Fairies: A Dangerous History

by Richard Sugg

Don’t be fooled by Tinkerbell and her pixie dust—the real fairies were dangerous. In the late seventeenth century, they could still scare people to death. Little wonder, as they were thought to be descended from the Fallen Angels and to have the power to destroy the world itself. Despite their modern image as gauzy playmates, fairies caused ordinary people to flee their homes out of fear, to revere fairy trees and paths, and to abuse or even kill infants or adults held to be fairy changelings. Such beliefs, along with some remarkably detailed sightings, lingered on in places well into the twentieth century. Often associated with witchcraft and black magic, fairies were also closely involved with reports of ghosts and poltergeists.

In literature and art, the fairies still retained this edge of danger. From the wild magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , through the dark glamour of Keats, Christina Rosetti’s improbably erotic poem “Goblin Market,” or the paintings inspired by opium dreams, the amoral otherness of the fairies ran side-by-side with the newly delicate or feminized creations of the Victorian world. In the past thirty years, the enduring link between fairies and nature has been robustly exploited by eco-warriors and conservationists, from Ireland to Iceland. As changeable as changelings themselves, fairies have transformed over time like no other supernatural beings. And in this book, Richard Sugg tells the story of how the fairies went from terror to Tink.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Folklore, Fairies, Mythology, Fae, Research

280 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2018

About the author

I am the author of eleven books, including Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires (Routledge, 2011; 2nd edn 2015; Turkish translation 2018), Fairies: A Dangerous History (Reaktion, 2018) and The Real Vampires (Amberley, 2019). My recent children’s book, Our Week with the Juffle Hunters, is an eco-fable set between the Welsh coast and the North Pole. I have lectured at the universities of Cardiff and Durham.
I am currently completing Talking Dirty: The History of Disgust from Jesus Christ to Donald Trump. My next book will be a groundbreaking study of ghosts and poltergeists, perhaps the strangest open secret of our times. I collect ghost and poltergeist accounts. If anyone has one they wishes to share, please write to me in confidence – richardjsugg@yahoo.co.uk
The new third edition of Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires is not only much cheaper, but substantially updated. Even I was surprised.
I now have the rights to The Smoke of the Soul and have almost completed a new trade version of this book. Please do write if you are interested in that title – it is proving a busy year…
Thanks everyone for reviews and reading. Writing is intrinsically solitary, and this community is a great thing.

Reviews

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd really expected more of this book. It sounds like it should be my jam and parts of it definitely were but others were not. So, first this is an academic book which means that sometimes the language makes it hard to access. Sugg favours long sentences and long words and while his language is more poetic than most academic texts, that doesn't necessarily help. The first half of the book is an examination of fairy folklore. A lot of it focuses around why people believed in fairies and what it meant for their lives that they did, and that was excellent, then the whole thing takes a weird turn where the author tries to convince you to believe that fairies exist.

This effort mostly consists of pointing at witness testimony and saying, there, that one. That one must be true because it's different from the rest of the folklore or it contains a specific detail or, in one case, because every person who experiences the phenomenon experiences it differently. That last one I'd say was more an argument against it being true than for. If ten people see the thing it's more likely to be a thing than if ten people see different things. But, at their core, these are all arguments to incredulity which hinge on the idea that people couldn't and won't make this stuff up and my dude, they can and they will. People make stuff up. They lie. They add specific detail to try to make it feel more real. People enjoy fooling others and we have no proof that anything mentioned in this book happened. For example, there was a story of a woman who vanished periodically and claimed it was the fairies. The author strongly implied that she was going somewhere so why not the fairies, but how do we know that? How do we know that this old woman went anywhere, or even existed? We don't. We have a story. That's all.

And it doesn't even have to be conscious lying. People might, even, perceive something that then becomes exaggerated through retelling to these fairy stories. Human perception is unreliable, as is memory and transmission of story. Maybe the old woman I mentioned above went somewhere once and didn't want to be caught so said she was in fairy, then through the story being passed down and misremembered and exaggerated for effect we get a woman who routinely goes off with the fairies.

The thing is, if the book has just jumped into the permits that fairies, if not materially real, were at least real to the people who believed in them, I can accept that premise. I can work within that framework. But when an author is over here telling me that this story has one novel element so must be a true and accurate record of events and I'm not saying fairies exist but look at this, well, it makes you doubt then on a number of levels.

The back half of the book featured a review of some literature relating to fairies and how our views of fairies have changed over time as they've been sanitised and turned into children's entertainment.

[Eltee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very accessible study with impressive research behind it. Respect the fey, y'all.

[Miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love books that call for having a computer by your side to do research. Richard Sugg is a lecturer in Renaissance Literature at the University of Durham and his love for his subject leaps off the page. The breadth and depth of his knowledge encourage the reader to delve into the multiple sources he references with new ways of seeing the material.

As for the subject at hand, fairies, he explores their history with the eye of a historian who has a deep and abiding respect for all no matter their socio-economic status while maintaining the skepticism of an academic and the delight of the child in all of us that yearns for magical mysteries.

[Kat Ponte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy-read nor smoothly cohesive, but an incredible assortment of references and historical lineage of our modern take of Fairies. The book is written from a highly subjective and personal take, with the author’s passion being very prevalent, which is beautiful but sometimes tiring as the references can feel redundant.

An interesting read but not really a boon to be read in a hammock in a long stretch. This is an endurance read not a sprint

[Peyton · Rating 3 out of 5]

“If fairies were everything ever said about them, they would be very confused creatures indeed.”

Fairies: A Dangerous History is a comprehensive work of nonfiction about belief in the existence of fairies (as well as similar creatures, such as elves, leprechauns, and selkies) and the role these beliefs played in European societies from ancient times up until the modern day.

Just like alleged witches and vampires, fairies were a convenient scapegoat that people living in pre-industrial societies could blame for unexplained disappearances, sudden deaths, physical and mental disabilities, and various other phenomena. Over the course of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, fairies metamorphosed in the popular imagination from powerful, dangerous, and typically male creatures into delicate, childlike, and typically female creatures. No longer a terrifying and mysterious force that people were at the mercy of, fairies (and nature as a whole) were eventually viewed as quaint and non-threatening.

Sugg provides readers with an impressive quantity of research into the topic of fairy sightings. Sugg’s approach to this topic, however, detracts from his overall argument. Sugg frequently comments on whether or not he believes a given fairy sighting is ‘legitimate’, even though this is inconsequential to his central thesis, which is about belief rather than the question of whether or not fairies are actually real. The fact that Sugg believes poltergeists are real, for example, is irrelevant to his argument that fairy sightings and poltergeist sightings tend to have similarities. I would have preferred for Sugg to take a more neutral and objective approach to this topic by simply describing the sightings and their circumstances. Sugg also speculates unnecessarily on many occasions. In particular, his speculations about the fates of real-life people whose disappearances or deaths were blamed on fairies can be uncomfortable to read.

I also feel that this book touched on some fascinating topics that it should have explored in more detail. For example, Sugg briefly mentions that Martin Luther and John Calvin believed that fairies are real and dangerous. Considering how influential both of these men’s worldviews and philosophies are, and how critical they both were of many of the prevailing beliefs of their contemporaries, I think it would have been fascinating to learn more about how their belief in fairies related to their other views. Sugg also mentions that fairies were widely believed to be responsible for various kinds of mycological (fungal) phenomena, such as ‘fairy butter’ and ‘fairy rings’. I would have loved it if Sugg really delved deep into the science behind this.

Where Fairies: A Dangerous History shines is in its discussion of depictions of fairies in English literature (especially theatre). Sugg’s argument is both intellectually convincing and emotionally moving, and he discusses topics as diverse as creativity, child psychology, and gender roles and expression.

Overall, Fairies: A Dangerous History makes for a very mixed reading experience. Fascinating paragraphs about folklore, philosophy, and literary analysis combine with unfounded claims, hesitant musings, and tacked-on conclusions. Sugg’s style of writing is also quite dense and slow to work through. If you have a particular interest in the topic of fairy sightings, this book is probably worth a read, but otherwise, I recommend seeking out more scholarly works on fairy folklore or portrayals of fairies in the arts.

[stephanie suh · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are classes of spiritual beings according to the races of the supernatural world that humans have arbitrarily defined with ostentatious pedanticism. For we treat the otherworldly guests of honors, such as archangels, angels, principalities, vampires, werewolves, trolls, big-foots, and even extraterrestrial aliens into the bargain with awe-inspiring reverence, whereas fairies are regarded as sort of the underclass, juvenile guests reluctantly invited to a terrific festival of supernatural beliefs. Such spectral discrimination, argues author Richard Sugg in his Fairies: A Dangerous History, results from the fact that unlike demons, angels, and other ethereal beings of educated Christianity, fairies are in want of respectful scholarship codifying their existence and nature, cultural influence on arts and literature, and spiritual elements of faith/belief traditions in lettered authority.

The book is a meta treatise on why the author himself believes in the existence of the belittled mystical beings deserving of their recognized appellation in the echelon of the spiritual realm with an impressively wide scope of dazzling knowledge ranging from religion to literature and deeply sympathetic understanding of the cultural heritage of the belief tradition wonderfully kept alive in Celtic local oral tradition to this day. Sugg takes us to the remotest area in Shetland to listen to a nonagenarian man whose vivid memories about fairy sights he saw and heard are amusing, to places surrounded by fairy fences on the Isles of Britain where the local folk will tell you where you can see the Good Folk and what to do when you see them, and to the fantastic feasts of fairies as seen and described by William Shakespeare and Edmund Spencer as the rulers of the Vegetable Kingdom in their Elysium of poetic fancy, which is also based on the popular hearsay that became a local folk religion alongside the established Christianity. Sugg keeps us hooked on pages after pages filled with his magic spells of words in an expanse of determination and willingness to let us see what he sees and believes in fairies with their own dangerous history; dangerous because the truth about them is theologically reasonable, spiritually potent, culturally dominant, and physically palpable.

In sum, this book is one fascinating account of fairies that serves the author’s purpose of educating and entertaining readers, both initiated and uninitiated, captivated by the glamour spells of the erudition of the author who uses words as sprinkles falling from his literary magic wands to allure readers to a riveting trance of the Fairy Realm as if the author himself were a chief courtier of Titania and Oberon in an ambition to restore its elusive kingdom to respectful glory of the Separate Race. The result is an enchantingly potent narrative of the mystical sprites told by a spellbound narrator who seems to easily traverse time and space with diaphanous gossamer wings. So much so that I wonder if this book is written by the help of a supernatural being, with the image of Dr. Faust springing from the reservoir of thoughts, in a quid pro quo return for the effectual propitiation of the supernatural knowledge. Nonetheless, this book is something of the authorial account of the Fairy Folk.

[katabaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

początek byl fajny i ciekawy, potem sie troche rozjechalo a na koncu zaczelismy mowic o harrym potterze i juz calkowicie mnie to przestalo interesowac. troche mało konkretne i bardziej pogadankowe niz informacyjne.

[Niki · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book did not give me the inspiration I was looking for. Though it was a nice read with a lot of information, which the author clearly did much research on and was able to present in a witty manner. I would have liked to read more short stories on fairy lore though, a lot or the shared stories were very short!

[Eric Wojciechowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Retreading already worn ground on the subject, Richard Sugg makes a wonderful entry into the subject matter of the Fae Folk in this volume. It's all here: Changelings, Fairy Forts, comparisons to witches/vampires/etc, abductions, fairy animals, the Disneyfication from a dangerous entity to a cute and kind being, and expressions of them in literature, Suggs covers it all. A worthy addition to the literature on the subject.

The most entertaining was Sugg's pointing out there's actually more evidence for the existence of fairies than the Christian god and I'll have to agree with him except that in both cases, we're only dealing with anecdotal material - stories. So until someone can "bring the body", we'll have to leave the reality of such things in the air.

I also enjoyed that with most cases, Suggs attempted to determine what the true story was. Were we dealing with pure fiction and legend or was there some truth? Such as in the case of changelings we are treated to the awful reality that many children suffered and died as a result of being accused of being a fairy plant rather than being recognized as suffering from a deformity or mental illness.

In the end, although the Fae Folk have common characteristics, they've pretty much been whatever you wanted them to be - some intelligence behind the scenes, making mischief or granting favors or meddling in the affairs of men. They're creatures that continue to exist in our imaginations, always changing with the times. And yet, as Suggs points out, it's difficult to review some of the stories of fairy encounters and dismiss them as fabrications. Some seem impossible to chalk up as imaginations gone wild. The mystery of some other elusive intelligence has been with us since time began, I suppose. It appears most of the evidence comes from within in our own heads. Unless, of course, at some point in an incredible turn of events, we actually do detect such an entity among us without a doubt. That would really be something.

[Skye · Rating 4 out of 5]

An approachable introduction to the subject, with an interesting and varied selection of source material. The chapter on fairies in literature was the strongest and overall I appreciated the author's theories and open-minded attitude to fairy belief. Wider historical generalisations, with which the author inteprets some of their sources, should be taken with a pinch of salt though (such as the illiteracy of the non-elites, the blandness of their colour palette). Arguably a far better place to start than Diane Purkiss's 'Troublesome Things'.

[Alison Lilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging and fun to read, I particularly like the treatment of Victorian fairy beliefs in a way that examines their nuance and paradox rather than merely dismissing them as a diminishment of “authentic” folklore.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t remember what time of year it was. I was a child in my room at night, sleeping. My mind remembers a crisp spring or fall night that may not actually have been, cool air drifting through the windows causing the curtains to aimlessly dance. I awoke to sensation first, hundreds of little pinpricks across my body, as if jabbed by countless toothpicks. I opened my eyes to see a grand albeit miniature army of wisps, little folk all glowing faintly blue and riding odd steeds and beasts, flowing through my windows in a great multitude and pouring into my room. The jabs continued from the successful invaders already on my bed, vigorously attacking the quarry that was apparently me. Not believing my eyes and the pain of the continuous prodding, I raced off my bed through the invading masses toward my light switch at the front of the room. The invaders continued to pour inside and the creatures upon me continued to attack as I sprinted for that switch. Upon throwing on the light, everything instantly disappeared, and I stood their breathing heavily, as awake as I’d been second before but now with considerably less of a fairy problem.

Dr. Richard Sugg’s book “Fairies: A Dangerous History” rekindles the unexplained moments of one’s childhood. As we grow older, we rationalize our every step, and all oddities gain conventional explanations. Surely in the above moment, I had a nightmare and slept-walk all the way to the light while still dreaming, only truly waking when throwing on the lights…don’t think too much to other instances of oddity that occurred toward the back of that house throughout childhood where my room was…

Sugg takes a multitude of stories and encounters from history that could raise the hairs on the back of anyone’s neck alone and adds his own ability to tell a good story to the mix. His credentials as a professor—generally well-educated people of rational thought, and this books certainly counts as a scholarly work on the history of fairies and their relationships with people—allows him to take us down the path of like-minded, educated skeptics, but as we hold his hand on this adventure the unexplainable doesn’t always quickly resolve itself. His prose manages to continually evoke the reader’s own feeling of confusion and intrigue: “If people weren’t seeing faeries, what were they seeing exactly?” There are not always easy answers.

As a child, I possessed a book on the history of the Jersey Devil. It was simple enough to terrify in just outlining the history of supposed encounters with little flair for writing even necessary. That’s all Sugg really needed to do here—let the stories tell themselves—but his own writing as he comes to term with all this is an extra benefit as the readers moves through and attempts to sort through the uncertainty themselves. The later sections of the book—outlining fairy appearances in media over the last two-hundred years or so—become something of a necessary (for an academic work) bore compared to his early sections of actual history, mythology, and encounters, but his ability to spin a good tale keeps those sections afloat beyond just “listing fairy stuff since 1800.”

I grabbed this book because I wanted to inject a bit of magic in my mind for this holiday season. I gave my child the “Santa Clause Book” outlining the intricate and borderline dangerous habits of Santa’s hibernating elves and felt I could use a bit more unknown in my life myself. As I walked in the dark on my way home reading this on my kindle, hearing the roar of airplanes overhead and the continue whoosh of cars passing by, I let my mind rest for a moment in the darkness, faint music suddenly drifting in and out of my ears carried on the wind. Now, my rational mind jumped to conventional conclusions: I couldn’t place the music as anything familiar, but an outdoor music system surely accompanied someone’s nearby Christmas lights out there somewhere.

I picked up my pace so as not to intrude on any festivities of the good people.

If moments like the above are what you are looking for, as well as interesting discourse of faeries and what they mean to us (pre-UFO aliens, socially complex ghosts, etc.), this book makes for an interesting and fun read.

I look forward to being very creeped out by his next work on poltergeists and the memory of my VCR continually turning back on and off while unplugged, which was obviously also a dream of some sort....obviously....

(4/5 Stars, the last bit lags a tad compared to the first two-thirds)

[Katharine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book.

On the one hand, there are parts of it I really liked - loved even. Sugg's introduction, in which he compares believing in fairies to believing in God or Christianity, was an interesting approach. He argues that believers of both rely on faith in the face of a lack of physical, empirical evidence, but that clearly less people believe in fairies. But do fairies exist? Sugg doesn't claim to have the answers, but I found this intriguing and wanted to read more.

I liked the following sections on the origin of fairies and historical fairy sightings (although these historical accounts could have definitely benefited from a great deal of citations and footnotes. Sugg surprisingly uses none!). In these sections, it was interesting to learn about early Christians believing in fairies as fallen angels or the hidden children of Eve. I was also shocked by the horrors that children endured who were thought to be fairy changelings. I think it just shows how certain belief systems really affected people in the past, even though we might find these ideas unbelievable today.

I also enjoyed another section in the book in which Sugg discusses fairies in poetry and literature. He provides an interesting reading of Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" and a fantastic (albeit brief) discussion about the contradictions of Victorian painting, which I absolutely loved.

Overall, though, I was just baffled by parts of this book. Beyond the organization (which felt like a bunch of different essays that had been haphazardly woven together), some chapters of the book were just strange. Why the random section on poltergeists (where the author bizarrely rants about how they are real, and that he had his own encounter with one)? It made me want to stop reading. I'm not sure why the author felt the need to convince the reader of other supernatural phenomena, when the book is about fairies!

[Molly Ringle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Within a chapter I knew this was the fae research book I've been looking for all my life. I realize putting "fae" and "research" (or "nonfiction") in the same description may seem odd, but that's still the best description of this book: it's an exploration of people's beliefs about, and real-life reported encounters with, fairies throughout history, as well as their representation in literature and art, and how their image has changed over the years.

Sugg's writing is lovely and lyrical, yet approachable, sometimes providing clear explanatory notes to the odd historical tales and sometimes pondering, for instance, the overlapping territory between ghosts and fairies. The reports of the harsh treatment given in centuries past to those believed to be changelings are chilling but riveting, balanced by lighter and occasionally hilarious reports of fairy-related hoaxes. (Cottingley is just one of many.)

Any pop culture fan will enjoy the trip through the evolution of fairies in fiction, from Shakespeare to Peter Pan to Disney. And did you know fairies weren't generally believed to have wings until Victorian-era painters started illustrating them that way? (Search on A Midsummer Night's Dream: you won't find a single mention of wings on any of its fairy cast, nor in the artwork for that play pre-1800.) The book sticks mainly to Celtic lands, perhaps to keep the definition of fairies more consistent, but it's easy to see how similar are the tales of local spirits or creatures in other parts of the world. If you're a fae fan and you want to scratch deeper than the sparkly, harmless, Disneyfied surface of most modern fairies, this is the book for you.

[gloam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I haven’t read nonfic in a few years, so I was slow about this one. I felt it was an ok synthesis of a lot of different research, although if you’re looking for something more in-depth, you might just want to pull from the works cited. The author’s voice is engaging, and he makes some very salient observations about the psychology of belief in fairies: fairy folklore largely originated with working-class rural/pre-industrial people who were at the mercy of their environment, particularly nature, and fairies were most commonly invoked to explain things that were uncontrollable, inexplicable, or cosmically unfair, such as early deaths, missing people, or natural disasters. He associates belief in fairies with closeness to nature, endangered by the industrial revolution and our increasing distance from the wilderness. He dedicates a lot of time to the scapegoating of fairies and the related abuse of “changeling” (ie physically or mentally disabled) children, which I appreciated. He does have a tendency to go on tangents - yes, practically any folklore monster could be broadly categorized as fae, and stories about malevolent ghosts have a lot in common with stories about fairies, but that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for here. Some surprising omissions, also: I was rather surprised to get to the “fairies in literature” sections and find no mention of the Child ballads, for instance. Overall an enjoyable read, a little rambly, with useful references to other works.

[Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this! It had a good overall point - got a bit weird in the middle when he talks about ghosts and fairies being real, but it ties together nicely at the end, and the scholarly bits that make up the majority are pretty good! I just wished that a few of the points were a bit more overt, particularly in the later chapters that cover Shakespeare on, which felt more like a literary review and a history of art essay. I understood what Sugg was trying to do - to discuss monumental portrayals of fairies that shaped the way people thought about them, but it felt like these needed a bit more shaping and a bit more groundwork to really narrow down to the point. The blurb and the introduction say that the book focuses on the question of fairies and danger, but I felt like this got a bit lost in the latter half of the book, which is why this is three stars. I did really like Sugg’s voice and style in this, and it was very well researched.

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got what I wanted from this book, a detailed and interesting history of fairies, how they have evolved, and what impact they have today to mention a few. Most of the stuff it talked about is stuff you can pick up through osmosis, but this is a nice refresher.

Sadly, it's badly structured. Quotes about fairy sightings make it into almost every chapter and while sometimes it's relevant to the chapter, other times it feels like you get blindsided with "By the way, here's another fairy sighting" in chapters where it doesn't feel relevant. Even some of the chapters and sub-chapters feel like that.

I appreciate this book and had a good time reading it, making me think it's a good book for people interested in the topic, but it doesn't break new ground and could've been structured a lot better. I think this book is best suited as an introduction.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a 'history' in the usual sense of the word. It's an entertaining, sometimes shocking, collection of anecdotes about fairies, gathered into chapters.
While the tangling of 'fairy belief' and othodox belief is a fascinating subject, Sugg is too ready to set up a binary between the two and his obvious anti Christian bias grates after a while.
The chapter on fairies in literature and art is disappointing. 'Medieval Fairies' are treated in just under two pages, which is less than the space given to 'Goblin Market' or the clapping episode in the stage version of Peter Pan. Given how much material there is, this seems strange. There's a quick trip through Pwyll and then on to Chaucer. Shakespeare gets the treatment, or at least 'Midsummer Night's Dream', but surprisingly Spenser's 'The Fairy Queen' isn't discussed.

I don't know why Collier's Lilith is on the cover.

[Sophia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't finish this book. It told me very little new information. There were multiple mistakes. The author takes a distinct position as a believer and frequently assumes the existence of Ghosts. It's really hard to read that someone knows something about faeries because Ghosts do that too. Like WAT. I rage quit this book when the author implied cerebral and cereal from ceres had a similar Latin root. Like no, boy, cerebrum is a Latin word and it means brain, they don't have the same root anywhere in their linguistic history. I studied linguistics so these things irritate me very much. I angrily looked up the words history to double check I wasn't crazy.

[Anthony O'Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

basic overview

Good coverage of a fairies as they appear in myth, folk culture and literature. Strange creatures on the edge of reality. At best tricksters at worst outright malevolent. Some of them 3 feet tall. Tinker Bell especially in Disnified form is a modern aberration. The most chilling part of the book though is about the humans - using myths of changelings to grossly mistreat, torture and even murder odd possibly disabled misfitting children. The fairies if they existed should be scared of us.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is exactly what the title says: it's a study on the history of the fairy lore.
Richard Sugg did the amazing job of collecting information since the very origins of fairy until the modern days, pointing out what it could mean and even how it affected the society at that time.
This is definitely a book to read more than one time, as there are so many information that could be lost on the first read.

[Jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

This started out very promising and I certainly learned a lot about folklore. I thought some of the points the author made were fascinating. Why every anecdote had to be introduced with the full names of the person(s) involved and the place names, I don't know.
The later chapters didn't excite me and it had to go back to the library, which was probably a good thing.

[Jodi · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent reference book. It tells how fairies are descended from the fallen angels. The British representation of trixy pixies to changelings and boggarts are covered. I enjoy the way the Disneyfication of fairies gave us tinker bell from the Germanic creatures which spawned many fairy tales.

[Michael Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent overview of fairy lore and belief with a particular emphasis upon the original views of Themselves as fearful and capricious influences.

Well-written and engaging, with many case histories cited, and plenty of good pointers for further reading.

[Judi Fruen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having thoroughly enjoyed reading this, I am now undecided as to whether or not I believe in fairies, but I am sure that I want to read more on the subject. I've bought this book for a friend's birthday, and am temped to buy another for a sibling. Read it!

[will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Delightful

I think history is important regardless of beliefs. Angels demons why not fey. It seems like we were the monsters during those early days of inquisition and puritanical thought. Bravo for the hard work.

[Lilly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't finish this book even though I love the topic. I loved the beginning but just could not keep me focused and interested, I got to about 70%. Maybe it was a bit too dry and academic. Definitely has many good parts.

[Sam Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

An examination of the evolution of the Good People from feared/revered, often human-sized, outsiders to the pinked and shrinked jobs of contemporary popular culture. Full of fascinating nuggets; I'd never have known it was Alexander Pope's illustrator who first gave them butterfly wings.

[Isa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Open minded and open hearted, absolutely loved this book

[Polly · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's an interesting topic, but I found this book to be extremely dry and somewhat disjointed. Very academic and flowery language, which ultimately killed my interest in this book.