Building Sound Foundations: Read the Fairy Lore

Art credit: Daniela Simina, collage.com, 2022

Pretend that you are someone interested in fairies but have little or no background at all. What would you do to begin learning?  Search the Internet for information, right? In doing so, there is a good chance for you to become overwhelmed and confused rather quickly. Nowadays, information abounds and the access is so easy. This is good, because easy access to information allows people to educate themselves. It is also bad, because a lot of the information out there is inaccurate at best, and sheer fabrication presented as historical fact at worse. The range in quality for the fairy material available online is broad, ranging from great to deplorable. Good sources are really hard to distinguish from bad ones[1]. This complicates the matter significantly, because fairies themselves are complicated, and an immensely diverse group as well.

 

There are numerous reasons for wanting to know better these beings, especially if you feel drawn toward them. It is in a sense similar to making friends among humans, enrolling to a new school, or moving into a new neighborhood. Gathering information that is accurate and weighing pluses against minuses helps one make the best decision. Whether entering relationships with people or fairies, knowing the terrain upfront paves the road for positive experiences, or at least, helps avoiding more serious trouble.

 

Learning the lore that is authentic to various cultures where fairies feature prominently is a very important step in getting to know them. This should be the first piece in the foundation that you are laying for a healthy and rewarding relationship with fairies. It is not the only piece, but it is a very important one. 

 

Throughout the history, fairy lore has developed from experiences that people had with fairies. (I am including modern times here, because fairy encounters and sightings not only did, but still do occur in the twenty-first century as much as they did in all centuries past[2].) Each epoch generated its own body of fairy lore. From lore we gather that fairies and humans underwent changes, Fairy[3] mirroring to a certain extent human society and culture. New encounters generate new lore which adds continuously to the already existing body. Conversely, the existing lore shapes people’s perception of fairy and to a large extent influences interaction. I know of teachers who insist that fairies did not change one bit over centuries, but in my opinion it is unrealistic to believe that fairies are frozen in time, and only humans move forward. This is like claiming that people of today speak, write, dress, eat or interact with one another in the exact same way they did a thousand years ago. This holds true for fairies as well.[4] If humans changed, and fairies mirrored the change, then the premises for interaction have also changed to some extent at least, which means that in many ways the relationships we develop with fairies today would be quite different form the past. At this point you may be wondering, with all these changes why should one still bother reading the lore? How could be stories, hundreds of years old in some cases, still be relevant?

 

Photo credit: Daniela Simina, 2022

I am aware that we live in the twenty-first century and our understanding of life, nature, and reality in general is different in many regards from how people perceived these, say five hundred years ago.  But… many things change on the surface while their core, the essence of what or who they are, doesn’t change.  There is a reason why children in school study World History: it is not an attempt made by the school system to entice people to live a lifestyle fit for the Middle Ages, but a way to help the present generations understand how the world has changed and the implications of change. This extends to our relationship to fairy traditions past and present: learning about their past helps us to better understand them in the present. The quality of our relationships depend on the degree of understanding, and the degree of understanding depends on what and how much we read, study, experience…

 

Fairies are not an element of fashion. Fairy-based spiritual beliefs are not fashion accessories. Being a fairy witch is not a trend. This is serious. In any successful partnership proper understanding is of paramount importance, and in the case of fairies, reading their lore holds the key.

Bright fairy blessings, and until next time ...really, read the lore.

Daniela

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[1] “Discerning Good Source Material”, Morgan Daimler,  https://lairbhan.blogspot.com/2018/02/discerning-good-source-material.html

[2] “The Paranormal and popular Culture, A Postmodern Religious Landscape”, Darryl Caterine and John W. Morehead; “Living Fairy”, Morgan Daimler; “Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies, 500AD to the Present”, Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook.

[3] Generic name for the part of the Otherworld, or the dimension where fairies live.

[4] “Fairies as the ‘Other’”David Halpin, https://www.facebook.com/page/505240543157960/search/?q=FAiries%20as%20the%20Other