The “green” fairies of Appalachia

In my reading of Appalachian fairy tales and stories, I’ve come across a number of fairies or fairy-like beings that are closely associated with the natural world. I would even go so far as to categorize these fairies as “green fairies,” for they all seem to share a number of green traits. These fairies appear to derive from a variety of sources and traditions—literary, folkloric, and classical—so they can hardly be called a unified group; however, they do share the “green” attribute, which perhaps reflects their origins in the Appalachian woods and hills.

The color green has long been associated with fairies, especially in Ireland and the “Celtic” parts of Britain. However, in that context, the color usually refers to the fairies’ clothing. In Appalachia, the color seems to refer to the fairies’ themselves (or the world in which they live). In this, Appalachian fairies are perhaps closer to the Green Children of Woolpit—two green-skinned children who visited the English county of Suffolk in the twelfth century.

By “closely associated with the natural world,” I mean that the beings possess one of the following traits: either 1) they’re explicitly described as “green”; 2) they live in a “green” world; or 3) they possess a nature that’s tightly interwoven with the vegetable kingdom. Let’s take a closer look at each of these attributes.

1. Regarding fairies described as “green,” we see this in a story that ballad singer Beth Vanover Roberts shared with folklorist Ramond Burgin in the early 1990s. Repeating what her grandfather had told her, Roberts said that some fairies in Virginia’s Dickenson County were called “the Green People” because they slept all winter among the roots of trees and only woke up in the spring when the flowers began to bloom. These fairies may have been inspired by Sibylle von Olfers’ 1908 children’s book, The Story of the Root Children, for there, we find the story of magical children who sleep among the roots of trees in winter—until Mother Earth wakes them in the spring. Although Beth Vanover Roberts identified the “Green People” story as Irish (like her grandfather who told it to her), it doesn’t seem to reflect Irish folklore. In fact, the “Green People” seem closer in nature to the Green Children of Woolpit.

2. The second story comes from Stacy Sivinski’s beautiful folktale collection, Fairy Tales of Appalachia. Told by a woman called Betty Crigger (who learned it from her aunt Ida Monk of Honaker, Virginia), the story concerns a man who commits a terrible crime and who’s sent, as punishment, to a place called “Green Land.” The otherworldly nature of this “Green Land” can be seen not only in its green color (so green it hurts mortal eyes) but also its location beyond “many mountains”:

Green Land was the greenest place on earth. Everything was green, so green that it hurt the eyes. The man had to walk over many mountains to reach this place.

Also suggestive of the land’s otherworldly nature is the fact that the man cannot bring anything away with him when he finally returns to his home. The woman the man meets in this land has “long, stringy” hair and an unappealing appearance. She brings him food but never speaks. Although he eventually succumbs to desire for her (out of loneliness) and even has a son with her, the story’s ending reinforces the woman’s essentially otherworldly nature: Unable to accompany the man (because she apparently belongs to the “Green Land”), the woman rips their child in half and throws one half of the body at the man, saying, “Here, take your half with you.”

To me, this suggests that the boy is half “fairy,” half man. (For the record, Sivinski connects the story to two other sources as well: the story of Medea, who slew her children as revenge after Jason abandoned her; and the story of the two women who fought over a child in the court of King Solomon.)

That the woman in the “Green Land” story is an otherworldly being seems clear from a variation of the same tale that folklorist Leonard Roberts collected in eastern Kentucky. In that tale, the woman is called a Yeahoh, which refers to the eastern Kentuckian version of Bigfoot. However, the word may also be a corruption of Yahoo from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, where the Yahoos are depicted as “degenerate” human beings (see a discussion of this here). Compared to the Bigfoot-like woman in Leonard Roberts’s story, the woman in Stacy Sivinski’s “Green Land” tale seems far more human, although she retains the unattractive quality of “long, stringy hair” and an inability to speak. Sivinski’s variation appears to synthesize the folkloric notion of an “otherworldly bride” and a narrative about human/beast intermingling.

Of course, this story doesn’t attest to actual fairy belief in Appalachia, but it does suggest that the notion of a fairy-like otherworld existed in the Appalachian imaginary—and that this otherworld was very green.

3. The final story about an Appalachian “green” fairy—also found in Sivinski’s Fairy Tales of Appalachia—is a retelling of Aesop’s fable, “The Honest Woodcutter.” In that story, the god Mercury emerges from a river to test a woodcutter’s honesty. The Appalachian version of the story, clearly altered over time, replaces Mercury with what Sivinski identifies as “an iteration of the Green Man,” a decorative figure found in medieval church architecture. The narrator describes this Green Man in the following way:

He was the oddest-looking man. . . with gray moss instead of a beard growing on his chin and whiskers that were the branches of spruce. And instead of a nose, he had a pinecone on his face!

We know that classical stories (such as Aesop’s) found their way to Appalachia (Marie Campbell collected many stories with classical roots in Kentucky in the 1920s and 1930s), but it’s interesting to note that this Appalachian version transforms the tale’s most “classical” element—the god Mercury—into a figure of later European folklore, perhaps more in keeping with the Appalachian environment.

Conclusion

What should we make of these “green” fairies in Appalachian stories? One possibility is that they reflect the environment in which Appalachian storytellers lived—that is, the hills and forests of Kentucky and Virginia, which remained quite isolated from the rest of the country for many years. Another possibility is that they represent inherited themes from Scottish, Irish, and English folklore, whether the greenness of the Woolpit children or the foliate heads (Green Men) of English and Scottish churches.

Keep an eye out for my book Fairies of Northern Appalachia: A History of the Little People of the Mountains, coming in 2026. And in the meantime, check out my two previous volumes of American fairy folklore below.