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The Fairies in Tradition and Literature

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Fairies fascinate young and old alike. To some they offer tantalizing glimpses of other worlds. to others a subversive counterpoint to human arrogance and weakness. Like no other author. Katharine Briggs throughout her work communicated the thrill and delight of the world of fairies. and in this book she articulated for the first time the history of that world in tradition and literature.From every period and every country. poets and storytellers have described a magical world inhabited by elfin spirits. Capricious and vengeful. or beautiful and generous. theyve held us in thrall for generations. And on a summers morn. as the dew dries softly on the grass. if you kneel and look under a toadstool. well ...

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

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About the author

Katharine M. Briggs

44 books112 followers
Early Life Katharine Briggs was born in Hampstead, London in 1898, and was the eldest of three sisters. The Briggs family, originally from Yorkshire, had built up a fortune in the 18th and 19th centuries through coal mining and owned a large colliery in Normanton, West Yorkshire. With such enormous wealth, Katharine and her family were able to live in luxury with little need to work. Briggs's father Ernest was often unwell and divided his time between leafy Hampstead and the clear air of Scotland. He was a watercolourist and would often take his children with him when he went to paint the landscape. An imaginative storyteller, he loved to tell his children tales and legends; these would have a great impact on the young Katharine, becoming her passion in later life. When Briggs was 12 her father had Dalbeathie House built in Perthshire and the family moved permanently to Scotland; however, tragedy struck when he died two years later. Briggs and her two sisters, Winifred and Elspeth, developed a close bond with their mother, Mary, after this - all living together for almost fifty years. As Briggs and her sisters grew older their main passion was for amateur dramatics. They wrote and performed their own plays at their home and Briggs would pursue her interest in theatre throughout her education. After leaving school she attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, graduating with a BA in 1918 and an MA in 1926. She specialised in the study of traditional folk tales and 17th-century English history.

The Folklorist Briggs continued her studies largely as a hobby, while living with her sisters and mother in Burford, Oxfordshire. She collected together traditional stories from across the country and the wider world, but did not publish them yet. Together she and her sisters performed in plays with local amateur dramatics groups and Briggs wrote historical novels set during the Civil War (also unpublished). When the Second World War started Briggs joined the WAAF and later taught at a school for the children of Polish refugees. After the war Briggs threw herself into her folklore studies, completing her PhD on the use of folklore in 17th-century literature. In 1954, the first Katharine Briggs book was published, titled The Personnel of Fairyland, a guide to the folklore of Great Britain. This was followed by Hobberdy Dick (1955), a children's story about a hobgoblin in Puritan England. Though these books brought a small amount of interest, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s, following the deaths of her sisters and mother, that Briggs became a renowned folklorist. In 1963 she published another children's book, Kate Crackernuts, and became involved with the Folklore Society of the UK, later being elected as its president in 1967. Now a preeminent expert on fairy stories and folklore, she began to lecture across the country and by the 1970s she had been invited to give lectures in the United States and was regularly interviewed on television. In 1971 she published her masterpiece, the four-volume A Dictionary of Folk-Tales in the English Language. This work remains the definitive collection of British folk stories, becoming a vital resource for writers, academics and storytellers. Katharine Briggs died suddenly at the age of 82 on 15th October 1980. At the time of her death she had been working on a memoir of her childhood days in Scotland and Hampstead, where her love of folklore began.

Information taken from http://www.foliosociety.com/author/ka...

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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
Profile Image for Rosemary Atwell.
510 reviews43 followers
October 22, 2024
This isn’t quite as entertaining as the Routledge Classics companion Briggs volume ‘British Folktales and Legends: a Sampler,’ but this is a small grumble as there’s much to love here. Not only are the regions of Great Britain and Ireland thoroughly covered, but the European and Norse traditions are also included.

Part III (Some Literary Fairies) is the absolute winner, with Briggs’ practical - and frequently acerbic commentary - on a range of literature from the 18th to the mid-20th century clearly accentuating her preferences (I’ll let you guess who gets the highest praise). Another delight is the excellent glossary of diverse species, highlighting the local dialects and imaginative language of their region.

And that quibble? In her thoroughness and necessity in tracking references and individuals, the book tends to become slightly repetitious when recounting so many different tales and sightings. A small matter, but noticeable.





Profile Image for Jayaprakash Satyamurthy.
Author 43 books519 followers
April 30, 2012
This is a superb book!

Briggs surveys the fairy lore and literature of the British Isles with a sympathetic, shrewd eye. She has a strong sense of the aesthetics of wonder - of how the sublime and the uncanny are two sides of a coin that has no room for mere whimsy or easy didactic. This instinct for the aesthetics of the 'true' fairy is reliable - it's the chief reason why Briggs intuits that the Cottingley fairies are inauthentic. That, and the fact that they look suspiciously like sentimental Victorian fairy prints rather than any of the earlier depictions of the fairy folk.

Briggs relates many fairy stores collected by folklorists and a surveys the literary fairy genre as well. The stories told range from the charming to the unsettling. Along the way she also points out interesting patterns. It is always the old who are said to have access to fairy lore, and from the earliest times the fairies have been spoken of as an ancient people who are now vanishing. 'The tradition of them burns up and flickers like a candle that is going out, and then perhaps for a time burns up again, but always the fairies are to be seen only between two twinklings of an eye; their gifts must be secret if they are to be enjoyed; they are, and always have been, the Hidden People'.

A stimulating mix of scholarship, critique and storytelling, this book is perfect for anyone looking for an overview that is neither cloying, credulous nor blind to the glimpses of the numinous afforded by folk traditions like this.
Profile Image for Mary Catelli.
Author 55 books203 followers
February 21, 2016
An overview. Assumes your basic knowledge of the facts, like the fluttery flower fairies are not the original conception. Indeed, she is careful to point out that the tiny fairies are indeed part of the tradition, as one of the oldest recorded accounts, of beings called Portunes, make them an inch high. Not that that size was commonplace.

Covers all sorts of topics. Like fairies attached to familes, apparent nature spirits like the Blue Hag that fights with Spring every year and when she loses, throws her staff under a tree so that nothing grows there. The fairy-ghost connection -- in Cornwall, all fairies are thought to be ghosts. The nasty and vicious ones. The giants, usually stupid, occasionally amiable. The wyrms, which, unlike continental ones, seldom hoard. Human fairy interactions, hit upon their need for humans, the time factor,l changelings, midwives, and lovers.

Then into the literary versions. Starting with the 18th century, hit the foreign invasions with Perrault and Grimm, and concluding with The Lord of the Rings, which was indeed the last word in literary elves at the time this was written.
Profile Image for Gabriella.
156 reviews13 followers
July 11, 2023
Whoever designed the cover for this reprint must have either been having a laugh, or hadn't read the book - the twinkling silver party wand is so at odds with the dark and mysterious folklore of fairies presented in this thorough and well-researched book. The stories mentioned throughout are fascinating and wide-ranging (within the British Isles, Ireland, and the Isle of Man), and though the tone of the book is scholarly, it was very well-written and enjoyable. If you are at all interested in folklore, other worlds, and storytelling, then this book is for you!
Profile Image for Jason Gignac.
26 reviews17 followers
August 21, 2009
Original Review here

So, it's not that I'm being lazy, but I'm rolling both of these reviews into one. I was going to write two, but the subject matter is so similar, and I really don't know if it's subject matter that will interest other people at all, and it just seemed easier, since I finished them a few days apart.

My nerdery is in full, giddy bloom with these two books! Quick synopsis. Both of these books are nonfiction, classics (more or less) in the field of folklore and mythology studies. Golden Bough is the older of the two, and one of the first really indepth studies of myth, and many of the ideas Frazier made in it (sympathetic vs imitative magic, for instance) are still (I think) very influential. The book studies a particular tradition, and travels deeply through world mythology and folk tradition to try to to purport a reasoning for it. Fairies in Tradition and Folklore (which should, by the way, be required reading for any fantasy writer who wants to write about fairies, I think) is a survey of prevailing folklore and literary references to fairies, elves, etc throughout the British isles, from the time of Shakespeare onward (for before Shakespeare, Briggs wrote another book, talking about the traditions that lead to Midsummer's Night Dream, The Tempest, and other Fairy Shakespeare, which I'll have to read eventually, too). It begins with talking about the general groups of fairies (fairies that represent the dead, for instance, or fairy plants), then discusses prevailing story types (the fairy midwife, fairy lovers, brownie stories, etc), and finally talks about how these have been integrated into literature (homily stories, 'whimsy stories', thoughtful poetry, etc).

Both books were E for excellent. Both authors have a lovely gift for taking what could be a very dry, academic study, and infusing it with a distinctive voice and character of their own. Their essentially several hundred page long research papers, but they don't read like it. Frazier has a fascinating gift for corollary, for taking a thousand differentideas, and drawing conclusions about their similarities (too much at times, but he was practically inventing the field from scratch, so you have to give him a little break). Briggs has an eye for fascinating details that draw you in, and illuminate the generalities of her categories with a vividity that makes you want to read more fairy tales (and how bad a compulsion can that be, really?).

Frazier feels dated, however, as well he would given the amount of time since the book was written (Edwardian period). While he does a remarkable job, considering the circumstances, of pointing out that European folk traditions are as savage and heathenish as any other continent, he cannot fully escape the ethnocentric mindset of the day - if I read this book and were an Australian Aborigine, for instance, I'd be pretty offended. From the part of my brain that knows a bit about the time period, I can appreciate that the book was leaps and bounds an improvement over it's contemporaries, but it's definitely written by a 20th century British white man.

Briggs' work, partly perhaps because it confines itself to the British Isles, does not suffer from this fault - in fact, her impartiality and open=mindednes were so powerful that, quite frankly, I wasn't sure by the end if maybe she believed in the Fairy Folk herself, which offered a very sympathetic and beautiful way to collect the folk tales from people who obviously DID believe in fairies.

Most fascinating, however, is the two opposing conclusions of the two books. At the end of Frazier, he discusses how Magical thinking progressed into Religious thinking, and Religious thinking has progressed into Science, and man continues to advance from there - his final supposition is that eventually something more comprehensively correct and wise than science will come and supplant it, which was a fascinating idea to me. Briggs, on the other hand, doesn't see folklore as a slow ascent from the savage to the civilized, but rather cyclical, and points out how, all through history, men have told stories of how the fairies are dissapearing, but how they always bloom back and reappear. In the Puritan period, for instance, fairy belief was quashed, and fairies were presented as demons and witch's familiars, but as society moed on, people did not forget the fairies, they bloomed them back in the same way they always have. It made me wonder deeply about our own day, not if people will find a way to wonder about the invisibile world, but rather how they'll do it.

All in all, both of these books were beautifully done, and well executed, and I'd recommend them to anyone interested in religion, mythology, folklore, or anthropology.
Profile Image for K8.
242 reviews23 followers
January 7, 2009
Briggs' described this book as a continuation of her book The Anatomy of Puck in which she examined fairies in relation to Shakespeare's work, as well as other writers of that time. It is a wonderful reference book and is a pleasure to read.

The text is divided into three units: The Fairy Peoples, Traffic With the Fairies, and Some Literary Fairies. It also contains a nice appendix with lists and definitions of fairy types and specific fairies. Last winter, this list was used by my niece (age 11). I had the book out and she asked about it. I gave her a brief summary and named a few of the fairy types mentioned in the book. She recognized one and said "Oh, that's from Harry Potter." This led to an interesting discussion in which she was first disappointed that the name (Dobbie, if you're interested) wasn't entirely Rowling's creation, but then she became interested in how intertextuality works (and no, I didn't use that term with an 11 year old). She started reading the lists at the back of Briggs' book to look for other names she might recognize from Harry Potter and other books. She found Padfoot, Grindylow, and some others I can't remember.

Anyone working with children's literature - particularly fantasy and nursery rhymes - will benefit from reading books like this one. One thing I would note - when shopping at online booksites for books such as this one, the customer reviews aren't always helpful. Some people buy these books not realizing that they are academic-type books or expecting happy little fairies or Tinkerbell-like fairies and are then disappointed. This comes through in their reviews.
Profile Image for Carrington.
285 reviews4 followers
November 17, 2021
An excellent reference book and writer's companion. More than once it crossed my mind that J. K. Rowling must have referred to this book when writing Harry Potter.

The book is a good broad overview of the world of Faerie, with a useful glossary and reading list I will turn to again and again. At times it was almost too broad in that I couldn't quite follow a reference it was making, though I think that was more to do with my distance, both in time and space, from the original publication.

I was amused by the chapter on "Whimsy" and reading as Briggs tore apart Barrie and Lewis most disdainfully. Overall, a great read, and I learned a lot!
Profile Image for Lunafairy.
4 reviews4 followers
May 22, 2016
Briggs does a fantastic job of presenting a great breadth of information on the folklore and writings on fairies throughout the ages, truly as comprehensible as possible in a dense format that avoids unnecessary lengthiness. It is a great introduction to the subject for anyone interested in fairy lore as well as its literary development in more modern times, with an extensive list of sources for those interested in then exploring the stories further.
110 reviews1 follower
April 15, 2014
Provides a decent overview of fairy lore in the UK, but each topic is covered somewhat cursorily and Briggs at times assumes prior knowledge of the subject and/or the literary canon which is not necessarily warranted.
Profile Image for James Kelly.
Author 9 books19 followers
December 2, 2011
Briggs is the authority on fairies and this book is fascinating if a little dense. It is difficult to chew through but very worth it if you have an interest in fairies.
Profile Image for Kate SeRine.
Author 13 books457 followers
May 18, 2012
Wasn't quite what I was expecting, but certainly a good one to have on the shelf.
Profile Image for Brent.
91 reviews1 follower
August 30, 2013
A good handling of modern fairies in literature and the fairy faith.
84 reviews4 followers
August 30, 2016
Such a great book for people are interested in true fairy folk-lore and not the dumb Disney, sugar-coated faeries.
169 reviews7 followers
March 21, 2018
If this is 'The Fairies in English Tradition and Literature' by Katherine Briggs, then it is an excellent round-up of beliefs and writings about fairies in England
Profile Image for Elizabeth.
24 reviews
October 6, 2020
Comprehensive and informational collection of stories, lore, customs, and beliefs regarding the Fey.
Profile Image for Abilash K.
2 reviews
July 12, 2022
Briggs manages to keep it both informative and entertaining to the reader while treating her subject with the seriousness needed from a folklorist.

I loved every bit of it.
Profile Image for T.  Tokunaga .
246 reviews1 follower
April 16, 2025
【British Tradition / The Fairies in Tradition Nd Literature / Katherine Briggs 】

To me, the British tradition doesn't necessarily mean Peter Pan or even Hobbits. It often means a scene from my favourite movie, Tom Jones (directed by Tony Richardson) - an aristocratic novice-rogue-ish guy full of energy getting drunk at inn with a freethinking, spicily-glamorous woman eating crab legs in an alluring style. And actually, the British tradition of fairies, according to this book, belonged more to this inn in the Oscar-winning classic movie than the world of children's literature with magic and butterfly wings.

Fairies were often supposed to be imps from the Hell, as much as actors were. Even after the Puritan Revolution, this risqué tradition persisted enough to inspire a lot of poems featuring Oberon (his head full of romantic "delusions" just as anyone else in A Midsummer Night's Dream) and other somewhat explicit (or very, very, very explicit) allusions to freethinking lifestyle. Even Alexander Pope, the dynast of logic and reason, did.

Fairies were imps from the hell, freethinking pranksters often did fatal practical jokes without malice (or even with it), fought against each other, helped real-life human beings, annoyed them with noise and surprises of encounter, kept their kingdom that kept their own animals, plants and even abducted human kids.

It wasn't always a world for kids. It was more the nasty world for nasty adults (with a relish of high dark comedy).
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