Fairies, Elves, supernatural beings, generally of human form but diminutive size, a belief in whom has been among the superstitions of the greater portion of the European nations. The word elf is from the Anglo-Saxon alf, which corresponds to the Danish alf, the Icelandic álfir, and the German alp; but the Germans adopted in the 17th century elf and elfe, from the English for the same idea. Fairy is properly enchantment, or the realm of fairy spirits, fay being originally the name of the sprites themselves. Fay (Low Lat. fata, 'fairy'; Fr. fée) is from Lat. fatum, 'fate,' and once meant the goddess of destiny. From the Old French fae (= fée) comes faerie, 'enchantment;' whence fairy. The Celtic fées or fairies are undoubtedly relics of those matres and matronæ which appear on Gallo-Roman inscriptions as objects of popular belief. After the transfusion of the Teutonic and southern nations the northern elves (which were originally of two kinds—the light elves, or elves proper, and the dark elves, or dwarfs) became mixed up with their Celtic kindred, the fairies, in inextricable confusion.
Tracing back the antecedent history of this widespread belief, various fanciful theories have been suggested to explain its origin and growth; most of which cannot be accepted as satisfactory. But, like many other survivals of superstition, it is probably to be connected with the mythological conceptions of the Greeks and Romans; some folklorists referring the fairy to the Parcae or Fates of primitive times, who were supposed to rule the destiny of man. The long occupation of Gaul by the Romans familiarised its natives with their mythological conceptions of nymphs and fauns; and indeed these closely resemble in many particulars the famous fays of the medieval romances. Again, the native Gauls themselves had a large pantheon of topical divinities, and doubtless these became fused with the other traditional figures, whether due to creative imagination or to more or less direct transmission, and thus helped to create the composite product forming the fairydom of our folklore, which through such literary mediums as the work of Straparola and the Pentamerone of Basil has exercised a profound influence upon western Europe. Fairies in literature have received the most different treatment: thus, Boiardo's, Ariosto's, and Spenser's fairies are mere diminutive men, with all the ordinary human emotions, while in the Oberon and Titania of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, and in the fairies that touched the imaginations of Ben Jonson, Herrick, Drayton, and even the youthful Milton, we find that the aerial and supernatural quality is the predominant feature in the characterisation. Altogether they are more romantic and interesting figures, and at the same time in their other-worldly conception are more real to the human imagination.
Comparatively modern fairy legends tell us how these little beings preside at the birth of man; and we know how at the birth of Ogier le Danois six fairies attend, five of whom give good gifts. In those parts of the world where there are mountains, mists, dangerous morasses, cataracts, and stormy oceans, all superstitions, being a belief in supernatural agencies, are naturally exaggerated, and, from the dangers to which the people are liable from the agencies they deem supernatural, the belief takes deep root in their minds. Accordingly, in flat and well-cultivated countries like England, the fairy superstition is simple and homely, connecting itself with matters of domestic routine, such as the sweeping of the dwelling-house, the skimming of the milk, the preservation of the butter, and the like, numerous allusions to which are found in Shakespeare. In Scandinavia and the Highlands the fairy people are connected with storms and convulsions, betray people to their death, fly away with them into the infinite cloud-land, or lead them through endless caverns within the earth. It has been observed as a further distinction that the fairies of the German or Teutonic tribes are more harsh, fierce, uncomely, or deformed than those of the Celtic nations, which have a tendency rather to the aerial and the graceful. Still the amount of common characteristics in the superstition throughout Europe is enormous. Its peculiarities have been found so much more emphatically displayed in Scandinavia than elsewhere as to have suggested the earlier and less philosophical view that modern fairydom is merely a remnant of the old mythology of the northern nations, communicated by them to a greater or less extent in all the countries over which their vikings carried their ravages.
There is a further distinction between the fairies of poetic and heroic literature and those of popular belief—the former being princes and princesses of chivalry, only distinguished from human beings by their superhuman superiority in all the qualities which elicited respect in the age of chivalry; while those of popular belief are small in stature, sometimes decrepit, and endowed with dispositions generally more allied to malignity than magnanimity. In Ireland and the Highlands they have been spoken of as a wandering remnant of the fallen angels, and in the west of England the pixies are the souls of infants who died before they were baptised. Sometimes they are supposed to be human beings, metamorphosed or disembodied, and this form of the superstition has made fairyland a place of purgation for those whose sins have condemned them to it. The analogy is carried out in the belief that the services of the living can extricate the souls so situated; but it is rather through dexterity and courage than pure piety that the feat is achieved, and the rescues from fairyland form some of the most wild and exciting of the elfin narratives—as, for instance, the exquisite ballad of Tamlane. The only dark cloud that obscures the brightness of fairydom is the periodical necessity of paying a teind to hell—a necessity which casts unexpected light upon the radical affinities of the fairies, in spite of all the seeming gaiety and happiness of their world. Hence their desire for kidnapping human children, in order to pay with them the inevitable tribute. Again, they do not possess spiritual souls like men and women, and consequently have no immortality of existence—this notion forms the heart of the most exquisite of artistic fairy-tales, the Undine of Fouqué.
There is still another broad distinction into fairies that dwell in the upper air and fairies that dwell within the bowels of the earth, while a third class frequent the waters. The Scandinavians called the fairy inhabitants of the air white elves, those of the earth black. Whatever was genial, light, playful, and benevolent in the superstition clustered round the former; the latter did all the work that was dark, cruel, and rapacious. Naturally enough, the black or subterranean kind frequented mining districts, where they might be seen extracting the ore for themselves, and thus unwittingly leading the miner to rich veins of metal. They might be seen in an occasional peep through an aperture of a hill in their underground retreats, in chambers supported on jasper columns, where they were stowing away their ample stores of gold and silver. Some of the most exciting tales about the German gnome, and the Irish leprechaun, who was a creature of the same kind, are founded on the efforts of adventurous mortals to get possession of their riches. There exists a legend, occurring in nearly identical terms in several countries, which connects some piece of valuable plate belonging to a church with the underground fairies. The story of the horn of Oldenburg is a type of these narratives. Pictures represent it as a beautiful drinking-vessel, in the shape of a horn, exquisitely decorated with the finest fanciful silver-work, in the style contemporary with the richest Gothic architecture. The legend is that one day Otho of Oldenburg, being exhausted with hunting, and very thirsty, exclaimed, 'O God, would that I had a cool drink!' Thereupon there appeared before him, as if coming out of the rock, a lovely maiden, who offered him a drink in the fairy-horn. He made off with it, and saved himself from evil consequences by bestowing it on the church. Hence these relics are generally in churches; but one of them is still in the possession of an English family, and, as their prosperity was traditionally believed to depend on retaining it, it was called the 'Luck of Eden Hall.'
Puck and the pixies belong to the same class of beings. Of the elf-folks of Scandinavia, the male is old and ill-favoured, but the evil element in the elf-woman or elf-maid consists in her beauty, which renders her perilous to romantic and loveborn youths, whom she beguiles either with her own charms or by assuming the aspect of their mistress. To our own literature belongs one beautiful story of this character—the ancient tale of the love between 'True Thomas' and the Queen of Fairyland, which the genius of some nameless maker has woven into imperishable verse. A common feature, both here and elsewhere, in the stories of fairy-women who assume human form and give their love to men, is a restriction of some nature which must not be broken. All mermaids, lamias, and the like are subject to some such conditions. Thus, Melusine is once a week again a serpent from the waist downwards, and when her husband breaks her one condition and surprises her at her bath, she becomes a water-sprite again.
In Ireland, and also in the Border country of Scotland, the fairy superstition has been incorporated into innumerable poetic legends and mystic traditions. T. Crofton Croker, in his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (3 vols. 1828), presents a full and amusing account of the Irish fairies or elves, which he describes as 'a few inches high, airy, and almost transparent in body; so delicate in their form that a dew-drop, when they chance to dance on it, trembles indeed, but never breaks. Both sexes are of extraordinary beauty, and mortal beings cannot be compared with them.' They do not live alone, or in pairs, but always in large societies, and are governed by a queen. The same author adds: 'They are invisible to man, particularly in the daytime, and, as they can be present and hear what is said, the peasantry never speak of them but with caution and respect, terming them the good people, or friends. They have their dwellings in clefts of rocks, caves, and ancient tumuli. Every part within is decorated in the most splendid and magnificent manner; and the pleasing music which sometimes issues from thence in the night has delighted those who have been so fortunate as to hear it.' There are Irish fairies, however, of more special character. Among these are the banshee, or female spirit who watches a particular family; the leprechaun or cluricaun, an elf of evil disposition, who usually appears as a wrinkled old man, and has a knowledge of hidden treasure; and the pooka, a spirit of diabolical disposition, who sometimes appearing as an eagle or a black horse hurries the person he gets possession of to destruction. Of similar varieties are the Scottish elves: the brownie, or domestic spirit nearly corresponding to the Banshee; and the kelpie, a kind of water-horse, not unlike the Pooka, and in form somewhat analogous to the being sung by Leyden in his charming ballad, 'The Cout of Keeldar' (Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border):
'Brown dwarf, that o'er the muirland strays,
Thy name to Keeldar tell!
'The Brown Man of the muirs, who stays
Beneath the heather-bell.'
Fairies cannot be seen by mortal eyes with impunity—it is the main part of Falstaff's terror when he sees his assailants: 'They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die' (Merry Wives, V. v.). But the greatest risk that mortals run from the denizens of fairyland is that already alluded to, of having their children stolen from the cradle, and a changeling substituted who bears a resemblance to the stolen infant, but is an ugly little creature and never thrives. On this theft of a maid, who is carried to fairyland, but in the course of time returns to her parents, James Hogg founded his fine ballad of 'Kilmeny' (Queen's Wake).
Besides being embalmed in imaginative literature, the fairy has a perpetual memorial in the small, exquisitely shaped arrow-heads found so abundantly in northern countries, where they were long known as elf-arrows, or bolts with which the more malignant fairies sometimes slew or injured cattle and human beings; thus, when a poor man's cow or heifer was suddenly affected with some deadly and incomprehensible illness, it was said to be 'elf-shot.' See ELF-BOLTS.
See especially Keightley's Fairy Mythology (1850), and the articles DEMONOLOGY, and FOLKLORE; also Ritson's
Fairy Tales (1831); Halliwell's Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of a Midsummer Night's Dream (1845); Schreiber, Die Feen in Europa (Freiburg, 1842); Maury, Les Fées du Moyen Age (Paris, 1843); Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1835; 4th ed. 1875-78; Eng. trans. 4 vols. 1879-88); and Wirt Sikes, British Goblins (1879); also the collections of fairy tales of Grimm, Crofton Croker, Von Hahn, J. F. Campbell, Dasent, Ralston, &c.