Daniel Griffin

Lesson 1: Fairies across history and cultures

AI-assisted study guide · prepared by Claude at Daniel Griffin's request · part of Fairies and Personal AI · initial version, not yet reviewed by Daniel.

You'll learn: where the idea of the fairy comes from, how similar beings appear in other cultures, and the main jobs fairy stories do. These jobs become design questions in the later lessons.

A word of caution first

"Fairy" is an English word with a European history. Persian peri, Arabic jinn and Japanese zashiki-warashi are not the same thing, and lumping them together hides real differences. Here the word is a loose working label: small or hidden beings, with their own rules, who live alongside people.

1. A short history of the word and the idea

  • Fate. "Fairy" comes through Old French fée and faerie from Vulgar Latin fata, "goddess of fate" (reinterpreted from the plural, "the Fates"). The root idea is a being who has a hand in your lot. Faerie first meant enchantment, or the realm where it happens, and only later the creatures themselves.
  • Medieval romance. Fairy women such as Morgan le Fay and Mélusine are powerful and ambiguous. They marry or test mortals on strict conditions. When Mélusine's husband finally exposes her secret in public, calling her a serpent before the court, she leaves.
  • Early modern Britain. Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Queen Mab), Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590/1596) and Robert Kirk's The Secret Commonwealth (written 1691; first known printing 1815). Kirk was a Scottish minister who described the fairies as a parallel society.
  • 1697, France. Madame d'Aulnoy's collection gives us the phrase contes des fées, "fairy tales." Perrault adds the fairy godmother to Cendrillon. Fairies become tools of a literary genre that rewards good conduct.
  • Victorian and Edwardian. Fairies shrink, grow wings and move into the nursery. In J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, fairies die when children stop believing, and the audience claps to save Tinker Bell. Here fairies exist because people keep believing in them together.
  • Cottingley (1917). Two girls' faked fairy photographs were championed by Arthur Conan Doyle, and became a lesson in how much people want to believe.
  • Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories." Tolkien calls Faërie "the Perilous Realm," not a place of cute helpers. He argues fairy-stories offer Recovery, Escape and Consolation.

Popular belief did not follow the literature. In Ireland and Scotland, fairies stayed dangerous neighbours well into the twentieth century.

2. Across cultures

  • Irish and Scottish
    • Beings: aos sí / sìth; Seelie and Unseelie courts
    • Relationship to people: Live in mounds and forts; the boundary thins at Samhain (Oct 31–Nov 1)
    • What the stories enforce: Respect for the land and for liminal places; keeping your word; not boasting; not eating fairy food
  • Scottish and English household spirits
    • Beings: brownie, hob, Robin Goodfellow
    • Relationship to people: Do farm and house work at night, for cream or porridge
    • What the stories enforce: Respect, not payment: give a brownie clothes or wages and it leaves
  • Scandinavian
    • Beings: tomte / nisse; Icelandic landvættir
    • Relationship to people: Farm guardians; land spirits
    • What the stories enforce: Care of animals and the farm; respect for the land itself
  • Slavic
    • Beings: domovoi
    • Relationship to people: House spirit that moves with the family
    • What the stories enforce: Household harmony; it is angered by quarrels and neglect
  • Japanese
    • Beings: zashiki-warashi (Tōhoku)
    • Relationship to people: A child spirit whose presence brings a house fortune
    • What the stories enforce: Prosperity depends on a relationship nobody can own; when it leaves, the house declines
  • Arabic / Islamic
    • Beings: jinn (Qur'an, Sura 72)
    • Relationship to people: Made of smokeless fire; have free will and moral responsibility
    • What the stories enforce: Moral agents, not tools. The bound genie of the Nights is a later literary figure
  • Persian
    • Beings: peri
    • Relationship to people: Changed from malevolent to beautiful and benevolent
    • What the stories enforce: Purity and longing; between angels and demons
  • Philippine
    • Beings: diwata, engkanto, nuno
    • Relationship to people: Spirits of trees, mounds and wild places
    • What the stories enforce: Ask permission when passing: tabi tabi po ("excuse me")
  • Akan (Ghana)
    • Beings: mmoatia
    • Relationship to people: Small forest beings; in some accounts they teach herbal knowledge
    • What the stories enforce: Respect for the forest; knowledge is given, not taken
  • Cherokee
    • Beings: Yunwi Tsunsdi, the "Little People"
    • Relationship to people: Helpful or dangerous depending on how they are treated
    • What the stories enforce: Respect; do not follow their drumming, because they bewilder strangers
  • Hawaiian
    • Beings: menehune
    • Relationship to people: Builders who finish fishponds and walls in a single night
    • What the stories enforce: Collective work, and keeping the bargain

3. What fairy stories are for

  1. Explaining misfortune. Elf-shot and changelings gave people a cause for sudden illness, a baby who failed to thrive, or disability. This can be very dark. In 1895 Bridget Cleary was killed in County Tipperary by her husband, who claimed she was a changeling.
  2. Enforcing norms. Hospitality, cleanliness, honesty, keeping your word, keeping quiet about good fortune, humility. The fairies watch, and they enforce.
  3. Testing virtue. In the tale type "The Kind and the Unkind Girls" (Perrault's Les Fées), a disguised fairy tests a girl's kindness. The fairy is the instrument of a moral order, not the servant of whoever meets her.
  4. Guarding privacy and boundaries. In the "midwife to the fairies" legend, a human midwife accidentally gets fairy ointment in one eye and can then see the fairies. When she admits it, they take away her sight in that eye. Seeing what you were not invited to see is the offence.
  5. Reciprocity rather than transaction. The brownie serves a household freely and for the household's good. Payment would turn the bond into a trade, so payment ends it.
  6. Stewardship of land and place. Fairy forts, thorn trees and land spirits make some places off-limits. This is not only historical: in 1999 storyteller Eddie Lenihan's campaign to save the Latoon fairy bush in County Clare was widely reported as changing a road project.
  7. Wishes and their costs. Three-wishes tales and the bound genie warn that power serving one person's unexamined desires tends to go wrong.
  8. Sentiment and childhood. Victorian and later fairies came to stand for innocence and wonder. Critics such as Diane Purkiss argue this drained away their old menace and moral weight.

Key ideas to carry forward

  • Fairies are usually third parties with their own law, not anyone's property.
  • Their help is conditional. It depends on virtue, respect and keeping the rules.
  • Household spirits are loyal to a household and a place, not to one person.
  • The bound genie is the one figure built to serve a master's wishes, and its stories are warnings.
  • Fairies are not purely benign. Their stories also carry cruelty, and fear of outsiders and of difference.

Check your understanding

  1. Why does giving a brownie clothes make it leave? What does that say about service and payment?
  2. Which story function, "guarding privacy," "testing virtue" or "explaining misfortune," fits the midwife-to-the-fairies legend best? Why?
  3. Name one tradition where the being is loyal to a place and one where it is loyal to a household.

Answers

  1. Payment turns a relationship of respect and reciprocity into a transaction. The bond depended on not being a trade.
  2. Guarding privacy and boundaries: her offence is seeing, and admitting she saw, what she was not invited to see.
  3. Place: Icelandic landvættir, Irish fairy forts, Philippine engkanto. Household: brownie, tomte, domovoi, zashiki-warashi.

Next: Lesson 2: Fairies in science fiction

Sources and further reading

Books: Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (1976; US title An Encyclopedia of Fairies). Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things (2000; US title At the Bottom of the Garden). Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth. J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories." Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999). Jack Zipes's work on fairy tales and their social uses.

Online (several are Wikipedia overviews; follow their citations for primary sources):

fairies-and-personal-aifolklorefairiespersonal-ai

Claude