But the old woman had only pretended to be friendly. She was a wicked witch who was lying in wait there for children. She had built her house of bread only in order to lure them to her, and if she captured one, she would kill him, cook him, and eat him; and for her that was a day to celebrate. – Hansel and Gretel, Grimm’s Fairy Tales
The original fairy tales weren’t all romance and happy endings. They were often cautionary tales.
Fairy tales, also known as wonder tales, are stories from folklore that feature enchantments and magic. Within them, fanciful beings – anything from elves, dwarves, gnomes, giants, witches and wizards, dragons, goblins and more – typically play tricks on less-than-wise humans. They’ve always been cautionary tales: it’s never wise to become involved with the Fae.
This isn’t a new trend in fairy stories at all – the earliest ones were grim and violent, and were aimed more at adults than children. The stories reimagined in more charming form by Disney, the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, originally featured child abandonment, cannibalism and dark punishments.
In the earliest version of Sleeping Beauty, Sun, Moon, and Taliaby Giambattista Basile, a lovely young lord’s daughter is struck down by a splinter of flax. The king, seeing her loveliness and believing she’s asleep, decides that he should have sex with her. While still unconscious, Talia gives birth to his twin children. Then, as if that hasn’t been bad enough, she’s nearly burned at the stake by the king’s jealous wife, who the king then consigns to the fire instead.
Not so cute a tale as the infamous Cottingley Fairies hoax, in which ‘photos’ of magical creatures swept 1920s England in an astounding fairy craze.
If you’re a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you’ve probably heard of it. Two young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who lived in the village of Cottingley, took a series of five photographs that showed them playing with what looked like the classic notion of fairies: tiny, like miniature people but with wings, flitting about the garden.
It was a remarkably clever hoax. When Conan Doyle, who was already interested in the paranormal, became aware of the photos, he accepted their authenticity enthusiastically, and promoted them as clear evidence of supernatural phenomena. He even used them to illustrate an article on fairies he wrote for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine, where he’d already published his Sherlock Holmes stories to great acclaim.
Elsie’s father was himself a keen amateur photographer, with his own darkroom. He immediately decided that her photos were “nothing but a prank”, and refused to lend the girls his camera any more. His wife Polly, though, believed the photographs were genuine, and eventually showed the photos at a meeting of the local Theosophical Society, a movement in the late 1800s that researched anything esoteric or magical. They were then shown at the society’s annual conference a few months later, and the story soared from there. Even other photographic ‘experts’ (a dubious claim in hindsight) pronounced the photos as authentic, including someone from the Kodak company.
The cousins stuck to their story even after they’d grown up and married. However, in 1978 magician and sceptic James Randi, along with a team from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, re-examined the photographs, using early computer enhancement, and concluded that the photographs were fakes – with strings supporting the ‘fairies’.
In 1983, Elsie and Frances admitted in an article published in the magazine The Unexplained that they’d faked the photos, although they wouldn’t abandon their story that they really had seen fairies. In a 1985 interview on the show Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that, after fooling the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she and her cousin were too embarrassed to admit the truth. But they clearly understood human nature very well: Frances added: “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.”
‘They wanted to be taken in.’ How true. Even in absentia, fairies cast their enchantments over humans.
What are fairies, actually?
Such magical creatures are found in many different folklores, but our Western idea comes largely from the Celtic version – a supernatural race said to be or have descended from the gods of Irish mythology, the Tuatha Dé Danann. They were said to dwell in “shees”, “fairy mounds” or “hollow hills”. Portals to an Otherworld.
And they weren’t nice. There were recurring legends about the need to ward off fairies with protective charms. These included things like four-leaf clovers, and food. Fairies were also believed to haunt specific locations and to lead travelers astray, and were often blamed for sickness.
So when we modern writers paint the Fae as nasty creatures, if seductive, we’re following a very old tradition.
Those in my novels are dangerous – bored because their realm is more static than ours, over centuries upon centuries, which has turned them into manipulative thrill-seekers. They particularly like to seduce humans, when they can get them, and play twisted games. Much of what they do is outside our understanding.
Some of the Fae have become fed up with all of that turmoil, and have chosen to live with humans. Their brethren dismissively call them the Dark Fae, as they now live ‘outside the Light’, even though the real darkness is within Tir na nÓg.
You’ll find out more about them in The Summer Door, coming this October. For insider info and sneak peeks into my next novel, subscribe to my monthly newsletter (no paywall) using the pop-up on this site!