The Battle of the Victorian Fairies
In the well-to-do households of Victorian cities, fairies were being scrubbed and starched to suit a new, child-friendly image. But in the countryside, the "Good Folk" maintained a frightening aura.
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In the twilight of the Edwardian era, the village of Grange in County Sligo, Ireland received a strange visitor. He was an Oxford scholar by the name of Walter Evans-Wentz, and he came to talk about the fairies.
The academic had embarked on a multi-year quest to record the testimony of fairy believers. Time was of the essence: as the older Victorian generations aged, the stories of peasants across Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Brittany—many of whom were illiterate—would be lost to time.
Evans-Wentz would become a major scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and an early translator of key texts into English, including the Bardo Thodol, otherwise known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. However, his first love was fairy folklore. He published his dissertation in 1911, and The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries has remained a staple in folklore studies ever since.
To the villagers of Grange, being asked to divulge one’s beliefs about fairies, to an Oxford man no less, would usually be a non-starter. But this man wasn’t from the British upper classes; he was an American, and his mother’s family was Irish. Most of all, he approached his conversations with curiosity and respect. Due to these attributes, Evans-Wentz gained the trust of old folks throughout Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Brittany.
Upon his arrival in Grange, Evans-Wentz sought the advice of a local priest named Father Hines, who helped him to meet elders with vivid stories of the fairies. Hugh Currid, the oldest man in Grange at the time, was willing to open up after learning that the scholar’s mother was Irish. With his sister translating (Currid mainly spoke Irish), he shared tales of fairy abductions:
An old woman near Lough More, where Father Patrick was drowned, who used to make her living by selling flax at the market, was taken by the gentry, and often came back afterwards to her three children to comb their hair. One time she told a neighbour that the money she saved from her dealings in flax would be found near a big rock on the lake-shore, which she indicated, and that she wanted the three children to have.1
Patrick Waters, a tailor who lived two miles from Hugh Currid, had his own stories of fairy kidnappers:
A girl in this region died on her wedding-night while dancing. Soon after her death she appeared to her husband, and said to him, “I’m not dead at all, but I am put from you now for a time. It may be a long time, or a short time, I cannot tell. I am not badly off. If you want to get me back you must stand at the gap near the house and catch me as I go by, for I live near there, and see you, and you do not see me.” He was anxious enough to get her back, and didn’t waste any time in getting to the gap. When he came to the place, a party of strangers were just coming out, and his wife soon appeared as plain as could be, but he couldn’t stir a hand or foot to save her. Then there was a scream and she was gone. The man firmly believed this, and would not marry again.2
In other villages, Evans-Wentz encountered people who either claimed to have seen the fairies, or knew someone who had. In Rosses Point, a Mrs. Conway said:
John Conway, my husband, who was a pilot by profession, in watching for in-coming ships used to go up on the high hill among the Fairy Hills; and there he often saw the gentry going down the hill to the strand. One night in particular he recognized them as men and women of the gentry and they were as big as any living people. It was late at night about forty years ago.3
And Neil Cotton, a seventy-three-year-old from Tamlaght in what is now Northern Ireland, claimed that he witnessed his cousin being saved from Faerie (or Fairyland) when he was a boy:
One day, just before sunset in midsummer, and I a boy then, my brother and cousin and myself were gathering bilberries (whortleberries) up by the rocks at the back of here, when all at once we heard music. We hurried round the rocks, and there we were within a few hundred feet of six or eight of the gentle folk, and they dancing. When they saw us, a little woman dressed all in red came running out from them towards us, and she struck my cousin across the face with what seemed to be a green rush. We ran for home as hard as we could, and when my cousin reached the house she fell dead. Father saddled a horse and went for Father Ryan.
When Father Ryan arrived, he put a stole about his neck and began praying over my cousin and reading psalms and striking her with the stole; and in that way brought her back. He said if she had not caught hold of my brother, she would have been taken forever.4
These examples barely scratch the surface of Walter Evans-Wentz’s research, and I would encourage anyone interested to read The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries for themselves.
What I would like to point out is that although Evans-Wentz collected these accounts from roughly 1907 to 1909, these older storytellers would have lived most of their lives during the Victorian period, and their accounts give us a window into the folklore of a fading world. Furthermore, we are miles away from Tinker Bell and the Cottingley fairies, which we discussed in last week’s entry in this series.
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