It would be easy to say that very little
is known about fairies, but it would NOT be
true. A great deal is known, since stories of
fairy-folk have come down to us through the
centuries from many parts of the world.
Information ranges from folk-legends to
scientific proofs (and dis-proofs!) to
first-person accounts of meetings with fairies
and journeys to Fairyland itself. You could
find a wide variety in any public library.
The problem is that the stories do not always
agree, so it is difficult, indeed, to know what
is true and what was simply "made up".
There seem to be two main reasons why it is
hard to pick the facts out of the fairy tales.
First, there was a great effort made by Christian
churches, for well over a thousand years, to
banish fairies from human territories and end
all contact with them. Churchmen of old often
believed that any power that was not Christian
must be from the devil himself, and fairies were
said to be powerful. The fact that the fairies
were known to people before the dawn of
Christianity only made these churchmen more
suspicious. Fairies were also generally thought
to live underground, and beneath the earth was
generally understood to be the realm of Satan.
So they linked fairies with witchcraft, and
spread the word that fairies drew their magic
from the devil. And in the process, much of
what was known became obscured or twisted.
Second, the fairies themselves do not seem
to want their secrets to be known. People who
stumble upon fairy ceremonies and revels are
often warned by the fairy folk not to tell what
they've seen or, worse yet, punished severely if
they do tell. There are innumerable stories of
people who enter fairyland being kept there
forever.
The fairies seem to be a private,
downright secretive lot, at least as far as
humans are concerned.The word "fairy" or "faerie"
seems to come, through a series of changes,
from the three Fates of classical times, the
daughters of Night who spun the thread of each
person's life, twisted it into different shapes,
and then, eventually, cut it off when the person
was due to die. But that is the origin of the
name; the origin of the fairies themselves is not
known. There are many, many tales and tidbits,
and from these, a few ideas seem generally agreed
upon.
First, fairies are not humans. They are a
different sort of creature. But whether they
are magical beings, or merely beings who exist
"in a different plane from our own" seems to be
still under debate. For centuries, it was always
assumed that they are magic. Many reports attribute
to them magical powers such as changing shape,
or flying through the air on a stalk of ragwort.
Not the least of these powers is Glamour, the
ability to make an ordinary person see fairies
and fairyland only as they choose to be seen...
even to appear completely invisible to ordinary
humans. Only special people, often children, or
those grown-ups gifted with what was called
"second sight" could see them... But Glamour
is more than that, for a man under its power
might see fairyland all about him, and yet not
see the very place in the real world where he
stood.
There are many stories of men who set foot
by accident in a fairy ring and suddenly heard
wonderful music and saw the fairies dancing there,
and could not resist joining them. To his
companion outside the ring, the man had
disappeared. As we have pointed out, some of
these reports were passed from mouth to mouth
for thousands of years, and now it is hard to
know which are true.
