A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories

Fairies are not unique to Britain's Celtic fringes, as is often believed. Fairies - or fairylike beings - can be found in every pre-industrial culture in the world, and post-industrial cultures too have their fairies. Why are these beings so widespread? Because they do important social work; they have many purposes.

First, they express and help to manage and control mothers' fears: fears for their children, yes, but also less socially acceptable fears of their children, fears of themselves as mothers. Such unspeakable fears are in Western Europe expressed through the myth of the changeling, a baby who is a fairy creature left as a substitute for a child stolen by the fairies. Such a child cannot be loved. So when any child is identified as a changeling, the mother has an excuse not to love it, even an excuse to torment it, for most 'cures' involve hurting the substitute child to blackmail the fairies into bringing the real child back.

In Scandinavia the same belief is held about Trolls, who are seen as ugly little creatures, not quite animal or human, who trouble the other supernatural beings around them as well as the humans. Trolls were believed to steal human children and replace them with their own. Recently however, trolls have been depicted in the same cute and fluffy way as fairies have been. 

In Nigeria, on the other hand, such fears are expressed through the legend of the spirit child, a child who will not settle into life in the womb, but keeps slipping away, thus preventing his unlucky mother from bearing other children.

Secondly, they express another fear, the fear that children will never grow up. Fairies are both ageless and eternally infantile, trapped between the adult world and the world of infancy. The Aboriginal Bitarr are old men spirits who play eternally with children, appearing as an extra child on the fringes of games. An ancient Mesopotamian demon called Kubu is a stillborn child who can never get any older because he has never been named.

James Barrie might have called Kubu a betwixt-and-between, which is what he called his scintillating fairy creation, Peter Pan. Peter is also a kind of stillbirth, and having lost his mother can never grow old or die. Are he and Kubu expressions of a maternal fear that the child will somehow evade their controlling hands? Is there a place where children can run wild, never be socialised? Or is this a plain and simple fear, fear that the beloved child will die and thus never get older?

Fairies also have a role as controllers of social behaviour. Or so our betters tell us. From Robert Herrick's fairies who reward good servants with a handsome tip, to the moral fairies of the Victorian schoolroom, eager to teach us grammar or botany, fairies, like the fairy story, have been hijacked for the causes of manners and morals. More ancient fairies, too, could enforce simple norms. Tales of lakeside fairies discouraged children from playing on the shore, for instance.

However, medieval fairies could stand for anarchy rather than obedience; when followers of Jack Cade claimed allegiance to the Queen of the fairies, Her Majesty was a symbol of their open defiance of the law. Fairies' moral authority and also their anarchy stem from their role as the active dead. In Mexico, families put out food for their dead on All Souls' Day; just so do the pre-industrial Scots put out food for the fairies at Yuletide, and just so do the Welsh and English offer the household brownie bread and cream every night. For the mediaeval world, fairies are dead, but dead that can offer benefits, dead with whom one can, so to speak, do business. Fairies therefore become a way to manage the fear of death itself.

Finally, fairies represent initiations, perhaps particularly sexual initiations. From ancient Greek Lamia or Persian Lamashtu, she-demons who engulf their male victims, to the English Queen of Fairies who longs for juicy young male lovers, fairies are associated with female desire and male initiation. It is a short step from languorous Titania to the gorgeous fairy chorines of the Victorian stage, luscious in tights and filmy skirts, who excited the passions of their own male votaries in the second and third rows. And fairies' modern descendants, aliens, often offer abductees sexual rapture in exchange for their body parts or seeds. And in doing so they show that even our sophisticated postmodern age needs such creatures to allow us to talk about things that cannot be said otherwise.

One thing I have learnt is that attempts to grasp fairies are uncertain - at best. At worst they are downright unlucky.