Lucy Cooper - The Element Encyclopedia of Fairies

Many thanks to everyone who has helped along the way in making this book a reality. Thank you to Susannah Marriott for sparking this project into life, to Caitlin Doyle at HarperCollins for forbearance and support, and to my family and friends for putting up with (and on occasions accompanying me on) my long sojourns in fairyland, especially Viktoria Heard, Clive and Franoise Cooper, Frances Ford, and Jon Levine.

Boggles, Bloody Bones, brownies, black dogs, Shellycoats, barguests, Robin Goodfellows, hags, hobgoblins, dobies, hobthrusts, fetches, kelpies, mumpokers, Pans, sirens, nymphs, imps, incubuses, Kit with the Cansticks, Melsh Dicks, knockers, elves, Rawheads, Padfoots, pixies, dwarves, changelings, redcaps, colt pixies, Tom Thumbs, boggarts, shag foals, brags, wraiths, waffs, gally-trots, Peg Powlers, Pucks, fays, selkies, Cauld Lads, sylphs, nixies, cluricaunes, kobolds, leprechauns, banshees, Lhiannan Shees, Gabriel Ratchets hounds, trows, sprites, and spunkies

Welcome to the wonderful and diverse world of fairies.

These are just some of the fairy creatures listed in a series of nineteenth-century folklore pamphlets by a Yorkshire tradesman named Michael Denham, later published as The Denham Tracts, edited by James Hardy (London: Folklore Society, 18921895).

This snapshot of the fairy realm in the British Isles of the not-so-distant past introduces us to a world in which nursery bogies, such as Bloody Bones, lurked in the cupboard under the stairs, and mischievous pranksters Puck and Robin Goodfellow cavorted in the countryside, likely to transform at any moment into flickering lights and lead unwary travelers on a merry dance through briars, ditches, bogs, and streams. Dobie, the helpful household fairy, lent a hand around the home, while the troublesome boggart delighted in upturning dishes, snatching bread and butter, and teasing members of the household with his tricks.

This brief peek into fairyland reveals a colorful cast of denizens, wildly different in appearance and characteristics, before we have even ventured further afield than the British Isles. Fairies have appeared in various guises in cultures around the world since ancient times, from the dryads and nymphs of ancient Greece to the noble Sidhe of Ireland, and from the Australian arawotya to the zinkibaru of Africa. Traditionally, fairies have assumed a number of different roles, as guardians, guides, gatekeepers, muses, and messengers, exerting an influence over human lives that may be by turns benevolent, malevolent, or mischievous, which makes pinning them down to definitions a tricky task.

Definitions are slippery things in the fairy world. Hard and fast rules have a habit of bending, blurring, or evaporating into thin air when applied to the capricious denizens of fairyland. The harder you try to pin down a fairy, the more likely it is to wiggle out of your grasp and vanish with a mischievous poke of the tongue.

As a rule of thumb, it is generally said that fairies belong to a race of supernatural beings possessing magic powers who sometimes meddle in the affairs of humans.

C. S. Burne, in The Handbook ofFolklore (1914), describes fairies as beings somewhere between gods and men, not quite human yet not quite divine. They share the Earth with humans more or less invisibly. They may be messengers for higher powers or operate independently but interact in some way with the lives of humans.

In Native American folk beliefs, every aspect of the natural world is imbued with the universal life force, which goes by many names, including manitou, orenda, and wakanda. Fairies in the form of nature spirits are found in many other cultures, too.

Under these broad definitions we find fairies of all shapes and sizes. The ant-sized abatwa of South Africa are small enough to hide behind a blade of grass, while the Cornish spriggans, generally no taller than a persons bootlaces, can rapidly increase to the size of giants to frighten away would-be thieves who attempt to steal their treasure. The German household spirit King Goldemar is invisible, but makes his presence known by the touch of his thin, froglike hands.

Shapeshifting is a common fairy attribute, and looks can be deceptivea wizened old hag is likely to be a beautiful princess in disguise. Swan maidens and selkies transform from human to animal form and have been known to interbreed with humansthough unions between mortals and fairies seldom run smoothly. Other fairies manifest as animals in the shape of cats, dogs, birds, or hybrid creatures, part-human, part-animal, such as mermaids, merrows, and Lamia, or in humanlike form, whether tiny or larger than life.

The denizens of fairyland are eclectic, beautiful, beguiling, and often downright bizarre. The hebu of South America has a glowing posterior and eyebrows so bushy that she must stand on her head if she wishes to look at the sky. The Matshishkapeu, or Fart Man, of the Innu people in Canada is the source of much amusement, but also wields great power and serves a serious function in having dominance over animal masters as well as human behavior. In the fairy world, sometimes wisdom is found in the most unlikely of places. Grave seriousness mixes with playfulness and humor.

Already we have glimpsed many fairy creatures and there is hardly a pair of wings in sight. The winged fairies of childrens picture books are a relatively new addition to the fairy world, popularized during the Victorian era. The fairies you will find here are drawn from the folk beliefs of cultures around the world.

The work of folklorist Katharine Briggs provides a rich store of reference for fairy lore of the British Isles, while Thomas Keightleys The Fairy Mythology (1828) brings together fairy lore from many different cultures around the world. These, along with many other sources, have provided starting points for investigation. Where possible, the oldest sources of accounts have been tracked down. Material has been drawn from anthropological texts, journals, periodicals, encyclopedias and dictionaries of mythology, collections of folklore, folk tales, superstitions, customs, and letters.

In 1881, the Cornish folklorist Robert Hunt wrote that even then:

old-world stories were perishing like shadows in the mist before the rising sun. Many wild tales which I heard in 1829 appear to have been lost in 1835 I drank deeply from the stream of legendary lore which was at that time flowing, as a well of living waters and longed to renew my acquaintance with the wild tales of Cornwall which had either terrified or amused me as a child.

How many more wild tales from around the globe must have been lost as the old stories were swept away by the march of progress? And yet the fairies are still with us. With a little digging, it is possible to unearth old tales and beliefs. In some places fairies still inhabit the here and now. Elsewhere the stream of legendary lore is buried deep underground and one must dig deep to find it. Yet still it flows.

Inevitably, there is not room here to include the many thousands of denizens of fairyland, and apologies are extended to those who do not appear between these pages. However, it is hoped that the fairies here, representing many cultures around the world, will spark interest for further exploration of the fairy realm.