The myths and legends of the Fair Folk are the oldest in Britain and our Fairy lore is unique to this island. Meetings with Faery are well recorded. Humans have always been aware of a form of life called Fairy, but how exactly do we meet these beings? What is their physical form and nature, and how and where do they live? Here is a deep analysis of the traditional knowledge of the nature of Fairies, and their importance to us, combined with an examination of our interaction with Faery.

The myths and legends of the Fair Folk are the oldest in Britain and our Fairy lore is unique to this island. Meetings with Faery are well recorded. Humans have always been aware of a form of life called Fairy, but how exactly do we meet these beings? What is their physical form and nature, and how and where do they live? Here is a deep analysis of the traditional knowledge of the nature of Fairies, and their importance to us, combined with an examination of our interaction with Faery.

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.

British Goblins - Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions. British Goblins does a good job at its stated purpose - collecting and loosely categorizing Welsh Folklore of every category, ranging from the reasons behind certain customs and superstitions of daily life, to descriptions and associated stories of various faeries, goblins, and giants, to descriptions of apparitions and the view of the afterlife, to more fantastic things, like dragons, standing stones, and magic wells and stones. Although a somewhat anecdotal approach is taken, the author has in fact preserved a good deal of information that might have otherwise been lost.

Fairies, unruly women, and vestigial Catholicism constituted a frequently invoked triad in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama which has seldom been critically examined and therefore constitutes a significant lacuna in scholarly treatments of early modern theater, including the work of Shakespeare. Fairy tradition has lost out in scholarly critical convention to the more masculine mythologies of Christianity and classical Greece and Rome, in which female deities either serve masculine gods or are themselves masculinized (i.e., Diana as a buckskinned warrior). However, the fairy tradition is every bit as significant in our critical attempts to situate early modern texts in their historical contexts as the references to classical texts and struggles associated with state-mandated religious beliefs are widely agreed to be. fairy, rebellious woman, quasi-Catholic trio repeatedly stages resistance to early modern conceptions of appropriate class and gender conduct and state-mandated religion in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cymbeline, All's Well That Ends Well, and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist.

Fearsome Fairies taps into the enormous fascination with fairies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and includes cornerstone authors of the Weird genre such as Arthur Machen, M R James and Charlotte Riddell. You see - no, you do not, but I see - such curious faces: and the people to whom they belong flit about so oddly, often at your elbow when you least expect it, and looking close into your face, as if they were searching for someone - who may be thankful, I think, if they do not find him. There was an enormous fascination with fairies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which popularised depictions of benevolent, butterfly-winged beings and glittering pantomime figures. But the fae have always had a more sinister side. Taking inspiration from folk tales and medieval legends, the works of weird tale and ghost story writers such as Arthur Machen, M. R. James, Angela Carter and Charlotte Riddell show that fairies, goblins and other supernatural entities could be something far more unsettling. Delving into a frightening realm of otherworldly creatures from banshees to changelings, this new collection of stories revives and revels in the fearsome power of the fairy folk.