Fairies: A History
Francis Young, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2026, 340pps.
LIAM GUILAR admires a fair-minded and well-informed treatment of an often-scorned subject
Towards the end of the 12th Century, an English writer called Laȝamon added a story to the French poem he was translating. He wrote that at king Arthur’s birth, the baby was visited by magical beings who took charge of him with strong magic and gave him gifts[i].
The magical beings are called aluen. I had always assumed these were elves, but the word has also been translated as fairies. The Middle English Compendium cites this quotation and offers: “Fairies or Elves of either sex” as a translation. Take your pick. But what did Laȝamon visualise when he wrote the word? Could he distinguish between an elf and a fairy? And if he did, what were they? A study of elves in his poem concludes, somewhat unhelpfully, that the term is “prone to shapeshifting. It can connote disease causing organisms, witches, nymphs, sea monsters fairy mistresses, nightmares.”[ii]
In search of answers, I have been reading scholarly works on fairy belief and Francis Young’s A History of Fairies is the most thorough treatment of the subject I’ve found. Ranging widely over time and geography he puts together a comprehensive and readable history of the idea of fairies. He does this even though his introduction explains why it is impossible to write a history of Fairies in the way someone could write a history of ‘The French’ or carpentry.
The problem is that defining the subject is not straightforward. Although some kind of fairy belief has been a characteristic of British and many other cultures throughout history, today the words fairy and elf point in the wrong directions – to cute little winged creatures with a wand (thank you 19th century and Disney) or beautiful folk with pointy ears (thank you Professor Tolkien and Peter Jackson.).
Throughout history people encountered supernatural beings, but discovering which beings they encountered is problematic. In the past the names used to describe ‘fairies’ were often deliberately vague or euphemistic to avoid either naming or offending the ‘good people’ who were often everything but good. Though there are stories of encounters from the Middle Ages onwards, they were usually recorded by educated men using Latin terms which may or may not reflect the words used by their vernacular speaking informants. To compound the problem, the supernatural beings in these encounters didn’t introduce themselves as fairies or elves, or boggarts, nor are they usually identified using such names[iii].
Young’s solution is to define fairy as: “A frequently invisible population of uncanny, non-human (yet human like) living beings, reported by folklore who share our world,”[iv] Having done so he demonstrates how to write a history of a subject that can’t be clearly defined based on evidence that is unreliable for so many reasons.
He traces the possible origins of fairies to the animism of prehistory, and later what he calls the godlings of non-Christian belief. For most of Europe’s Christian history the fairies have been the unsanctioned supernatural, sitting aslant a theology that was more comfortable with angels and demons, ghosts, God and the Devil.
As the narrative moves towards the present, it moves on to firmer ground. There is more evidence, and the bias and error are perhaps easier to see. Folklore became a respectable subject by the 19th century and educated people started to take an interest in the beliefs and practices of ‘The Folk.’ Ironically, some of them didn’t just record fairy belief but (perhaps inadvertently) invented some and repackaged others.
Stepping neatly through the problems of evidence and contending arguments. Young is even handed in summarising various points of view, while tentatively offering his own. At times this even handedness makes the book feel like a symposium where everyone is on their best behaviour.
Given the limitations of the evidence there’s an unavoidable familiarity to much of the material. However, a history of fairies that didn’t mention Elidyr or the Cottingley fairies, or Bridget Cleary, would be deficient. Young’s emphasis on each is his own. Summarising the story of the Cottingley photographs, he explores their consequences for subsequent fairy belief. The death of Bridget Cleary comes in the context of how belief can be denigrated as superstition and used for political ends.
It’s a history where there are few certainties. There are crucial problems that never will be solved. The contemporary relationship between the fairies of medieval literature and the fairies of popular belief is impossible to untangle. Why the church and civil authorities moved from a long-standing dismissive attitude towards popular ‘non-sanctioned’ supernatural beliefs to what Young aptly calls a lethal credulity will never be known.
At times this uncertainty and the lack of definition threaten to subvert the attempt to discuss the subject. Across time and geography, the accounts are so various, the practices so widespread, so similar yet different that it must be difficult to know what can be excluded from the discussion.
What is missing, inevitably, are the fairies themselves. As Young acknowledges, a history of fairies must be a history of the opinions of educated, literate people, then and now, about other people’s beliefs (p.24). I still don’t know what Laȝamon thought aluen were, but the book is a reminder of how ‘vast and various’ the human imagination is, and how unpredictable people can be. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most rational of detectives, was a believer in the Cottingley photographs. Hugh Dowding, who led RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain, was a firm believer in fairies, belonged to the Fairy Investigation Society, and feared the next war would be between fairies and humans.
A History of Fairies stands out amongst the ones I’ve read for several reasons. The book ranges widely over its subject in time and geography. While he focusses on Europe, Young acknowledges that a belief in fairylike creatures spreads much further. While acknowledging the role of Ireland in fairy lore, the geographic range of Young’s examples prevents him from falling into the trap of suggesting fairies are ‘Celtic’ or that all elves come from Iceland.
While adopting a neutral stance as to their existence, he insists that “Fairies are part of the rich history of human experience and I do not see why belief in them or claims of encounters with them are any less worthy of respect than say, religious beliefs or reports of religious experiences” (p.2). Coupled with this is his refusal to fall into the modern trap of ‘explaining’ fairy belief. Modern writers who reach for an explanation which appeals to them as rational can sound like adults in a primary school playground and their explanations usually raise more questions than they answer[v].
Because he takes his subject seriously, Young can suggest that more is at stake in a history of fairy belief than the question of when fairies were first portrayed as being tiny, cute creatures with wings: “Belief in non-human populations of supernatural beings existed all over Europe, and not just in those countries where it was endlessly discussed and self-consciously revived by romantically inclined intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth century” (p.205).
If this belief in a human-like, non-human social being was so widespread, for so long, does it reveal something about the ways humans made sense of the world and their place in it? What does the disappearance of this belief as a widely held assumption suggest about modern consciousness? The book raises these questions while admitting their answers are beyond its scope.
Fairies: a History also has a significance beyond its subject matter. It is an effective demonstration of how difficult it is to understand or discover what people believed in the past. I started with Laȝamon and his story about aluen. He was a parish priest, for part of his life at a small church in Worcestershire. He and his parishioners would have identified themselves as Christian without hesitation. However, we know nothing about what ‘being Christian’ meant to them, what they knew of Christian doctrine or how much they understood it, or how it shaped their behaviour or their imaginative, emotional and intellectual lives. We sometimes know what an elite group of highly educated men thought everyone else should believe. We know what some snarky high-ranking ecclesiastics thought of ‘parish priests’ in general, but of their faith we know as much as we do about their interactions with the local aluen.
Fairies: A History is an eloquent reminder that confident assertions about the beliefs of the mass of any population in the past are about as trustworthy as those famous photographs taking in a garden in Cottingley.
[i] ‘Sone swa he com an eorðe; aluen hine iuengen/ heo bigolen þat child; mid galdere swiðe stronge.’
[ii] Cyril Edwards, ‘Layamon’s Elves’ in Laȝamon: Context, Language, and Interpretation, Edited by Rosemond Allen, Lucy Perry and Jane Roberts. P.95
[iii] A point made by both Jeremy Harte in Fairy Encounters in Medieval England and Richard Sowerby in Natural and Supernatural in Early Medieval England
[iv] This is similar to Alaric Hall’s suggestion in Elves in Anglo-Saxon England that the early Old English evidence suggest Elves were ‘Corporeal anthropomorphic beings mirroring the human in groups which believed in them.’ p.68. Such definitions give historians room to manoeuvre even if they aren’t very helpful for the reader
[v] See for example Matthias Egeler’s ‘Explanation’ of some of the practices associated with fairy abduction in Elves and Fairies: A short history of the Otherworld, p.61
LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain. His most recent publication is a translation of the Mabinogion folk-tale How Culhwch Won Olwen (Shearsman, 2026)