Fear Creates Magic
A deep dive into the origins of fairies and the narratives we attach to them
Every supernatural creature from the page of a dusty hardcover once began as a bead of uncertainty within a very human writer.
Take Victor Frankenstein and his monster: a manifesto of undesirability, abandonment and human failure alight in the mind of Mary Shelley. Charlotte Brontë’s beast-like Bertha Mason: sin and insanity embodied. Every myth poured from the mouths of ancient storytellers from Theophrastus to Euripides: a reflection of their doubts and triumphs, a window into the beliefs of their societies. Witches like Circe and Medea exiled and feared; Eastern European shrouds, vampires and grave-dwellers shunned for desiring the unthinkable. Cupids and angels kissing the most lonely parts of their human readers.
Circe Invidiosa, John William Waterhouse, 1892
The “sudden, visceral intensity” associated with fear makes it one essential pillar in creating something ‘sublime’, as noted by professor Sacha Golob for Aeon Magazine. Professor Golob analyses the sublime through paintings of epic landscapes, Romantic-style cliff faces and ships bent by powerful storms. The sublimity evoked by these works is akin to a kind of magic- a testing of the capacities of human imagination, and an exploration of the emotional responses attached to what we see.
The ability of centuries-old fairytales to retain relevance for a current audience can be attributed to their ability to tap into this sense of the sublime, usually through setting, characters, or alternate realities never too discernible from our own.
My last semester of uni was spent exploring this sublimity through the nuanced character of the fairy, including the origins of fairies, their prominence throughout Europe and the British Isles, and why fairy stories were such a key feature of 19th and early 20th century folktale. The answer was surprisingly simple: people were scared.
Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things, Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823-1903), date unknown.
Fairies have for decades embodied the unrest and anxieties of societies adjusting to the evolving spiritual regimes of the 19th and early 20th Century, which sought order through categorisation of what is ‘pure’ and what is ‘other’. The capricious character of the fairy emerged as a liminal being: one that defied social laws by being neither good nor bad, but rather both and neither. Their magical powers, both helpful and disruptive, mirrored a collective fear surrounding the capacity of humans to be evil, the capacity of nature to be cruel, and the terrifying knowledge that many of these fears were completely uncontrollable.
Early accounts of fairies illustrate them as virtuous creatures: a salve to ease uncertainty. In thirteenth Century Britain, elven creatures were held in tradition as being healers, whereas others were believed to be wealthy, beautiful aristocrats. Oftentimes, it was assumed that fairies were endowed with human knowledge and skill, often thought of as former angels “banished to the earth for remaining neutral during the war in heaven”. The word ‘fairy’ itself is derived from the Latin word, ‘fatae’, meaning ‘fate’- a term with great significance in Greek antiquity where the three Fates or the ‘Moirai’ sisters, were responsible for deciding the path and span of human life.
‘The Three Fates’ (tapestry), artist unknown, c. 1510-20
In James McDougall’s “The Hunchback of Willow Brake”, written in Scotland, 1910, a fairy named ‘Play of Sunbeam’, straightens the hump on the back of a man before returning him to the real world.
“"Hunchback!" she exclaimed. "It is long since we expected to meet you. I am Play of Sunbeam, and my joy is making the world merry. Come with me, my people are expecting you, and pass the night with us, and in the morning you will have neither disability nor defect."
He went cheerfully with her, until they arrived at the back of the Big Fairy Knoll.
"Shut your eyes, and give me your hand," said the fairy”
Fairies were also commonly associated with high class and abundance. Banquets and feasts are a common theme in fairy stories across the United Kingdom, likely because of the regality associated with fairy kingdoms stemming from Celtic tradition. Professor of English, Carole Silver, considers one popular view that fairies may in fact be “diminished forms or “trickled-down” versions of the ancient British, Celtic, and classical gods and goddesses”.
In “The Priest’s Supper” (Ireland, 1834), Thomas Crofton-Croker makes clear “as the fairies can have every thing they want for wishing, poverty does not trouble them much”. Similarly, Professor Piotr Spyra argues that a Celtic portrayal of elves is one that “capitalizes on ideas of fairy illustriousness, majesty and beauty characteristic of Irish beliefs in particular”. In fairies, noble people saw an ideal of safety and security. Like Golob’s notion of the ‘sublime’, fairies embodied something awe-striking and just out of reach, a magic propelled by real-world insecurity.
The Fairies’ Banquet, John Anster Fitzgerald, 1859.
The perceived authority of fairies produced a two-fold effect on the humans they encountered. On the one hand, fairies were revered and respected as helpful and generous spirits. On the other, fairies had powers that usurped the agency of mortal humans. Carole Silver explains how the wrath of fairies could be equally as cunning as the joyfulness of their pleasantries, highlighting them as “parasites” who lived off of “substance”:
“fairies received the benefits of which humans were deprived, that they lived off human substance, stealing the nourishment out of mortal food, or the milk out of cattle, or the live child from its mother's arms. Their kine grew fat if human kine grew thin; their fields flourished if the fields of mortals withered.”
In an Irish tale by John Gregerson Campbell from 1900, titled “Fairy Theft”, the narrator refers to the ‘substance’ of things by the Gaeilge term, ‘Toradh’: meaning something’s “virtue, fruit, or benefit”. The narrator then illustrates different ways in which fairies steal the Toradh from things, ensuring “the outward appearance is left, but the reality is gone”. One of these thefts includes stealing the health from a cow so that it cannot produce any milk (and any milk that it does produce “yields no butter”), and its meat becomes so infected that it cannot be eaten. Therefore, “In reality the cow is gone, and only its semblance remains, animated it may be by an Elf, who receives all the attentions paid to the sick cow, but gives nothing in return”. Fairies were used as scapegoats to explain uncontrollable issues with crops and livestock and the resulting loss of income for farmers. The fear surrounding this uncertainty projects onto fairies who are illustrated as scheming and motivated by their own fruitful desires.
A similar phenomena occurred in relation to children, where fairies were often used as scapegoats for child ‘otherness’, particularly through the idea of ‘Changelings’. Changelings were believed throughout Europe to be humans (typically babies or young people), who had been secretly substituted for a fairy and therefore ‘changed’’. This justified why certain children with medical defects such as dwarfism, cleft palates, inability to grow or reach maturity milestones, or a ‘gaunt’ appearance common with congenital diseases; developed these disabilities which forced them to suffer for no apparent reason. The grief surrounding “untimely death of young people” and innocent lives wasted to disease was a key point of anxiety within 19th and early 20th Century Great British society. Fairy changelings are a projection of this resentment and frustration: mythical creatures who swapped healthy children for disturbing creatures of their own species.
In a tale by James MacDougall from 1910 called “The Glengarry Fairy”, a woman leaves her child sleeping in a cradle to fetch water. After hearing the child crying, the woman attempts to feed and console him, however when she looks at him, she sees that he has “two teeth in his mouth, each more than an inch long, and that his face was as old and withered as any face she had ever seen”. The woman then throws the child into a deep pool of water, where he eventually transforms back to the original baby. The response of the mother is typical of the society of the time. Young notes that the idea that your child could be snatched by a fairy and become a Changeling transcended stories and was actively present in nineteenth-century Great Britian:
“We learn of charms to keep fairies away, including a prayer book in the cot or a charm around the neck. There were also techniques for bringing stolen children back: dipping them in a well three times”
The fear associated with the danger of thieving fairies was born from an anxiety surrounding unexplainable otherness. This otherness is manifested in fairies, who were believed to possess an inherent power over humans which they use for their own wicked gain.
Fairies at the Cradle, Warwick Goble (1862-1943), date unknown
The only thing as universal as storytelling is fear. Each is upheld by the other.
Iterations of fear can be understood everywhere. A look of horror transcends language, an adrenaline rush occurs in the heart of a wild dog as it does in a human. Many of our actions are guided by fear, even good choices are often made out of fear of a bad choice. Fear is designed to surround things that we should avoid, an untouchable otherness.
Fairies are an example of what happens when human fear encounters imagination. They are ‘others’ existing on the margins of society where ideas of right and wrong are blurred. Fairies hold space for the aspects of humans that became marginalised during the 19th Century, including an uncertainty towards faith, anxiety surrounding superstition, and a need to be accepted by a wider community.
Much like humans, fairies are complex, faulted, and operate according to their own capricious desires. We can learn from them, as can we with every supernatural literary creature. After all, it was humans that designed them.
