A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - F Is For Fairies

Arthur Rackham: The Fairy Ring. Public Domain

 So, you think fairies are sweet little things that flutter around flowers, do you?

It’s true that this idea has grown up over the centuries. Artists have painted flower fairies. Shakespeare’s fairy King and Queen, Oberon and Titania, are like benevolent woodland gods. Mind you, the weather goes crazy around their quarrel, and Puck brags to another fairy about the mischief he does. But it is just mischief, and Oberon looks after the young lovers, feeling sorry for them, then blesses them on their wedding night. 

However, if you had lived in the old days, you would be very wary of the fairies - or Good Neighbours, as they didn’t like to be called fairies, much as the Greek and Roman Erinyes/Furies were called the Kindly Ones, when they were anything but kindly. People used to try protecting their children’s cradles against them. It didn’t always work(see below, changelings)

Some varieties were helpful and did housework in exchange for food. Others were not as benign.

There was the story of a woman who was called on by mysterious folk to deliver a baby. She did, and was rewarded, but rubbed an eye with a magical ointment that let her see the fairies. When she saw some afterwards she said hello. They asked her with which eye she saw them. When she showed them, she was struck blind in that eye. I suppose it could have been worse, they might have killed her or struck both eyes blind without asking. 

There were stories about changelings, when babies were snatched by the fairies and replaced with elderly fairies. There was one solution by which you did something weird to get them to show up who they really were. Unfortunately, another way was to abuse them till they left and returned your child. It was unfortunate because people who really believed this would abuse babies born with disabilities. 

In the poem of Tam Lin, he is a young man kept by the fairies for seven years, after which he is to be sacrificed to hell, to which the Queen owes a rent. Fortunately for him, a girl called Janet, who is pregnant with his child, saves him. 

There are elements of this in New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox’s novel The Absolute Book, a novel I highly recommend.

Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is set in the 1970s, on a small American university campus. The heroine, Janet, is a student. The actual Queen of Faerie has brought her court from the past, and is now the head of the Classics department. Every seven years a Classics student dies. This year it’s the boy Janet cares about who has been chosen. It’s a wonderful book, but you might need to get it second hand.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Songkiller Saga is mainly about how Hell has decided to make humans miserable by removing folk music. They only succeed in the US, with the help of the Debauchery Devil, but a bunch of folk musicians travel to Britain to retrieve their songs. As it happens, the Debauchery Devil is, in fact, the Queen of Faerie, who failed to pay her rent to Hell due to Janet’s rescue of Tam Lin. She needs rescuing herself.

It’s a trilogy, and, if interested, you can get it in ebook. I loved it - I’ve always loved folk music, but this one made me realise that folk is a lot broader than I had known.

There is a fairy origin story that they are not quite fallen angels, but almost. They weren’t quite as bad, but ended up on earth instead of in hell. 

Tolkien uses the term “fairies” for his Elves, who are mostly the good guys, but also violent and slaughter each other quite a lot. Death is supposed to be a gift. It’s not much help, because they just get reborn. 

Melissa Marr has done a series of novels, Wicked Lovely,  with genuine folklore fairies, though she has them with tattoos just because she likes tattoos, and they are rather tough, fighting each other, hanging around the city and riding motorbikes. They are not remotely like flower fairies! 

To be honest, I quite like evil fairies; they are a lot more interesting than the cutesy ones.