It has often been reported that one can be
"lost in Fairyland" without going anywhere at
all. Sometimes a person is "with the fairies"
but seemingly still in a place on the Earth.
If you set both feet in a fairy-ring, you may
well see the fairies dancing madly there, and
suddenly hear their music, often described as
the sweetest ever heard. People who experience
this are often drawn irresistibly to joining
the dance. Meanwhile, anyone who might have been
with them, but outside the fairy-ring, thought
their companion had disappeared, and saw nothing
of the fairies and heard nothing of the music.
The person who stepped into the ring became quite
as invisible as the fairies, and there is good
reason to believe he was then in Fairyland...
even though he had not left the fairy-ring.
Often, the person who has crossed over into
Fairyland lives in a different frame of time
than we do here. The stories of those who've
wandered into the fairy-ring and joined the
dance sometimes tell of the vanished person
being rescued from the fairy-ring a year-and-a-day
later, only to have the rescued victim complain
that he just wanted to finish the dance and he'd
only been dancing there a few minutes.
More mysterious yet are those travelers who've
entered fairyland, whether by accident or
foolishness or by the lure of the music or some
other fairy trickery, and stayed at their revels
and feasts for what seemed to be a few days or
weeks. But when they returned to their own land,
to their home town, they saw not a single person
they knew. Those who they questioned had not ever
heard the name of the traveler or his family.
Often the only person who'd ever heard of them
was the oldest person in the village, for the
traveler was one who was said to have disappeared
with the fairies two or three hundred years before
The reason that human travelers in Fairyland are
so often confused is that the fairies use their
magic, called Glamour, to make things seem as they
want them to be. And this trickery would be
completely impenetrable to us, we would not know
of it at all, were it not for those few who have
chanced to undo its magic and see the truth. This
has happened more than once when a human midwife
was summoned in the night to aid a woman in
child-birth, only to find it was a fairy-woman.
The midwife is brought to a strange place and
sees within a grand and luxurious palace. The
fairy noblewoman and her husband wear fine and
beautiful clothes and are themselves as beautiful
as the eye can bear. When the baby is born, the
midwife is instructed to rub it all over with
a special ointment. But if she happens to rub a
bit of it near her eye, suddenly that eye sees
the scene quite differently. The palace now
appears as nothing but a dank, dirty cave, the
rich bed but a pallet of straw, the rich clothing
merely rags, the beautiful fairies now old and
drawn and wizened. The ointment has removed
the "glamourous" magic from her eye and what she
sees is... the truth? Hard to say, for people
who have seen fairies without their knowledge
or consent have still reported them as beautiful
creatures. It is a mystery.
One point on which there seems little argument
is that you must not take food or drink in
Fairyland, nor pick the flowers, or you risk
becoming a captive there. As noted earlier, the
visitor to Fairyland scarcely notices the
passage of time, and that delusion alone serves
as an effective prison.
