Shakespeare gives us some beautiful ‘cute’ names in Midsummer Night’s Dream: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, Mustardseed and, even the classical-sounding, Titania. However, the one fairy name that we know predates Shakespeare from the Dream, ‘Puck’ is of a rather different type. It is short, muscular and a little bit menacing. Later fairy names range from the aristocratic – there was a nasty boggart called Annabell in the South Pennines, who lived in a barn; to the vivid, Red Cap in the Borders; to the hickish-sounding – in nineteenth-century southern Cornwall, we read of a fairy child called Coleman Grey; to the aristocratic, Queen Mab in Romeo and Juiliet; to the botanical, Old Queen Moss in Greenfield, Saddleworth; to the diminutive, Wee Willie Winkie from the Scottish nursery rhyme; to the petrifying, Bloody Bones. Modern fairy fiction has tended to build on this rich and varied tradition: Sookie Stackhouse, for example, from the HBO series True Blood sounds just right; Peter Pan’s guardian Tinkerbell could have appeared in Midsummer Night’s Dream (she has the character as well); and Nuala in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series has a pleasant Celtic edge to it. One of the most interesting bits of fairy research in recent years, by Emma Wilby, has shown that fairy names were often similar to the names of witches’ familiars. If EW is correct, and her arguments are persuasive, then we must ask whether witches and fairies were not connected

The fairy changeling represents one of the least attractive parts of fairy behaviour. Fairies would – case have dropped off in the last century – search out babies and infants, typically baby boys or sometimes beautiful young women. They would, then, kidnap these human victims. However, it was not enough to kidnap. They would leave behind either a simulacrum (a stock of wood or a broom that magically appeared to be a child or a woman) or they would actually leave behind a fairy who would take the kidnapped human’s place, the ‘changeling‘. Often mothers or husbands would suspect that they had a changeling on their hands when a young baby or a beautiful wife became listless or when their health changed dramatically: the onset of a serious medical condition may have encouraged parents to think that they had a changeling in their house. The typical response was then to torture the ‘changeling’ with fire or metal or boiling water until the horrified fairies felt obliged to intervene. The fairies would, then, bring the changeling back and take their own fairy away. We have several early modern and even nineteenth-century cases of ‘changelings’ being mistreated by parents in the most dreadful circumstances. The most famous is the case of Brigid Cleary who was burnt in 1895 in County Tipperary (Ireland) by her husband because he believed that Brigid was a fairy.

Time and time again reference guides refer to fairies as being ‘diminutive’ or ‘tiny’. In some cases ‘microscopic’ would be a better word. Shakespeare refers in Romeo and Juiliet (I, 4) to Queen Mab riding over a man nose with her horses: ‘in shape not bigger than an aget-stone, On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.’ Among the trooping or social fairies this is sometimes, though by no means always the case. However, when we turn, instead, to the solitary or anti-social fairies, they are rarely tiny. In fact, sometime they are significantly bigger than any human they might happen to bump into and their size is one of the most intimidating things about them. The best examples here are sinister humanoids like trows or some of the Lancashire boggarts. It is even possible that some traditional ‘giants’ should be classed as bogey fairies.

The only sensible answer to this question is: ‘it depends’. Some fairies are in the fairy godmother vein. They run around trying to help their special charge and they won’t rest till she or he have the crown on their head or a love in their bed. Other fairies are though thoroughly, sadistically nasty to any man, woman or child who should happen to fall into their grasp or across their path. Most fairies in tales are ambivalent: that is to say that they can go from icy cold to boiling hot at the slightest provocation. They are indifferent to humans as long as humans treat them well. But should humans break one of their special laws or taboos… Well, it will be worse for everyone involved. Thinking back to the rural populations that suffered fairy wrath not the least frightening thing about the local fairy was that humans were always walking on egg shells. They never knew what might anger ‘the good people’ and conversely what might make them happy. A general answer? Human-fairy relations rarely ended in smiles and all too often someone’s blood was splattered over a dry-stone wall.

Truth be told there are hundreds, if not thousands of different types of fairies. A number of reference works have attempted the thankless task of cataloguing different fairy types, but it is, make no mistake, hopeless. Every region had its own fairy type and even names are misleading. Just because pixy meant one thing in Devon does not mean that pixy meant the same thing in Cornwall. Likewise fairies with different names in different areas sometime sound suspiciously similar: for example, the brownie of Lowland Scotland the dobie of Northern England often appear in tales in the same role and with the same temperament.  However, there is a way through all this confusion. Fairyists have long noticed that fairies tend to break down into two categories: trooping and solitary fairies; or as they have also been called social and anti-social fairies. Trooping or social fairies are hive animals, they live in groups and are seen in groups at revels or dancing or even funerals: these are the conventional fairies of the western imagination. If trooping/social fairies are bees or ants solitary or anti-social fairies are dragon flies or stag beatles. They tend to be seen on their own. In this category there are leprechauns, boggarts and silkies.

Perhaps the only sensible answer to this question is what do you mean by fairies? After all, if you define fairies as little humanoids the size of butterflies, with gossamer wings, who help hedgehogs and children and never lose their temper, the answer will be no, fairies do not exist.

If you define fairies as a series of phenomema experienced by certain individuals, then even the most hardened sceptic must answer ‘yes’. After all, some individuals clearly have unaccountable experiences that need to be explained even if we decide they are happening in, not outside their heads.

But do fairies exist outside our heads or are they just a product of abnormal or ‘special’ brains? The fact that fairies are typically seen by children, at night, alone or while the witness is in bed should all set off warning clankingly loud bells. But as the sceptic has an easy time of it let’s, instead, concentrate on four reasons for taking fairy sightings seriously as an external reality.

First, the great number of fairy sightings. It is true that fewer people see fairies today than did in the past. But even in the materialistically-inclined, urban twenty-first century the number of sightings of supernatural but living humanoids (our definition of fairies) is surprisingly high. It is not just a question then of explaining away three or four ‘weirdos’.

Second, the type of witnesses. Many witnesses are men and women who might be said to be psychically-inclined: that is to say that, whether psychic phenomenon exist or not, these individuals believe that they are privy to special insights and even visions. It would not be particularly suprising were a medium, say, or a psychic to see a fairy. But, on other occasions, we have sightings from individuals who declared themselves to be sceptics but whose minds have been changed by something that they cannot account for.

Third, the consistency of fairy sightings. Themes repeat themselves in fairy sightings. Fairies often do the same things when seen by witnesses, even witnesses who don’t apparently know much about fairy lore. For example, fairies again and again, are seen dancing in circles, even when those who see the fairies knew nothing (or claim to know nothing) about dancing fairies. Of course, it could be that they fairies dance because of some psychological stimuli buried deep within us and this psychological stimuli works in the same way in different individuals. If so neither sceptics nor believers have come, though, close to explaining the fairy dancing stimulus.

Fourth, fairies like particular places  It is not clear why but fairies tend to appear in the same location, in the same way that ghosts are often associated with the same room or the same corridor. Why does this suggest the authenticity of fairy sightings? Quite simply because some individuals who see fairies are not aware that fairies were associated with the place where they had their fairy experience.

No self-respecting sceptic will have had their ‘faith’ shaken too much by this little list. For one, there is simply not the raw data to lead to any conclusions. However, let’s just keep the door open to belief. If fairies do exist how can we possibly explain them?

There have been various attempts to do so over the years. However, there is no question that the most popular modern explanation is that fairies are nature spirits. That is to say that when we see fairies we are actually seeing spirits of natural processes be that a tree growing, a fire burning, a rock being…David Boyle, for example, suggests that fairies might be ‘some hidden aspect of natural processes, the personification of rotting or photo-synthesis’, say.  It has to be said that fairy lore includes very little of this: here we have a late nineteenth-century reinterpretation of fairy lore at the hands of theosophists. Of course, that does not mean that is it not true.

Another approach that tries to break the gap between belief and disbelief claims that fairies are personifications of natural and other processes that, through human passions, take on an actual external reality and become independent of the mental processes that created them. There is no question that belief though in any external reality for fairies is anti-scientific, at least anti the science we have now at hand. Whether that is a good thing or not is another question.

The longer Oxford English Dictionary defines a fairy as follows: ‘[A fairy is one] of a class of supernatural beings of diminutive size, in popular belief supposed to possess magical powers and to have great influence for good or evil over the affairs of man.’ This is fine as far as it goes but why ‘dimunitive’? Fairies were often described as human-size or bigger. We prefer another simpler if very tentative definition: ‘fairies are living supernatural humanoids’. ‘Supernatural’ means, as the OED explains, that these are magical perhaps even non-physical creatures. You are unlikely, in short, to catch them with a butterfly net. By ‘humanoid’ we mean that big or small, ugly or beautiful fairies have a human form: dragons aren’t fairies, whereas mermaids or trolls could at a stretch be so classed. And ‘living’ is meant to help distinguish fairies from ghosts. However, any definition for something as mercurial as fairies is doomed to failure and even these three modest adjectives have their limits. Many late nineteenth-century writers played with the idea of fairies as an alternative human race, either technologically inferior or even a breed apart: according to this definition fairies are not supernatural, they are simply a different type of human. As to ‘humanoid’ what about the shape-changing fairies who become balls of wool or dogs? Then, even, ‘living‘ is sometimes doubtful. The Irish fairy tradition particularly associated fairies with the dead and in north-western England a ‘boggart’ was a word for a fairy-ghost. Define a fairy and it will squeeze through your fingers.