Is a fairy and an alien the same thing? The first response to this question is ‘d’oh, obviously not!’, the first comes from a hole in the ground, the other from a hole in the sky. But think about it for a moment.

I) Fairies and aliens are both usually described as non-human humanoids: sometimes with pointed ears.

II) Fairies and aliens are often associated with bright lights.

III) Fairies and aliens need humanity for reasons that are not clear in either case: they constantly interact with homo sapiens.

IV) Fairies and aliens both kidnap humans.

V) Fairies and aliens are unpredictable in their behvaiour, they are neither entirely good nor entirely evil though they often show that they have anger management issues.

Then, fairy belief trailed off over most of the western world in the nineteenth century and by the twentieth century belief in UFOs and greys and numerous other fantastical creatures from ‘beyond’ took their place: before there were aliens there were mysterious airships and Forteana in the sky. It is almost as if a vacuum was left by the disappearance of fairies and that green humanoids from other planets took over the franchise.

This is by no means an original theory. Jung was already playing around with the folklore signifance of UFO by 1958. Then, in 1969. Jacques Vallee published Passport to Magonia where the French scholar looked at the curious parallels between aliens and fairies. Most, subsequent work, not least by Vallee himself, has pushed down the same tracks, e.g. Rojcewicz (1991), with the idea that whether or not fairies/aliens exist they represent essentially the same set of experiences and human needs. Of course, it could be argued that all supernatural creatures tend to fulfill the same roles be they fairies or aliens or the Virgin Mary. Still the parallels are there and they are striking.

There are almost as many different fairy outfits as there are fairies. However, there are a few common threads that are worth pulling on. First, many of the solitary fairies are nude or as good as, wearing only just rags. It is interesting that when, in 1834, a local Methodist decided to walk around without clothes in the road at night at Winsford, it was immediately assumed that he was a boggart!

Second, many group fairies are described as wearing green. Green, in fact, is a colour that recurs again and again in fairy descriptions from the famous green children at Woolpit (Suffolk) to the green-haired fairies described by Saddleworth poet Samuel Bottomley as having green hair. Why this color? Some claim that green is the color of death or perhaps it is because fairies are associated with vegetation?

Third, another feature are hats and particularly red hats: there is even a Border fairy, a thoroughly unpleasant Borders fairy called Red Cap.  Hats come up again and again even the most recent addition to the fairy canon, the Gremlins had their top hats.

Fourth, another feature of fairy clothing is that while being local it also tends to be traditional and perhaps a little old fashioned. For example when William D saw fairies at Kea Church they had sugar loaf hats, hats that had gone out of fashion in Cornwall perhaps a generation or two before. All this begs the question of what fairies would look like today should we see them: Victorians, Edwardians, men in tweed cloth caps, women with corsets…

Fifth, wings don’t feature…

Time and time again in illustrations fairies are shown to have pointed ears and this dates back to the early modern woodcuts when fairies are first made into works of art: take for example the small image of Robin Goodfellow below which almost certainly dates to the late sixteenth century.

Where does this notion of pointy eared fairies come from? There are two, related answers to the question. The first is that, in antiquity, centaurs and, most importantly Pan, were shown as part animals, and as such they often had pointed ass or donkey ears.  The image here is from the fourth century BC.

The second is that, with the rise of Christianity, and the death of the pagan world Pan and his fraternity were, quite literally, demonized. Demons in medieval art were portrayed as having pointed animal ears that went together perfectly with the cloven goat hoof of the devil.

The fact then that fairies are shown with pointed ears is hardly a compliment, at least it wasn’t in the sixteenth century when any Christian would understand the implication all too well.  But by the nineteenth century pointy ears were just part of fairy uniform: though many more ‘realistic’ artists avoided the touch. In the twentieth-century Tolkien did not perhaps have a clear idea about elves’ ears in Middle Earth. But cartoons and films of his universe leapt at the chance of a cheap and a useful symbol of difference. Then there is Spock, a science fiction elf…

And by now pointed ears for a fantasy or offworld creature is almost a reflex.

And perhaps most curiously – what would Pan, St Augustine or, for that matter, Tolkein have had to say about this?! – ear sculpting..

Perhaps you mean fairy TALES or the Japanese Manga series? Fairies don’t have tails.

Fairy music is one of the constants of fairy-lore. Though there are many different stories – including the casual walker cursed by music or the man blessed with music by the fairies or a bizarre case of mistaken identity – we are going to concentrate here on the man or woman who suddenly hears fairy music blown down to them on the breeze and remains enchanted. The references are so similar and so widespread that there is the suspicion that there might be some natural phenomenon that explains ‘fairy music’: though what that explanation might be is anyone’s guess. Here is a reference from the Alps.

Once my wife was standing before her house on a bright moonlit night, and to pass the time she looked out into the ‘world’. At once she heard in the distance a music so lovely that she had never in all her life heard anything like it, just as if the angels were playing. She went away from the house and inched, bit by bit, farther and farther, in order to hear the music better, and the farther she went the more lovely it sounded. At last my wife could no longer stand still, and she walked and walked, and came, just by hearing and listening, all the way to the mountain ravine.

And here is a reference from the Isle of Man:

An English gentleman, the particular friend of our author, to whom he told the story, was about passing over Duglas-bridge before it was broken down; but, the tide being high, he was obliged to take the river; having an excellent horse under him, and one accustomed to swim. As he was in the middle of it, he heard, or imagined he heard, the finest symphony, he would not say in the world, for nothing human ever came up to it. The horse was no less sensible of the harmony than himself, and kept in an immoveable posture all the time it lasted; which, he said, could not be less than three quarters of an hour, according to the most exact calculation he could make, when he arrived at the end of his little journey, and found how long he had been coming. He, who before laughed at all the stories told of fairies, now became a convert, and believed as much as ever a Manks-man of them all (Waldron).

In Ireland, meanwhile, the phenomenon was so common that some fairy sites were named for music Lissakeole, the fort of the music, is a common name in the south of Ireland, while there is a Knocknafeadalea, Whistling Hill.

What does the music sound like? A professional musician Thomas Wood heard what he believed was pixy music on Dartmoor in 1921 and wrote: ‘this music was essentially harmonic. It was not a melody, an ‘air’. It sounded like the weaving together of various tenuous fairy strands’. When he was later told that Irish fairy music was ‘a waving in the air’ he agreed enthusiastically. An individual (DY) from the same general locality some forty years later had a similar experience: ‘lying in bed in bed when I was about 8/9, windows open, summer night – it was gloaming coming on night I always remember ‘bells’ – well at least that’s how I think of them.  A lovely music, like glass bells – very very beautiful…’

Other descriptions from elsewhere seem to correspond to this essential lack of melody. Consider this comment from Wirt Sikes: ‘The music of the Tylwyth Teg has been variously described by people who claim to have heard it; but as a rule with much vagueness, as of a sweet intangible harmony.’ Sikes compares fairy music to the famous lines about Caliban from the Tempest that come close to Thomas Wood’s description above: ‘The isle is full of noises;/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not./ Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments/ Will hum about mine ears.’ Perhaps a young Shakespeare in Warwickshire…

And here are three examples of fairy music written out. The first is Thomas Wood’s attempt to render pixy music; the second is a Welsh man who has written down the last bars of fairy music (Sikes); and the last is the cry of a banshee from Yeats!!

Wood:

Sikes:

Yeats:

Thanks to Chris from Haunted Ohio Books for help with this page.

If you buy a book of fairy tales you might expect to get a book full of fairies. But, of course, any child who has sat at his parent’s knee to listen to a story knows that fairy tales rarely have fairies in them. The ‘fairy’ in fairy tales come from a now obscure French work entitled Conte de fees (D’Aulnoy’s), but actually fairies were not particularly common in this work either. Perhaps the best way to think of a fairy tale is to give ‘fairy’ the now obsolete but once common sense of, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it: ‘[e]nchantment, magic; a magic contrivance; an illusion, a dream.’ Cinderella is a Magic Story, Snow White is a Tale of Enchantment. Perhaps the closest word in modern English – though it is on its way out – is ‘fancy’: Goldilocks as a fancy tale or better still a fancy. So much nicer than the ugly German Märchen beloved by folklorists.

In any case, that’s the linguistics of fairy tale what about those rare fairies? Cinderella has a fairy godmother. Rumplestiltskin would be, in the English tradition, a solitary fairy. There is an Italian tale: The Three Fairies, though this has never had much success in the English-speaking world. Peter Pan is sometimes dropped into fairy book collections for the young: though it is a twentieth century novel that became a famous play in 1904. Very occasionally, this was truer in Victorian and Edwardian times, Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream was also included in fairy tale collections, though there is lots of fancy but not much tale: not particularly satisfying from the point of view of a six year old.

But hold on a second, what actually went wrong? Britain and Ireland had an extraordinary range of traditional stories, many of which included fairies. Yet these stories did not appear in most nineteenth centuries collections and they were quite forgotten by the twentieth century. These tales, the true fairy tales of the English-speaking world are often less polished and cruder than Hans Christian Anderson, but they remain entertaining for young and old alike. In fact, their very crudity is the guarantee that they are closer to the traditions that were slowly sanded down in the great French, German and later Scandinavian collections.

If you watch a Disney cartoon with fairies or flick through random images of ‘fairies’ on Google’s image search fairies have one thing in common – wings…

However, traditional accounts do not describe fairies’ wings, though fairies can fly or at least rush from place to place in a moment. Where then do wing’s come from? A crucial moment comes in Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712), one of the most important eighteenth-century English poems, where AP writes the following lines:

Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold,/. Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;/ Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight.

it would be interesting to know where on earth Pope got this line from.

These words, in any case, gestated and Thomas Stothard, Pope’s late eighteenth-century illustrator showed fairies to have butterfly wings on the basis of this line in 1798: though, in fact, the ‘fairies’ resemble far more the nauseating Italian putti/cherubs of the late Renaissance than they do English fairies as they had been imagined in the previous centuries.

However, there may have been something more general in the air for already in 1790 Fuseli’s Puck showed fairies with bats wings!

Why do we have to wait to the end of the eighteenth century for this? One possibility is that fairies were increasingly accepted and they were being assimilated to Renaissance cherubs as the Renaissance was beginning to take off in the English-speaking world. Another possibility is that as fairies declined in popular culture they were ‘gentrified’ and became more and more like angels.

In any case, the idea shot quickly through our culture to the point where the most recent fairy cartoon, Tinkerbell and the Wings, an entire film is based around the question of flight and there is now a small industry of fairy-wing producers.

However, knowing authors and artists have understood that wings are surplus to requirement. Susan Townsend Warner, for example, in her Kingdoms of Elfin claims that it is not seen as properly fairy to fly and that only commoners would take out their wings! She may have a point and her fairies don’t blink at playing golf… But the wings will out. Twentieth-century fairy sightings often describe beings with wings, something that would never have happened in the nineteenth century.

It is a beautiful cool evening and you are walking along the way when you hear the peculiar jangling of fairy music and you turn to see, to your amazement, a group of twenty fairies dancing in a circle around a large toadstool. What do you do? Well, it used to be said that it was bad luck to see the fairies before they saw you. As extremely private creatures they resent being ‘spied’ upon and do not hesitate to punish those who were ‘nosey’ about their world: not for nothing they are called the secret people and in faery curiosity really does kill the cat. You should probably then take a deep breath, enjoy the sight and walk quickly on…

Of course, fairies may take it upon themselves to come into your life and your house. Even then, though, their desire for secrecy remains. For example, fairies used to give money to their favourites, but if the lucky recipient was foolish enough to mouth the fairies’ generosity around they would stop their dole payments. Some fairies, particularly brownies, are so generous with their time that they actually help around the house. However, again, they would only do work once the household had gone to sleep and they were furious if it transpired that human eyes had been upon them without their permission.

Fairies are also sensitive about things that might seem obvious, because they are courtesies that we would extend to any human being. For example, if you leave fairies food or drink, make sure that the water is clean and the food is wholesome. A little stale bread will not cause offence, cheese crawling with maggots will bring the wrath of the fey upon you… Fairies like things to be clean as well: pixies were sometimes credited with pinching housewives who left the kitchen in a shameful state. They also particularly resented rubbish being thrown on their heads: in days gone by when ‘slops’ were disposed of out of the window at night this was a real danger.

Traditional storytellers had one great concern, that fairies would capture or take individuals away with them. If that should happen, then, the individual in question faced a stark choice. If he or she played by the fairies rules then they would be their prisoner for a time or perhaps for ever. If, instead, they followed the rules below then they might get home by morning. First, a fairy prisoner should never dance with a fairy. W.B.Yeats records one poor woman who made that mistake and returned home a year later without any toes. She’d danced them off… The image below comes, instead, from nineteenth-century Wales.

Second, don’t ever take food or drink from the fairies and that includes fruit hanging from their trees and water running in their streams. As with all supernatural creatures the act of drinking or eating their foods means that you become their prisoner… If a cup of wine is pushed in your direction follow the sensible advice of the best fairy book heroes and pretend to drink it dropping it down your front, instead.

Third, don’t get romantically involved with a fairy. Tradition claims that fairies deliberately brought humans into their realms who they wanted to seduce or marry: these relationships never ended well and the kids need lots of counselling…

There are literally hundreds of records from the last five hundred years where individuals claim to have seen fairies, have talked to fairies, have killed fairies, have slept with fairies and, in some cases, have, they say, gone to live fairies and raise children with them. According to tradition these associations rarely end well. Perhaps then the question should be how do I avoid fairies? However, as you’ve clicked on this link, you deserve a proper answer to a dangerous question.

The first rule for seeing fairies is the children rule. When we collate fairy sightings a striking number involve children who are younger than ten. Likewise many people who claim that they saw fairies when they were children also claim that they saw fairies less and less: lots in infancy, a few in their adolescence and then rarely if ever by the time that they reach adulthood.

The second rule for seeing fairies is the bed rule. Again a striking number of fairy sightings (like ghost sightings and other ‘visions’) take place in bed either before, during or immediately after sleep. For obvious reasons there is the suspicion here that the sighting is connected with some sort of dream state.

The third rule for seeing fairies is the night rule. Even if you are not in bed more fairies and supernatural creatures are seen at night. Believers explain this with reference to fairy tradition that claims that fairies prefer the night. Sceptics point to the excess of shadows and the possibility of confusing small visual stimuli at midnight.

The fourth rule for seeing fairies is the repetition rule. An unusual number of sightings involve individuals undertaking some kind of repetetitive agriculture work: e.g. hoeing a field or picking blackberries. Again there is the suspicion that there is some kind of mental state that either brings down the curtain between our and another dimension (the believer) or creates the necessary conditions for some kind of illusion (the sceptic).

The fifth rule is the country rule. Fairies are seen in cities, but even there fairies tend to be seen in parks and gardens. It is much more common for fairies to be seen in the countryside out in fields, in woods or on the moors than in an urban setting. Is this because fairies prefer the countryside or because the country creates a particular state of mind?

The sixth rule is the habit rule. Fairies are traditionally seen in certain places: on that hill rather than on this hill, for example. If you are a fairy believer you will conclude that this is because fairies live in the fairy hill (or plain or wood) in question. If, on the other hand, you are a sceptic you will deduce that certain places create conditions conducive to optical illusions or special psychological states.

The seventh rule, the lone rule. Fairies are rarely seen by groups of people – though there are a few fascinating cases – they are typically seen by individuals on their own.

The eighth rule. As with other supernatural visions those who see fairies may be under stress  or they may be worried or they may have recently suffered a tragedy.

Summing up then the ideal circumstances for seeing a fairy would be to send an emotionally-disturbed ten-year-old blackberrying at dusk on a hill associated with fairies on his or her own. If that doesn’t sound like good parenting then we return to the point that perhaps meeting fairies is not the safest activity.