes hammering at a stone in time; fairies walking in lockstep, Borg-style, across a field; rows of fairies chattering incessantly ‘like birds’ on the branches of a tree. Individuals rarely emerge from modern group fairy encounters.
Why? Is it that earlier accounts were more likely to survive as folk tales where fairies were given a social gloss? Or is this a real change in our perception of the impossible – a reflection of our own increasingly individualistic, fragmented societies?
Alternatively, if you want to apply taxonomies to the supernatural, are we dealing with an entirely different species? Did the ‘real’ fairies decamp, as folklore assures us, to escape railways and factories, gunpowder and 5G? By this logic, modern fairy-seers encounter not ‘fairies’, but ‘landscape spirits’: the bogies under the bridge and the troll in the tree.