Stuff You Should KnowMost people think of Tinkerbell when we think of fairies, but the Disney versions capture only the last century or so of what we’ve conceived fairies to be. Over millennia they’ve gone from ugly and scary to pretty and helpful and everything in between. Come meet the fae!
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry who's just flitting around us, sprinkling us with fairy dust so we can fly around with their fear and of course all that makes this stuff.
You should know. That's right, a fairy petition.
Yeah, I'm excited about this one. I asked for this. I think fairies are cool, and we're going to talk about them because I realized I had a very limited understanding of what fairies are, what qualifies as fairies, where they came from, what they can do, what they do do, all that stuff. So we're going to get into it. Chuck, when we talk today about fairies.
That's right, and I think it can be summed up best by saying, fairies have existed in many forms in lore throughout parts of Europe for a long long time. And sometimes they're good fairies, sometimes they're bad fairies, sometimes they're evil, sometimes they're fun.
There you go, that's all you need to know.
And now we're gonna talk about all of that over and over for the next forty minutes.
Well, what's really weird that The first thing I didn't know is that fairies as we understand them today are relatively recent concepts. And that because, like you said, they pop up in lore all over the place at different times, going back a very long time. There's it's not like some groups said, hey, these are what fairies are and it just spread. Instead, groups around Europe in particular, came up with these concepts of things that had fairy traits, but they didn't they didn't put the whole thing together as fairies until much later. So no one can really agree on what exactly a definition of fairies are, aside from something that they're kind of human like usually and they're associated with magical powers some way or another.
Yeah, because if you tried to do that, it would be like, well, here are Irish fairies from this period and they're like this, and here are Scottish fairies from this period and they're like this, and these come from Scandinavia in this period and they're completely different, and here's their stories, which is what folklore is. It's different everywhere. The actual word fairy is much more recent than the lore of the fairy. It didn't come around in the language until late medieval period, but the law of fairy goes back much, much, much further, and from the beginning. I guess we need to talk a little bit about elves because they are sort of in lockstep with fairies in that lore in a way. One way is that elves were not you know, the kind of fun, lovely elves. They're not making cookies in a tree back in the early days. They were usually associated in the early days with illness, with rash, with health problems. If your cows all died, it could have been the work of elves.
Kind of an impy kind of creature.
Yeah, but that demonstrates like the idea that they brought, say, disease or illness, especially mysterious suddenly on setting disease or illness, like that's associated with fairies or elves in this case, and that also pops up in other places too. But they just didn't call them elves. They called them other things. But you just kind of see some like underpinnings of things that came to be part of fairy lore. And eventually they were like, all this stuff is so different, We're just gonna have to chop the fairies up. Into different camps and categories, which they eventually did. We'll talk about that later, but one of the one of the things that they figured out, there's a guy named Ronald Hutton who as a folklore scholar from the Anglo Saxon period. He didn't live in that time, that's his his focus, I guess, And he said, there's like clues here there because nobody sat down for at the very earliest periods and said, here's what fairies are. Future historian, go tell everybody about it. They just pop up here there, and they seem to pop up not just in folklore but in actual like scholarly works from the early medieval period where people are like, oh, yeah, this guy ran into a fairy and here's his story.
That's right, he did.
You know, if you look at the name as far as like elves always being like empish or bad or monstrous, even that's not necessarily true because there is a name ae l f w I ny I guess would that be pronounced elf line off line?
Yeah? I think so that's a great band name.
Yeah, not too bad. Ex it's an Anglo Saxon name, but it means elf friend. So that's an indication that you know, there were friendly elves and this came from Ronald Hutton. And when Ronald Hutton talks.
People listen, Wow a joke for our genexen boomer friends.
Yeah, for sure. So a lot of people say, well, okay, what would make the most sense is that elves, fairies, these kind of like supernatural creatures that live in close proximity and interact sometimes with humans, probably came from the early gods and the early nature spirits, and it wasn't until Christianity came along that they were kind of wiped out or demonized, literally demonized, and in Ireland in particular, they're like, yeah, they're actually related to one of the last native indigenous magic using people who lived in Ireland before the modern Irish people like us alive today came along, in particular the Tua dey Donna. They were like, again, like a magic using people. They were people of the goddess Danu, who was also known as the Morrigan. And they said, okay, this is what elves and fairies evolved into from this group, this magic using group, as humans kind of came in and pushed them out into the rural areas.
Did you just feel the entirety of our d and d audience stirring in their seat when you said magic user.
And you get this one too cleric, They're.
All like, what did he just Did you just say magic users?
Did he say fighter instead of night?
So those irish elves, like you said, descended from them and lived on in fairy forts or fairy mounds, these sort of raised structures. If you are an archaeologist, you will say, actually, those are not for fairies. They were where ancient humans lived. But that notion persists, the magical notion persists such today that still in some places you cannot build roads where there are these places because not of the fact that ancient humans might be buried there, but because of the supernatural menace that might befall you if you disturb it.
Yeah, and I saw that archaeologists are like, great, for whatever reason we're preserving these archeological sites. That's fantastic. But yeah, the most recent I could find was there was a highway being built in County Claire in nineteen ninety nine and they were gonna they were gonna basically tear up a ferry bush, and people were like, you do not want to do that, and they actually built. They moved the road over so they didn't remove this ferry bush. This is almost in the twenty first century that they did this, you know. So there is this idea of you know, fairies do exist to some degree, the people believe in it. And it's not just from this ancient folkal or tradition. It actually was revived in the early twentieth century in Ireland became part of like nationalist pride, which is why it survives in such strength today as we'll see.
Yeah, and was not you know, kind of Concurrently, while this was happening in Northern Europe, the British Isles like Scandinavia, Germany and the British Isles mainly, it was also at the same time coming out of classic Greek and Roman stories. Basically this is where the sort of the human appearing fairy kind of comes more into play. That lived these very lavish lifestyles. They had kings and queens stuff like that. Not necessarily saying they were human, because sometimes they were sometimes they were not, but they seem to always have some sort of connection to magic in some.
Way, right, yes, and.
Didn't like people, didn't like like real regular humans or at least didn't trust them.
Right, And it's from this belief in nymphs and satyrs. Again, these are like wood dwelling sprites, magical people. They bear a really strong resemblance to elves and the British Isles. But again, these things evolved in an isolated manner. I think, I mean, I guess the Romans did make it all the way to Britain, so I guess it's possible they brought the ideas of nymphs and satyrs with them, but I don't know. I definitely have the impression that this stuff evolved from the Celts independently. So, but the name fairy actually comes from the Roman mythology of the fates fairy well, fates led to fairy in English fay and fairy, fae and fae r i e. Were magical or uncanny. There was an adjective that described that, and in fact, if you came down with sudden illness you were considered to be fay struck or fairy struck. And get this, Chuck, I saw that the word stroke today for becoming suddenly paralyzed, comes from elf stroke, which was what they used to call it in the medieval era when somebody suddenly had a stroke. That's what the that's what it came from. You were stricken by elves, you were ELFs.
Stroke el Strokes another good band name.
I think that that's alf Wind's debut album.
Did you know that actor Aubrey Plaza had a stroke when she was twenty years old?
No? I didn't. Wow, she's solely recovered. Huh oh.
Yeah, And I mean I think it had been out before, but she recently was on I think Howard Stern and talked about it, like in depth. Not maybe not for the first time, but I think it it's been amplified recently. But yeah, very scary.
Yeah, oh, I'm sure, man. I think it's scary at any age, but especially when you're younger too, you know.
No, absolutely, all right, So we're in the twelfth century now, Aubrey Plaza's won't be around for a long long time. There were a lot of traditions by this point firmly established about these again human looking or at least human shaped, little supernatural creatures. Sometimes they you know, they weren't angels or devils. They kind of danced in between sometimes depending on the lore and the story, and they lived in a human like society sort of parallel to us, and were a lot like us.
They lived a lot longer. It's now occurring to me that Ruby and I a few.
Years ago read a whole fairy series of books that was kind of fun about these children who find these fairies and go to their magical land. And it's very now that I know this stuff. It's very much based on all this sort of traditional lore.
Is it. But was it positive or were those kids in danger?
Well, they were a little bit of both. The kids weren't in danger.
It was kind of like a Narnia thing, like once they went in there, there was like kind of good and evil to combat, gotcha.
So yeah, that definitely does follow in the tradition of how there was a duality among fairies, and it wasn't even necessarily like in this world, these fairies are good and these are bad, although some some cultures did separate them like that, but it could just be different folk beliefs that the same fairies, depending on where you encountered them, how you treated them, how you spoke around them, could go from good to evil, and it just like the flip of a switch.
Yeah, they did this in these books too.
Actually okay, great.
Yeah.
A good example to me, Chuck of how just randomly different fairies can be. What can be considered a fairy is Merlin from the Arthurian Legends, Like he's considered a fairy. His dad was either a demon or a fairy, and Merlin was at least half fairy, which would explain his sorcery skills. And then Morgan le Fay was also part of the Arthurian Legends, and they think that she is descended or based on the Irish Morgana that we talked about.
Yeah, that's right.
One of the kind of maybe surprising things to learn is that at the time, if you were a in medieval times.
You.
May write it as a like this is a real natural phenomenon that we just don't haven't studied yet and don't fully understand yet. Like it's looked upon as lore all these years later, but at the time a lot of this stuff was kind of put out in historical accounts of the day, even not just like folklore books and stuff, as like, hey, this is the thing and we just don't understand it yet.
Yeah, it was very Fordian in nature, you know.
Yeah.
And then kind of wrapping up the medieval era. In the thirteenth century, Christianity stepped up and said, no, these fairies you're talking about, they are mentioned nowhere in the Bible, so therefore they're evil, they're devils, they're in disguise, they're meant to lead you astray. Stop talking about fairies. And if you know a fairy, stop talking to that fairy. You're not allowed to be friends with them any longer. That's right, And it led to a great schism among some really wonderful fairy human friendships. But eventually it recovered. And when we come back, we'll pick up starting around the nineteenth century when things really got hot again.
All right, here we go with that two everybody fairies true story. We're in the nineteenth century. Now, we're jumping ahead a little bit. We'll probably jump back as well.
That's right.
But interest in the traditions I think you mentioned earlier, like these sort of old traditions are being revived because of national pride. All this old folklore is kind of coming back. Of course, central to a lot of these stories were the brothers Grim Jakopp and Wilhelm, who we did I think a two parter on the Grim brothers didn't we Yeah.
We did one on the fairy Tales, and I can't yeah or the other one I guess.
It was, I think, yeah, just on the Grim Brothers themselves. So those are from a while ago, but those are good if you want to check those out. But if you look at their eighteen twelve collection, this is I believe before that they were telling sort of oral stories and before they put them into like real literary works that had a lot more religion and a lot less of the sexy stuff. A lot of these were like really really violent tales and feature you know, things, you know, like little folks living inside of a mountain, magical creatures, helpful elve sometimes but also really awful like violence and stuff like that, which of course fairies were a part of.
Yeah, and the fact that they're called fairy tales demonstrates what I was talking about earlier, that fairy was an adjective for anything magical or uncanny, so it encompassed all sorts of magical stuff, not just flying little humans or imps that tried to trick you into stuff.
Yeah, but this stuff is growing via previous folklore obviously, but now like real literary works are starting to write about this stuff more and more in the nineteenth century.
Right, so people are, like you said, they're starting to have kind of a response or reaction to modernization. And there one of the first responses was to kind of try to preserve the original traditional folklore. And it wasn't just the Grims that did that. There was a novelist named Anna Eliza Bray and she collected folk stories from her native Devonshire, England, and she published them in eighteen forty four. And what she found by going out in the countryside and interviewing the rural people there is that basically everybody believed in Pixie's fairy, that kind of thing. They were just part of the fabric of life, and in particular, the people of Devonshire associated them with the souls of unbaptized babies who didn't go on because they hadn't been baptized, but they didn't go to Hell or anything like that. They just turned into fairies, which is a pretty pleasant thing to think totally.
I love it.
Also, late in the nineteenth century, none other than William Butler Yates published I don't know if it was the first one, but maybe one of the first big guide books almost about fairies. It was called Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, published in eighteen eighty eight, and you know, retold popular stories, reprinted some stories. It sounds like a pretty easy gig if you asked me for Yates.
Well, you know what that reminds me of, Chuck is do you remember that big coffee table gnome book from the seventies.
M like garden Homes.
Yes, it was an illustrated guide to gnomes and how they lived and where they lived.
It was I don't remember that. I bet I would recognize it if you like showed me that. I know we did not own that, but it was probably in a lot of coffee tables.
Okay, well I'll buy it and then bring it over to you and so you we'll sit on the couch and go through it together. Okay, Oh that sounds nice. So okay, So, like you said, W. B. Yates created this guide book to the Irish fairies, and it actually became like kind of one of the authoritative homes on the whole thing. And one of the things that I mentioned earlier I think is really important. I didn't realize this, but in the British Isles, in Ireland and Cornwall and Wales and the Scottish Highlands. They as in the nineteenth centuries it kind of wore on. They really grabbed on to that tradition, that folklore of fairies and just absorbed it into their modernizing national belief and pride. I had no idea about that, but it certainly does explain why still this at least kind of a winking belief in fairies in the area still too, which I think is great.
Yeah, cool to rediscover those old traditions nuts too, specifically like thumbier nose it, you know, the modernization of science and stuff like that.
But any way, in America, I'm kind of jealous because in America we don't have fairies. We just have like baseball.
Yeah, hey, baseball's pretty great there, it is, but it's no fairies.
Yeah, that's true.
Also, in eighteenth century literature was when we first saw wings on these things. I don't think we mentioned yet that up until this point these were not sort of the tinker bells that you might picture flying around when you think of fairies with their little flitty wings. That happened in the early eighteenth century in literature a little bit, but really the Victorian period is where we get this idea of these sort of tiny little insect like things usually looking like women, or at least shaped like women, and that more commonplaces what you think of as fairies is the Victorian era.
Yeah, and the wings are typically done like kind of like a really beautiful, colorful, translucent butterflies wings. I've also seen that they are sometimes depicted with bird wings or bat wings, which I didn't like that last one. One of the guys who really kind of advanced our modern conception of fairies is, you know, little beautiful humans with wings was a painter named John Anster Fitzgerald, and his paintings are just a joy to look upon. My favorite so far is Rabbit and Fairies, and I mean it does what's on the label. It's a rabbit surrounded by fairies in this cute little grassy area and it's just heartwarming stuff. It's like looking at old care bears images.
Oh wow, I'm looking at that now. Is that a great point? I mean, it's beyond the whimsy of it.
It's beautiful, very very lovely, but not expected like bright colors.
It's very beige.
Yeah, but let's not overlook that whimsy because it is important.
No, it for sure is because these are fairies, after all, not all art depicted them depicted them like that, though it wasn't always these beautiful things, or at least that wasn't the reason behind it. Because there's a little something in the art world back then called the fairy loophole, and that is, if you lived in a place at the time that had pretty bad censorship for butts and breasts and paintings, a little workaround was to just paint it as a fairy because they were usually not clothed at that point, and so you could say, hey, sensor, you can't say anything. There's a fairy that's not a woman.
See the wings, dummy beat it. This is actually what inspired me to do this episode on Fairies, Chuck. There was a buzz it great.
Oh yeah, why, I just wonder where that came from. And now it all makes sense. We should have just done this one as.
A short stuff. So we're going to do a short stuff within a larger episode right here, right now, we're going to great talk about the Cottingly Fairies hoax, which was arguably the greatest fairy hoax of all time.
Yeah, this was in nineteen seventeen. Photography was a thing at the time, and there was a sixteen year old named Elsie Wright and her nine year old cousin, Francis Griffiths. Griffiths, that's a tough one. And I even have teeth who said, hey, we photographed some fairies by the stream near our home in Cottingley, England.
Everybody look, look.
Yeah, And so this was a time we did an episode on spiritualism and we talked about how it was a big response to so much death during the Civil War, the in World War One. And I think Elsie's mom, Polly, was into the spiritual movement and she took these pictures to the Theosophical Society, which is also intoitulism at the times, said look at what my daughter captured. Here's some fairies in photos. And everybody just went wild, like they just like if something can go viral in nineteen seventeen is what happened with these photos. They were spectacular photos of Elsie or Francis interacting with these beautiful little winged fairies flitting around in the air around them.
Yeah, I had seen these somewhere. I don't know if you sent these to me or if I just came across them at some.
Point in my path.
Pretty famous, no, well yes, but also just like great and like super cool that this sixteen year old and nine year old pulled this hoax over because it looks pretty darn good for the time. What they did was they copied images from a children's book and cut them out, added wings to them, and then use hairpins to hold that paper up and took pictures.
And I think it probably helps it.
It was nineteen seventeen style photography, but.
Pretty fun, little tricky thing to do for these two young girls.
Yeah, and they were like they you know, they didn't mean for this thing to become like a national phenomenon. But I think one of them later said, I think it was Francis, who's like, you could see the happins in the picture if you look closely enough. And yet that didn't matter, because the adults who were into spiritualism wanted so badly for some evidence that the supernatural existed. Some any fairy pictures will do that, they just bought the whole thing, hook line and sinker. And in fact, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, he got into spiritualism toward the end of his life, and because he was just such a trusted authority on things like mysteries and rationalism and all that stuff, he wrote a paper and when the paper was released, he was saying, essentially, this is real. I consulted a photography expert and the expert said, these pictures show whatever was in front of the camera when the photo was taken. They haven't been doctored, and it is true.
The guy was right, no, no, that's true.
But he was saying, like, they haven't been doctored, they haven't been messed with, like this is a real picture of what you're seeing. And Conan Doyle said, okay, they're fairies. This guy proved it. These are real deal things, and not everybody believed it. I think there was a headline in one of the London papers when Doyle released his article that said, has Conan Doyle gone mad? Like it was not necessarily well received by everybody, but in the spiritualist movement it was like we approof finally.
Yeah.
I wonder if the last line of that article said, perhaps as best if he just sticks to Sherlock, he.
Stays in his Sherlock lane, and that was the first instance of people using the word lane like that in a smarmy way. So I want to say also, Francis and Elsie were from what I can tell, Elsie went to her grave never admitting it was a hoax, really, because Francis did admit it until nineteen eighty three.
Oh jeez.
And she was saying like she didn't feel bad because obviously the adults wanted to believe this very obvious hoax, So you know, more power to them. I don't think said the last part. I'm paraphrasing.
She said of men without hats concert, they're all dancing the safety dancer.
She was like, hey, guess what that has something to get off my chest?
There be good.
So nineteen fifty seven there comes another paper from a folkloress named Catherine Mary Briggs who did another sort of categorization of fairies that involved what is this one, two, three, four, five, six, I guess seven categories, and we're going to go over those quickly here. The first is heroic trooping fairies. These are the kinds I was talking about. There were a little more aristocratic that had the king and the queen. Not to be confused with the second grouping homely trooping fairies, which were you know, kind of farm dwellers who can maybe change in size, who might reward a human for help, who might punish a human for not helping or being unkind, and might even steal from humans.
Yes, there's another one, solitary fairies. They're usually tied to a place, usually in the countryside, say like the moors or something like that, and they will often like pose as something like a needy stranger or something like that, and to test the traveler's kindness to strangers. And if they pass the test, they might be rewarded with something. If they fail, they'll probably be punished by this magical fairy. Leprechauns are one of them. They're usually tricksters. There's one named Tom tit Tot who I read the story of and it's great. It's got a kind of a rumpel stilt skinny vibe to it. But I think I like Tom tit Tot's a little more, so I say, go check out Tom tit Tot in his story.
Yeah.
And you know, it seems like a lot of this as it's occurring to me more and more. It sort of falls into the category of the what's the story that you tell when it's are you going to do the good thing or the bad thing?
Is it a fat no.
More agacy tale?
Yeah?
Like as a moral yeah, I think sort of fables and morality tales where they're saying, well, good things will happen to you or bad things will happen to you according to your behaviors and whether or not you're like kind to the stranger passing through town. It's actually a fairy or a leprechaun. YEA, well, well I'll be what else we got? We got three more categories?
Uh?
No, we've got two. No, we have three? Year, you're right.
Three is a catch all tutelary.
Fairies fun to say, but also include my favorite fairies, which are brownies, which are household helpers, and people will still leave out a little bit of bread, a little saucer of milk, or something like that as a thank you gift to the brownies that live in their house and help them out with household chores. The very very famous fairy tale about the cobbler who was helped out by fairies who made shoes for him every night and eventually made him a very wealthy man. Those are brownies. I remember that anybody helping out around the house, that's a brownie. And I just think that's the cutest, most down to earth folksy concept ever, that there's little tiny fairies that help out around the house. And the other thing that they do, which I think is hilarious, they punish lazy servants who aren't doing enough work by pinching them while they sleep.
That's got to be where brownie points comes from, right.
Yeah, probably, don't you think? Probably? Yeah, because you do want to score points with the brownies to keep them happy. Because yeah, in addition to happening out, if you don't reward them, they will sometimes start stealing. They'll make your milk go bad. They'll make it impossible for butter to churn into butter. They can't mess you up. You don't want to mess with them, but if you keep them happy, like I fully want a brownie in your house.
They make your fart hang in the air long after it's it's fast.
Yeah, I know that kind of brownie.
Finally, there are nature fairies. These are the kind of water sprites and river sprites you were talking about, These spirits that dwell in nature.
It's very.
Self explanatory. They protect animals usually and deal with the animals out there. And then there's the catch all category that I mentioned, which are the scariest ones, like the giants and the hags and the monsters of the group.
Like, yes, I get that that is part of original fairy lore and like the widest possible use of the term fairy. But we've evolved so far beyond that. How are you going to include like a monster and a giant into the fairy categories?
Yeah, totally.
Giants and giant exactly, They're their own thing. Don't do any like them. Yeah, I say we take our second break, Chuck, and come back and wrap this up and talk some more about get this fairies, okay, Chuck. So, by the nineteenth century, early twentieth century, like fairies were starting to congeal, all these different threads were starting to kind of come together, and yeah, they were solidifying like so much jello pudding. Yeah, remember the skin on top of that stuff?
Buh of, just like jello or the pudding.
The jello pudding, I don't remember.
If it sat out, would I get a little topper.
As it sat it would almost invariably like create like a shell a skin at the top and it was limsay and rubbery and like you did not want it. But I think some real sickos liked the skin of the pudding.
It's right here that I have to quickly sidetrack about a movie I just saw called The Substance.
Have you read about this yet?
No? It's the new movie with Demi Mour and Margaret Qually That is a body horror film. Oh, just say the least. If you're into body horror, this is the going to go down in history. Is the all time leader in that category. It is the most foul, horrifying, disgusting but great thing that I've ever seen in my life.
I gotta see this.
Are you into that kind of thing?
Yeah? I mean I like all kinds of horror. Body horror is not my leading type of horror. It's usually a good ghost story, but I like body horror.
Well, go see The Substance. It is really something. I got the strongest stomach for that kind of thing. And I was literally feet pulled up in the theater, peeking through eyes like a small child.
So are you and holding my ears?
Are you into body horror?
I like a Cronenberg thing, But This is like Cronenberg on ten million milligrams of steroids. However much that is, it's beyond the pale of anything that you could imagine for body horror.
Okay, I'm telling you, I'll see that in the meantime. You see, there's a classic body horror movie called Society from the mid eighties. Don't know that one, and it's widely considered the all time leader in horrible, horrific body horror. So anymore I will be I can't wait to see the Substance Man.
Yeah, and it's got a great message. I can't remember the woman who made it, but her first movie is called Revenge and it was great, total sort of I spit upon your gravestyle Revenge film that you can watch now it's out on streaming. And she's just a very unique voice in film making these days. And a great message in this new one about women and aging and youth obsession with youth culture and stuff like that.
From what you described the messages.
Yes, it's tough. I cannot get some of the stuff out of my head.
Okay, So let's get back to fairies, shall we.
Yeah, that all started with putting skin, by the way, Yeah, fairies. Lets your mind run wild with that association.
Okay, so by this time fairies have are they're kind of becoming dual. They can be different kinds of sizes. They can be ugly or beautiful. And then from that point on, like they either have one or the other, usually polar extremes. Right, so, like they're either immortal or they don't have souls, so when they die they just perish completely, or they're they're fallen angels but they're not demonic or wait, member, there may be unbaptized babies, like there's they're as desparate and weird as it sounds like. It's still way more put together than the threads used to be before the nineteenth.
Yeah, for sure. Sometimes there are solo fairies. Sometimes they are in little small communities or families. We have mentioned that a lot of times they live out in rural areas and caves and wells and heidi holes other sort of bucolic rural spots, mounds and holes in the ground, things like that. Sometimes there is a fairy land like in these books that I read Ruby, where things are just magical and wonderful or can go really wrong. A lot of times the beauty is an illusion. So there are some stories like if a human comes along and says the right spell or applies to magic ointment, they will be awakened to the true reality that everything is all. The treasure is garbage, and the food is poison and stuff like that.
I found that interesting because the magic ointment jumped out at me because they also prescribed a magic ointment for witchcraft and to become a werewolf. And I don't remember what drug they what hallucinogen they thought was in that magic ointment, but I suspect yeah, referring to the same magic ointment that would make you trip balls.
Right, Oh, that's funny. Not Jim Wall's trip balls. They can't cross rivers usually, or any kind of running water.
Yeah, that's a big one.
Holy water is not great for them, right.
No, And this is where the influence of the Christian Church came in. They don't like holy water, they don't like cold iron. Church bells really drive them. They sound like nails on a chalkboard to them. And in fact, like just talking about religion can set a fairy off that one historian from the fifties, Katherine Mary Briggs, said it is tactless in the extreme to mention Sunday to a fairy. That's one of the best lines I've ever read.
Well, you know, the other thing you don't want to do is if you meet a fairy, don't call that fairy a fairy, right.
They don't want to hear that.
No, they want to be called fair folk people of peace. One thing that everybody now agrees on about fairies is that they really respond to flattery and that they're very easily upset.
Right, Sorry, I had a joke.
I'm not gonna tell Okay, you can tell me later.
I'll tell you later.
One thing that you can do, like, let's say you've got some disturbing fairy stories banning about that have to deal with human children and maybe a fairy, you know, swapping them out for a fairy like they've become a changeling. Essentially, if you're an unchristened baby and you think your baby is at risk to be carried off by a fairy, you wrap them up in daddy's clothes, put a bible under their pillow.
That's a good way.
Or if you live a little dangerously, you can hang some iron fire tongs or some giant iron scissors over their cradle.
Which seems like a really bad idea.
Yeah, I'd go with the Bible under the pillow, And that's me talking.
You don't want iron scissors to fall under your baby's crip. So this is where it gets really dark. In fact, there was a long standing folklore all the way through the late nineteenth century that when a child started to develop disabilities or was suddenly struck ill or i think was also born with like physical abnormalities, the folk belief was that the fairies had stolen the actual baby, the human baby, and replaced it with a fairy changeling, right, yeah, And so you would kill the fairy changeling because you wanted your baby back in hopes that they this would help get your baby back. And it was actually one of those things where probably some people, especially long ago, believed that what they were doing was actually killing a fairy baby. But it also served a really grim but kind of necessary for the time purpose of removing the baby that was never going to be able to help out on the farm, but was gonna need some of the food from that farm to stay alive, from a very poor family to have to take care of that kid. And that is about as dark as fairies get and there's some dark parts to fairies.
Yeah for sure.
And I would also like people to write in if they, like me, were singing the Chile's Babyback Ribs commercial in their head the third time you said babyback.
Oh, oh yeah, I'll bet. I'll bet that happened. Nice. That's a gift to you, buddy.
I think we should close with some famous fairies, because we mentioned that they had been had long been written about in literature, and some have some of that cream rises to the top everybody, and the wheat is separated from the chaff, and you get some genuine fairy celebrities. Puck is the one I would love to mention because Puck was not just from the mind of William Shakespeare. Puck was a fairy or a demon, depending on, of course, various factors of medieval folklore and Shakespeare by the time he got around to writing A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck was a very mischievous character who Shakespeare leaned on in that story. Puck as a character would help with chores around the house, maybe get rewarded with some bread and milk from the midwives, but could also play tricks on people like that spoiled milk again or maybe trip an old lady walking through the forest.
Right. He also appeared on the first season of Real World.
That's wasn't the first season, but yes.
So thank you for saving me a ton of emails. Yeah, first season was London, Josh. He also had a great nickname, Robin Goodfellow. Did not know that. Yeah, I'll just keep moving on. But you said that Shakespeare used him in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare was the champ of using and describing and writing about fairies. And it turns out they think actually venting fairies because one of the most legendary fairies was the fairy queen Queen Mab, who's described in Romeo and Juliet and just kind of spread from there, and they can't figure out where Shakespeare got this, so they actually think he might have made up this really definitive fairy Queen Mab, which is pretty impressive.
And I think we have to close by talking about the two most famous fairies of.
Them all, who tinker Bell and that tooth fairy.
Oh tinker Bell, of course, created by the great and wonderful Jay and Barry, author of the play, and then eventually the novel Peter Pan. What a great character and what a great just thing that Jay and Barry launched into the world. Like all about Peter Pan. I've always loved Peter Pan and all the stories and iterations from the various movies and cartoons to the actual books themselves, and that book about Jay and Barry or the movie about jan Berry, which was very good.
J and Barry also invented the concept of fairy dust. And there was a Guardian article that describes why I actually think. I found it on Reddit to tell you the truth. In the article, I say that Berry invented fairy dust. So, originally Peter Pan was a play and then a few years later it became a novel, and the fairy dust appears in the novel because in the interim between the play and the novels released, kids were trying to fly like Peter Pan. So we introduced fairy dust to say, like, you can't fly, kid, you don't have fairy dust. You have to have fairy dust to be able.
To fly, So don't jump out of your window for gotcha.
Exactly because it's not gonna work.
That's called a Janberry CoA original.
And then the Tooth fairy, you said, right.
Yeah, of course everyone loves the tooth fairy.
Of course.
This is the tradition of when your child looses their baby tea, they put it under their pillow or maybe in a little pocket of a tooth pillow that you might have bought for eight bucks or whatever. In my case, Janet Barney gave us a tooth fairy pillow, which was very sweet as a gift, and you get some you get something in there, like a little bit of money or a little treat or something like that. And that originated in Norse tradition in the thirteenth century, when parents would pay a tooth fee.
Yeah, they would pay a tooth fee because baby teeth were considered good luck. So they were essentially buying the lucky tooth from their child.
Yeah, buying it out.
But the the first appearance of the actual tooth fairy as we understand it today, that didn't come about until nineteen oh eight, when apparently a Chicago Tribune writer just made it up.
Yeah, but it was around long before that, but yeah, in print for sure.
And then we also can't not name check all of the Disney fairies, including tinker Bell. There was the fairy godmother in Cinderella. Yeah, there were fairies and fantasia.
All over the place.
Sleeping Beauty had three great fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merriweather the greatest. And that's all you really need to mention. The list goes on, but we're going to stop there.
Yeah, I wish I could remember the name of that book series. Let me see if I can find it real quick. Why don't you talk intelligently for ten seconds?
Oh god, let's see a little more about fairies. Fairies are great. Everybody typically agrees that was one scholarly finding Backyard Fairies.
I believe that is it?
What was that? That was the series?
I think I think it's Backyard Fairies. Okay, I might be wrong.
You sounded like you knew what it was a second ago.
Well i'm looking.
Yeah, yeah, Backyard Fairies by Phoebe wall w A h L. It's wonderful and there are a lot of books and they're a lot of fun if you have a kid, that's you know, like six ish.
Okay, great, thanks for read too, Thanks for that. Yeah. Well, Chuck recommended a children's book series which, as everyone knows, unlocks listener mail.
Yeah, I'm gonna mention this a quick mistake we made, and this is from Brad. A few people have written in and this is something we've mistaked on before.
Mistake on.
Hey, guys, have just finished listening to your History of Glasses episodes and noticed a little mistake and figured you'd love when people right into correct you. When Josh was listening Famous where monocles, you mentioned Monopoly guy rich uncle Pennybags is apparently his name a great example of the Mandela effect, guys, because he never wore a monocle. I'm pretty sure you even mentioned this in your episode about the Mandela effect, and probably in your Monopoly episode as well, so this may be a three timer. Any who, You guys are the best ever. I hope you make episodes for at least another couple of decades.
Rock on, Brad, Rock on yourself.
Brad, that was a great email and we appreciate it. We appreciate you thanks for pointing that out. It is so interesting when that Mandela effect comes up.
Agreed, I thought he had a monocle.
Two. I just I even don't believe what Brad's saying right now. I'm so convinced he had a monocle at some point.
Yeah, I looked it up.
I double checked, and there have been drawings of him with monocles, but nothing that's not canon, like no official.
Monopoly stuff.
And I've been playing Monopoly, we've been playing as a family, so I'm surprised it got past me.
Okay, all right, great, you got anything else?
Got nothing else?
And that was from Brad.
That's from Brad.
Okay, Well, if you want to be like Brad and get in touch with us, send us an email too. Send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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