Fairy

The road out of Aberfoyle is a poor place to be at the turn of a quarter. The air goes close and strange before anything shows itself, and then the whole company passes low over the ground with bag and baggage, bodies flickering like a chameleon’s and never quite settling, their talk a thin clear whistling that a man hears again for the rest of his life. Robert Kirk, minister of that parish, wrote this down in 1691 as a plain report of what his neighbours told him. He added the detail that gives it away as belief rather than literature: the people of his parish went to church on the first Sunday of every quarter to have themselves, their corn and their cattle hallowed against exactly this, and then most of them did not come back until the next quarter began.

They are called the Good People because they are not. Kirk records the Gaelic as Sleagh Maith and says outright that the Irish bless whatever they are afraid of. Two centuries later W. B. Yeats collected the same habit in Sligo, where the safe words were the gentry and daoine maithe, and where the Irish for fairy was sheehogue, a diminutive of the shee in banshee. Scots did the same trick with a different adjective. The Scottish National Dictionary enters seely court as the fairy court and notes that seely, meaning blessed or lucky, is a euphemism, with seely wicht for a fairy; its earliest quotation is the ballad Allison Gross, printed in 1783, where the seely court goes riding by on Hallowe’en. The blessed court is in the record. Its famous dark twin is thinner than most retellings admit: the same dictionary’s entry for unseely covers unlucky hours, unseasonable weather and an ill-conditioned dog, and never a court of fairies at all.

Where they come from has three answers and no verdict. Yeats set them side by side without choosing: the country people said fallen angels, not good enough to be saved nor bad enough to be lost; the Book of Armagh called them gods of the earth; the antiquarians said the Tuatha Dé Danann, the old gods of pagan Ireland, who stopped being fed with offerings and dwindled in the popular imagination until they were a few spans high. Kirk’s Highlanders put them of a middle nature between man and angel, and his most affecting page says they are usually silent and sullen because of what he calls their pendulous state, not knowing what will become of them when everything is finally settled. Nobody has ever reconciled the three.

The idea of a single fairy kingdom is itself younger than the beings in it. Ronald Hutton’s survey of the British sources finds no collective identity in the earlier medieval material at all, and a coherent fairy realm assembling across the fourteenth century, complete across the island by the fifteenth. The tell is in one story told twice: in the Middle English Sir Landevale, around 1300, the otherworldly lady’s nature is left undefined and she dresses in royal purple, while the later Sir Launfal makes her the daughter of the King of Faërie and dresses her in green. By the fifteenth century Scotland had Thomas of Erceldoune taken into the hill by the queen of that country, and King Berdok, which carries the first known use of the word fairy in Scots. Wales absorbed the same idea into Buchedd Collen, where Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of Annwn, is now also King of the Fairies, and where his whole shining court vanishes at a flick of holy water and leaves green mounds behind. It had reached ordinary people by then. In 1450 someone calling himself Queen of the Fayre was working Kent and Essex, presumably for money, and the next year a gang of disguised poachers raiding the duke of Buckingham’s park styled themselves servants of the queen of the fairies.

As to what they look like, the honest answer is that the oldest witnesses refuse the question. Yeats says flatly that everything about them is capricious, even their size. Kirk gives them bodies of congealed air, best seen in twilight, and dresses them in whatever the country wears: plaids and variegated garments in the Highlands, and the Irish mantle in Ireland. Their women spin very fine and dye and embroider, he says, though whether with real thread and solid instruments or with cobwebs and impalpable rainbows was beyond the sight of the man who told him. Green belongs to them in the romances rather than in the field reports. The palm-sized fairy is later and bookish: a fashion in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature for imagining a world of miniature people, which Hutton points out had no counterpart in popular belief. The wings came last of all, with no clear example before the closing decades of the eighteenth century, which is to say that the most recognisable thing about a fairy is the newest.

The best surviving account of what it costs to accept their hospitality is nine hundred years old. Walter Map put it in De Nugis Curialium around 1190, and set it among the most ancient Britons. A pygmy king no taller than a monkey rides up to King Herla on a large goat, red-faced, red-bearded to the chest, dressed in a spotted fawn skin, hairy-bellied and goat-hoofed. He proposes a bargain of two weddings, attends Herla’s with a train that fills the hall and the field outside and eats nothing of the king’s provision, then calls in the debt a year later. Herla follows him into a cave in a high cliff, through a stretch of dark, into a light that comes from no sun or moon but from a multitude of lamps. He is sent home loaded with horses, hounds and hawks, and with a small bloodhound carried in his arms, and one instruction: nobody dismounts until the dog jumps down. Outside, the shepherd he stops cannot follow his speech, because the shepherd is a Saxon, and says the queen he is asking after belonged to a King Herla who vanished at that cliff two hundred years ago. Some of the company get off their horses anyway. They fall into dust in front of him. The dog, Map notes, has not yet alighted, and the band was last seen by Welshmen plunging into the Wye at Hereford in the first year of Henry II.

Their other great advantage is that nothing you see in their company is necessarily there. Kirk knew the salve that does it, and knew the penalty: anyone who meddles with their ointments is struck as if by a puff of wind, without pain, and loses both the natural sight and the acquired one in the twinkling of an eye. The tale that carries this everywhere is the fairy midwife, and its earliest teller is Gervase of Tilbury, writing early in the thirteenth century, whose version is not about fairies at all. A woman of Arles washing clothes on the Rhône reaches for a floating wooden bowl, goes out of her depth and is taken by a Drac to nurse his son. Eel fat from a pasty gets on her fingers, she touches an eye, and from then on she can see clearly under the water. Years later she meets the Drac in the market at Beaucaire and greets him. He asks which eye she sees him with. She tells him, and he puts his finger in it. The tale travelled and hardened. In a Welsh telling collected by John Rhys at Ystrad Meurig the elf-lady simply blows into the woman’s eyes and says she will see no more; in the north of England the grand fireplace turns out to be the hollow trunk of an ancient oak with glow-worms where the lamps were; in Cornwall the parting rhyme is water for elf and not for self, and the offender has lost her eye, her child and herself.

The stolen child is the most familiar fairy crime and the hardest to date. Hutton finds no certain record of it in any British medieval text, though it is well attested in France and Germany in the same period, and the first unequivocal British appearance is in a schoolbook of model Latin translations printed in 1519. It is missing from the abundant Scottish references before 1660 and everywhere in Scottish folklore afterwards, which points to an import into England around 1500 that then spread north. Kirk’s own version, a century and a half later, is stranger and less cosy than the nursery one: what the fairies take is the woman in childbed, carried off to nurse a fairy infant, and what they leave in the bed is a lingering, voracious image of her, like a reflection in a mirror, which makes a show of devouring food and then abandons the body as though she had died of natural causes.

Everything else they can do follows from being able to move unseen and take the good out of things. They live on the foyson, the substance, of corn and milk, so the rick that should have yielded well does not, and the cow strained by them gives milk whose cream floats like a cork. A great eater with a fairy attached to him, Kirk says, stays thin as a heron however much he puts away, because a joint-eater is having the pith of it. They are heard baking bread and striking hammers inside their hillocks, and Kirk repeats the Welsh report that an ear laid to a cleft on Barry Island still catches bellows and hammers and the filing of iron. They read weather and death better than people do; a seer of Kirk’s acquaintance watched a winding sheet creep up a healthy man’s legs to his knee, his waist, his shoulders, and worked out from the intervals how long he had left. And they shoot. The elf-arrows that fly in the dark are what the parish was going to church to be protected from, and against those, Kirk says, we have nothing, because they are a people invulnerable by our weapons.

But they can be shut out, and the remedies are domestic. Kirk’s Highlanders put bread, or the Bible, or a piece of iron in the bed of a woman lying in, and he reports the belief as a general law: that all uncouth, unknown wights are terrified by nothing on earth so much as cold iron. He even gives their reason for it, that hell lies among the scalding metals and the iron of the north, which is why the lodestone points that way, so the creatures flinch from anything that comes from a place their own fate may involve. The name of God said out loud empties a room of them, and the name of Jesus makes them bow whether they want to or not. Beyond that, they are not immortal in the way the Irish claim. Kirk’s version is bleaker and more particular. They are not subject to serious illness, he writes, but they dwindle and decay at a certain period, all of them at about one age, and they spend the time until then quiet and out of temper, waiting to hear what they are.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a fairy?

A fairy is a member of an invisible people believed in across Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, living in mounds and hollow hills alongside human settlements. The minister Robert Kirk, writing in 1691, described them as being of a middle nature between man and angel, with light changeable bodies best seen in twilight. They take the substance out of corn, milk and cattle, and they take people.

Why are fairies called the Good People?

The flattering names are protective, not descriptive. Kirk records the Gaelic Sleagh Maith, “the Good People”, and says plainly that the Irish bless whatever they are afraid of; Yeats collected “the gentry” and daoine maithe in Sligo for the same reason. Scots did it with a different word: the Scottish National Dictionary enters seely court for the fairy court and notes that seely, meaning blessed, is used as a euphemism.

Are fairies afraid of iron?

Cold iron is the oldest recorded protection against them. Kirk reported in 1691 that Highlanders put bread, a Bible or a piece of iron in the bed of a woman in childbed to stop her being taken, and stated as a general belief that unknown wights fear nothing on earth so much as cold iron. Saying the name of God aloud was held to clear a place of them.

Did fairies always have wings?

No. There is no clear example of winged fairies before the closing decades of the eighteenth century, and the palm-sized fairy is older but still literary, a fashion in Elizabethan and Jacobean writing that the historian Ronald Hutton notes had no counterpart in popular belief. In the older sources the fairies are person-sized or of no fixed size at all, and Yeats says outright that everything about them is capricious, including their size.

What happens if you eat or stay with the fairies?

Time inside their country does not match time outside it. Walter Map’s tale of King Herla, written around 1190, has Herla spend what he thinks are three days at an underground wedding and come home to find two hundred years gone and Saxons in his kingdom; the men who dismounted before the fairy king’s bloodhound jumped down fell instantly into dust. Those who use fairy ointment to see through their glamour are blinded in the eye that saw.

Related Entries

Sídhe, Seelie, Tylwyth Teg, Changeling, Púca, Leprechaun, Far Darrig, Banshee, Merrow, Brownie, Glaistig, Pixie, Spriggan, Gwyn ap Nudd, Wild Hunt, Elf, Drac