Finding Ourselves in Faerie

Fairies:
A History
by francis young
polity, 352 pages, $35

The average secularist is apt to dismiss belief in ghosts or aliens as eccentric. But if you say you believe in fairies, even the modern equivalent of an irrational peasant is liable to roll his eyes at you. There is something silly about fairies, something childish.

As Francis Young explains in his definitive chronicle, Fairies: A History, our imaginations have been unduly dominated by the “small winged fairy,” largely a Victorian and Edwardian creation. The Cottingley Fairies photographs of 1917, which so beguiled Arthur Conan Doyle, further contributed to the ascendancy of the small winged fairy. Thus, the word “fairy” automatically calls Tinker Bell to mind, rather than the dangerous, mysterious, often surprisingly tall and wingless fairies commonly found in most streams of European folklore. Young’s book does much to dispel this misimpression and restore the disturbing ambience proper to the fair folk.

Young’s book reflects the scholarly concern of an Oxford tutor. Further, he has the mien of a man who has plausibly encountered the Good People, based on his author photo. Yet his book is soberly anthropological and accessible to those of us who remain fairy-agnostic or even outright fairy deniers. (Young takes no official position on the reality of fairy encounters but seems open enough to them.) Rather, his book seeks to chart the metamorphosis of fairy encounters throughout different times and places, while excluding from consideration non-Western fairylike beings—the jinn of the Islamic world, say. The book’s fairies are decidedly Euro, though fairy folklore in the United States, Australia, and Canada (with a surprising accent on Newfoundland) is also explored. Young’s expertise in Baltic folklore provides some particularly interesting excursions, including the book’s opening description of a relatively recent, Soviet-era fairy encounter in Estonia. 

As Young makes clear, the charm of fairy folklore lies in the fact that fairies don’t fit. They escape the categories by which we organize the universe. This is something C. S. Lewis pointed out in The Discarded Image. The medieval cosmos, he grants, was so carefully categorized, so neatly delineated, that a modern person might feel claustrophobic in its confines. Fairies, for Lewis, provide a welcome breeze of the inexplicable. Given the fairies’ inherent mystery, Young’s book describes Christianity’s varied attempts to grapple with their origin and intentions. Are the fairies demons? Diminished versions of the pagan gods? A certain group of publicity-shy human beings? One popular theory, which gained credence throughout the Middle Ages, was that the fairies were the neutral angels, those who took no side in Satan’s rebellion against God. 

Another theory, particularly salient in Icelandic and Irish folklore, is that the fairies are a kind of “mirror community,” a not-quite-human reflection of the human. In other words, the fairies are us, seen newly and strangely. They are unexpected revelations of our own terrible, preternatural dimension. 

They also seem to recall us to an animistic and shamanistic understanding of reality, in which every particle of nature reflects the human. As William Blake put it: 

Each grain of sand,
Every stone on the land,
Each rock and each hill,
Each fountain and rill,
Each herb and each tree,
Mountain, hill, earth, and sea,
Cloud, meteor, and star,
Are men seen afar.

The fairies are men and women “seen afar”—or perhaps, brought too uneasily near. 

Reading this book, I sometimes felt my own openness to the reality of the fairy realm waning, despite Young’s own intentions. Fairy folklore proves to be so culturally various that one often loses the sense of some stable, discernible reality underlying all the disparate phenomena. He also gives numerous examples of what folklorists call “ostension,” in which purely fictional narratives about the fairies end up influencing the nature of claimed encounters. But disenchantment is far from the goal of the book, and one still discovers a pattern of curious family resemblances among these various depictions. Writes Young: 

As we have seen, the English word “fairy” referred originally not to an entity, but to a place and state of being: faerie, which signified not just an otherworld realm but also the condition of being under enchantment. Faeries are enchantment, because faerie is a synonym for enchantment, and enchantment will always find a way to take on a life of its own.

As we lose our sense of life’s narrative cohesion, we lose our sense of the fairies. Fairies become a casualty of the imagination’s own weakness, as children clapping to revive Tinker Bell have long understood. Perhaps we need this sense of an otherworld running parallel to our own, betwixt heaven and hell, in order to understand ourselves. In Young’s telling, fairies emerge as a weirdly important facet of our engagement with the world. If they are not central to human imaginative and paranormal experience, they are certainly not peripheral—even though they lurk so tantalizingly at the periphery, their natural home. 

Young points out that in folklore, the fairies always seem to be leaving. This is usually taken to be a parable of dawning modern disenchantment, yet it exists far back in the lore. Fairies are always on the way out, but certain individuals still happen to stumble upon them. To make their disconcerting acquaintance is to confront the crux of our own mystery: Like them, we are trapped in a middle state between the angelic and the bestial. They reflect back to us our own capacity for joy and cruelty, our own opacities and incomprehensibilities. One feels indebted to Francis Young for directing our gaze back to this much-needed looking glass.