Fairies are the medieval and post-medieval versions of the old Celtic spirits of place. Among the lesser deities in the Celtic pantheon are the sprites who inhabit springs and streams and the dryads who inhabit trees. Among these elementals are the gnomes, the spirits of the Earth who appear out of cracks in the rock to frighten Cornish miners. There are also sea-nymphs or mermaids, and sylphs, the spirits of the air.
A feature of the Celtic mindset is a blurring of the boundary between the everyday world and the Otherworld, and between human beings and spirits. Just as it is possible for people to travel, under special circumstances, to the Otherworld and back again, so it is possible for people to have dealings with fairies, though it is not always wise to do so. European folklore generally is full of tragic tales of relationships between mortals and fairies.
There are different views about the origins of fairies. They are sometimes thought of as the spirits of the dead, sometimes as fallen angels, sometimes as astral or elemental spirits. In the Highlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fairy hosts were regarded as the evil dead. In Ireland, fairies are the spirits of the recent dead as well as the long dead. The Tuatha de Danann became the heroic fairies, the Daoine Sidhe.
In Cornwall, fairies are the ancient pagan dead who died before the age of Christianity; they are not good enough to go to Heaven, nor wicked enough to go to Hell, but linger on, gradually diminishing until they become as small as ants before disappearing altogether. In Cornwall and Devon the souls of unbaptized babies are called piskies, and they appear at dusk as little white moths. In a dark version of the Glastonbury legend about Joseph of Arimathea, the knockers in the tin mines are believed by the miners to be the souls of Jews who were transported to Britain for their part in crucifying Christ.
In Wales, the belief that fairies are the souls of the dead seems to be less common. They are described in more general terms as a race of beings halfway between something material and spiritual and rarely seen, or as a race of spiritual beings living in an invisible world of their own.
Some of the lore is neo-Celtic, dating from the Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nursery sleep fairies were invented at this time, presumably to make managing small children easier. The best-known of these was the sleep fairy featured in the hugely popular nursery rhyme Wee Willie Winkie, which was written and published by William Miller in 1841. The earliest version of the first verse runs:
Wee Willie Winkie runs through the toun,
Up stairs and down stairs in his nicht-goun,
Tirling at the window, crying at the lock,
“Are the weans in their bed, for it’s now ten o ’clock? ”
In the Middle Ages, fairies formed distinct communities or kingdoms. Shakespeare’s Renaissance version of a fairy realm ruled by Oberon and Titania is not far removed from the medieval concept of the world of the fairies—though a long way from the Iron Age concept of that world 2,000 years earlier.
Fairies are usually very small, about 1 foot (30cm) tall, and some are no bigger than insects. The smallest are known as pigwidgeons. They are usually very attractive in appearance, in contrast to goblins, elves, imps, and pixies.
Fairies are gifted with supernatural powers. They have the ability to fly very quickly from place to place and are invisible most of the time. Only people with second sight can see them, though others are able to see them on certain occasions.
They behave rather like children. They are insecure, easily offended, mischievous, and can be quarrelsome. Some think this is because they once owned the landscape and have been displaced by newcomers. They may be responsible for causing fog and dew.
Fairies use toadstools as seats or tables. The flint arrowheads we now know were made by Neolithic people were once believed to be elf-bolts made and used by fairies to fire at cattle (see Fairy Blight). Sometimes fairies leave objects that are picked up by people.
Fairies like dancing on grass. Sometimes rings of a darker green are seen in the grass, and these “fairy rings” are thought to mark the path danced by the fairies. The dancing takes place at night and the fairies vanish when the cock crows.
Fairies often visit women in childbirth, sometimes casting good or evil spells on the babies. The worst thing they do is to steal babies, leaving changelings in their place. Whether the changelings are fairies or mortal children acquired somewhere else is not known.
Occasionally fairies fall in love with mortals, usually with results that are disastrous for both parties (see Religion: Gods and Goddesses, Otherworld).
A knight about to enter a fairy mound:
Fairies are generally held to wear green, which is one reason why some Scottish women dislike wearing that color; another is that green is associated with death. In Ireland the small trooping fairies, the Shefro and the Daoine Sidhe, wear green coats and red caps, but solitary fairies such as leprechauns generally wear red. The silkies of northern England wear glistening white silk, the White Ladies on Man wear white satin, and the Tylwyth Teg of Wales also wear white. The self-confessed witch Isobel Gowdie described the Fairy Queen in her Traffic with Fairies: “The Qwein of Fearrie is brawlie clothed in whyt linens, and in whyt and browne cloathes.” On the other hand, a fairy queen who visited a cottage in Galloway was described in more vivid terms by J. F. Campbell:
She was very magnificently attired; her dress was of the richest green, embroidered round with spangles of gold, and on her head was a small coronet of pearls. One of the children put out her hand to get hold of the grand lady S spangles, but told her mother afterwards that she felt nothing.
Manx fairies sometimes wore blue. One description gives us a little, gnomelike man 2 feet (60cm) high, “wearing a red cap and a long blue coat with bright buttons, white hair and bushy whiskers. Face very wrinkled. Very bright, very kind eyes, carrying a small but very bright lantern.”
Brownies wear ragged clothes and many hobgoblins run around naked.
The tradition is that the life of a fairy is as long as the life of the world, so it would not be possible to witness a fairy funeral. Yet beside this there is a parallel tradition of fairy funerals. The poet William Blake claimed to have seen one. “Did you ever see a fairy’s lianeral, madam?” he asked a lady who happened to be sitting next to him.
“Never, sir, ” said the lady.
“I have, ” said Blake, “but not before last night. ”
He went on to describe how he had seen in his garden “a procession of creatures of the size and colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared.”