An overview of one of the richest aspects of British folklore
By Richard Holland
‘The Fairies of these Islands are of all kinds,’ writes Britain’s premier writer on fairylore, Katherine Briggs. ‘There are good and bad. There are the big and the little, the beautiful and the ugly, the trooping fairies and the solitary fairies.’
Briggs wrote the invaluable ‘Dictionary of Fairies’ (among many others), a work which started life simply to please some children who had asked her to explain the differences between pixies, brownies and the like, and grew into an impressive body of work. The variety of British Fairies is bewildering. Reginald Scot, writing in the 16th century, complained: ‘In our childhood, our mothers’ maids have so … fraied us with bull-beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, sylvens, Kit with the cansticke, tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphs, changling, Incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, the hell wain, the fier drake, the puckle, Tom Thumbe, Hob goblin, Tom Tumbler, boneles, and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes.’
I do not have the knowledge to explain all of that weird company but I can tell you that, despite Scot separating out ‘fairies’ in his list, most in the roster fall into the remit of fairylore, including those alluded to from Classical mythology. Broadly put, the fairies are a body of spirits or beings who inhabit a world other than our own but who are able to enter the mortal world, where they are usually encountered out of doors, often at known fairy-haunted sites such as solitary trees and ancient burial mounds.
There is considerable cross-over between ghostlore and fairylore, indeed in some early accounts there is no difference at all – the fairies are the souls of deceased mortals now inhabiting a spirit world of illusory luxury. Sometimes they are said to be the spirits of people not good enough to go to heaven but not bad enough to go to hell; or the spirits of people who lived before Christianity came among us; or the spirits of unbaptised children. Others believed they were simply another order of creation, not demons exactly, but amoral. Today many like to think of fairies as nature spirits, demigods and goddesses of the woodland, the wide open spaces, springs and waterfalls.
In Scotland the fairies belong to two distinct groups, the Seelie and the Unseelie. This distinction might be applied UK-wide: the Seelie are the fairies who appeared as ‘the Gentry’, fair to look upon, wearing fine clothes and inhabiting grand halls; the Unseelie make up a myriad order of grotesque beings such as goblins and will-o’-the-wisps.
Despite their many variants, fairies throughout Britain do have many aspects in common. They are usually smaller than human beings, though rarely as small as the frilly-winged creatures beloved of the Victorians; they like to dance; they like to entice humans to their world or steal babies; they can be generous when treated well, vengeful when treated with disrespect. Mortal men have married fairy women, and children have been born of these unions and begat families of their own.
Uncanny UK does not intend to discuss the subject of fairylore in depth, for it is a vast one. Here we will explore certain aspects or stories that intrigue us. True tales of modern encounters with fairies or fairy-like beings are always welcome. Please get in touch if you have information on such an encounter.
For more in-depth information on fairies, you might like to try the following books:
‘The Dictionary of Fairies’ (1976) and ‘The Vanishing People’ (1978) by Katherine Briggs and ‘Explore Fairy Traditions’ by Jeremy Harte (2004). Brigg’s ‘Abbey Lubbers, Banshees and Boggarts’ (1979), an edited and beautifully illustrated version of the ‘Dictionary’, serves as an accessible overview of the variety of fairies.
© Richard Holland 2008
