Description
Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Francis Young's new history of fairies demonstrates that the truth about belief in fairies is far stranger than clichéd images of tiny figures with wings and wands.
Before the rise of the 'small winged fairy' in the nineteenth century, the category of fairies included a vast range of supernatural human-like creatures, from the elves of Scandinavia and the aos sí of Ireland to the vilas of the Balkans and the fadas of Iberia. Young traces the ancient origins of belief in such creatures and how it adapted to the rise of Christianity and then flourished in medieval Europe, before being transformed – but not destroyed – by the upheavals of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and even European colonial expansion, which made fairies a global phenomenon. He concludes this uniquely wide-ranging history by reflecting on the surprising ways in which fairy belief endures in our apparently disenchanted contemporary world.
No one who reads this brilliant tour through the enchanted pathways of fairyland will ever look at the winged creatures of contemporary popular culture – or the woods at the bottom of their garden – in the same way again.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: the fairy-haunted world
1. The hills are alive: sacred nature in ancient Europe
2. Between heaven and hell: monotheism and ambiguous spirits
3. Here be monsters: otherworldly beings in the Middle Ages
4. Founding fairyland: the late Middle Ages
5. The reformation of fairyland: early modern fairies
6. Trying the spirits: fairies and the enchanted Enlightenment
7. Fairies go global
8. The coming (back) of the fairies: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
9. Rewilding fairyland: fairies today
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
