Fairies

I am tinkering with the idea of writing a short story or manga about fairies, and so because of this, I decided to do some research to make my representation a little more accurate according to other history or texts.

It turns out that there are so many different tales of fairies and of their different sizes, shapes, magics, and all sorts of interesting things! The basic fairy that most people think of today is a small winged person (usually a female, though sometimes they are male). They are also associated with having insect or butterfly wings to let them fly and sometimes magical powers, but are definitely associated with the supernatural or magical. In old texts and in oral tradition and history there are other versions of this though. In Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s dream” the fey (another name for fairies) were depicted as human sized. Also at the time of when Shakespeare was alive they church highly disapproved of these magical beings. Sometimes they were thought of as demons and so that would be one reason why the church would so highly disapprove of them. This was also when they first deemed that goblins (particularly hobgoblins) were evil. Although they were “evil” texts depicted them as personifications of nature at that time. I don’t particularly understand how that would be bad or evil, but that is what they said. Also when it comes to the fairy’s size, texts would differ. Some folklore said that they were about the height of a small child, while others said they were human sized, and some, like our culture, said that they were small.

Celtic tradition and folklore calls the fey the “hidden people” as a reference as to how they hid from humans. That is how they came up with the fairy hills where they would say that they fey went to hide from humans. Also folklore says that they fey cannot lie but they do trick people with their words, so basically they are very deceptive. Folklore also says that they are devious and sometimes bite people. That is where we can connect to changelings. Fairies were said to steal children from their homes and replace them with changelings which were either fairy offspring or enchanted wood or stones that looked like they baby and seemed to grow sick and die. This is why when children died of diseases at young ages parents would say that that child was a changeling and that is why it died.

The history of fairies becomes a little unclear when you talk of how they came to be. In Peter Pan they said that a fairy is born when a baby laughs for the first time. Some people believe that they come from nature and that they are “born” in a sense from the element they are.

So that is most of what I found on my search about fairies, I advise you to take some peaks around google if you thought that this was interesting too. Also I am going to post pic of my drawing of a fairy. (It was supposed to be a vid but my computer won't play or post the file :( ) I hope you enjoy it! :)

Some extra links so you can find out more on Fairies:

http://www.fairies-tales-art.com/Fairies-History.html

http://urban-fairies.com/background.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy