World of Fairies
In 1999, storyteller and folklorist Eddie Lenihan successfully persuaded Irish road planning authorities to preserve a fairy bush as they built a bypass to Newmarket-on-Fergus and Ennis. Lenihan argued that destroying the bush could result in a large number of driving fatalities in that stretch of the N18 in County Clare. Inside the median strip [...]
How can we classify beings rarely seen by humans, how can we delineate different categories of supernatural creatures? Some who have studied the fairy lore suggest a moral distinction traceable to two separate kingdoms of fairies, the Seelie Court and the Unseelie Court (seelie means holy or blessed in Irish). Those belonging to the former [...]
To consider fairies from different cultures, we need to separate the words from the ideas they describe. The words “fairy” or “faery” comes from the Middle English “fayerye” influenced by the Old French “faerie”, both terms referring to a realm of magical creatures. The French word evolved from the Latin fata, for fate. The concept [...]
In Ireland, a country rich in fairy lore and legend, notions of the origins of fairies intermingle history, religion, and anthropology. According to Irish myth, a race known as the Tuatha de Danaan arrived in Ireland centuries ago on May 1, possibly aboard a flying ship. They defeated the previous inhabitants of the land, the [...]
Fairy lore has existed for centuries, and but no definitive answer satisfactorily explains the phenomenon of those known under many names: the good folk, the other crowd, the little people, fairies, elves, or many other appellations. One theory weaves together Christianity and fairies, suggesting fairies belong to a third group of angels who remained neutral [...]
