Record #45
Fairies
Enchanting yet morally ambiguous beings who interfere with human destiny.
Original Text
They meddle magically in human affairs, and their name is linked to the Latin word latum (fate, destiny). It is said that the Fairies are the most numerous, the most beautiful, and the most memorable of the minor supernatural beings. They are not restricted to a particular place or particular period. Ancient Greeks, Eskimos, and Red Indians all tell stories of heroes who have won the love of these creatures of the imagination. Such fortunes hold their perils; a Fairy, once its whim is satisfied, may deal death to its lovers.
In Ireland and Scotland ‘the people ofFaery’ are assigned underground dwelling places, where they confine children and men whom they have kidnapped. Believing that the flint arrowheads they dig up in the fields once belonged to Fairies. Irish farmers endow these objects with unfailing medical powers. Yeats’s early tales abound in accounts of village people among the Fairies. In one a countrywoman tells him that she did not believe either in Hell or inghosts. Hell was an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and the ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go ‘trapsin’ about the earth’ at their own free will; ‘but there are faeries and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels’ .
Fairies are fond of song and music and the colour green.
Yeats notes that ‘The [little] people and faeries in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.’ At the end of the seventeenth century a Scots churchman, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, wrote a work entitled The Secret Commonwealth; or an Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the most part)Invisible People heretofoir going underthe name of Faunes and Fairies, or the lyke, among the Low Country Scots, as they are described by those who have the second sight. In I8I;, Sir Walter Scott had the book reprinted. Of Mr Kirk it is told that the Fairies snatched him away because he had revealed their mysteries.
On the seas off Italy, especially in the Strait of Messina, the fata morgana contrives mirages to confuse sailors and lure them aground.
In Ireland and Scotland ‘the people ofFaery’ are assigned underground dwelling places, where they confine children and men whom they have kidnapped. Believing that the flint arrowheads they dig up in the fields once belonged to Fairies. Irish farmers endow these objects with unfailing medical powers. Yeats’s early tales abound in accounts of village people among the Fairies. In one a countrywoman tells him that she did not believe either in Hell or inghosts. Hell was an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and the ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go ‘trapsin’ about the earth’ at their own free will; ‘but there are faeries and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels’ .
Fairies are fond of song and music and the colour green.
Yeats notes that ‘The [little] people and faeries in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.’ At the end of the seventeenth century a Scots churchman, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, wrote a work entitled The Secret Commonwealth; or an Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and for the most part)Invisible People heretofoir going underthe name of Faunes and Fairies, or the lyke, among the Low Country Scots, as they are described by those who have the second sight. In I8I;, Sir Walter Scott had the book reprinted. Of Mr Kirk it is told that the Fairies snatched him away because he had revealed their mysteries.
On the seas off Italy, especially in the Strait of Messina, the fata morgana contrives mirages to confuse sailors and lure them aground.