Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

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  • The use of “Fairy” in depictions of Queen Alexandra

    NB. In this post, I use the term Fairy to describe a condition, state, or influence. However, it also refers to a discourse, that is, a set of understandings, references, and connotations related to fairy tales; it’s the use of this discourse I wish to examine in this post. I recently wrote a Facebook post…

  • Fairies in Beverly, Massachusetts, in the 1830s?

    Lucy Larcom’s A New England Girlhood (1889) contains a wealth of information about life in Beverly, Massachusetts, in the 1820s and 1830s when the town was a tiny seaport. Larcom was an author and poet, an impassioned abolitionist, an associate of John Greenleaf Whittier, and later a teacher at Wheaton College. Of particular interest to…

  • Demonization of Little People and fairies in New England folklore

    In an earlier post about the hobgoblin Robin Goodfellow, I mentioned the widely reported phenomenon of folkloric beings starting out as neutral or benign and becoming, in the history of folklore, increasingly demonic (that is, monstrous or allied with the Devil). This process may occur under the influence of church authorities, secular courts, or the…

  • New England Fairies now available on Kindle

    New England Fairies is now available on Kindle in both the United States and United Kingdom. Purchase here for the US. Purchase here for the UK.

  • Looking for the fairy “muse” at haunted Chanctonbury Ring

    Last week I was in Somerset, England, for my dad’s funeral. The trip evoked fond memories from the late eighties of my dad taking my brother and me to sites rich in Somerset folklore. This included Swayne’s Leap, where small stones mark the spot where highwayman Jan Swayne leapt to his freedom during the English…

  • Religious and magical responses to fairy “fatality”: A reflection

    Toward the end of his book Twilight of the Godlings, folklorist Francis Young writes about medieval romance as a genre that deals with fatalitas, a Late Latin word referring to the realm of fate and necessity. Romance and fairy tales exist within the realm of fatalitas because the characters found in these genres are subject…

  • What Roald Dahl’s “The Gremlins” teaches us about fairies

    I recently read Roald Dahl’s first ever children’s book The Gremlins in which he tells a story based on folklore about an imaginary being called a “gremlin,” which spread in the British Royal Air Force during World War Two. Although British pilots didn’t actually believe in these mysterious beings, they blamed them for accidents and…

  • How traditional a fairy is Tinker Bell?

    It’s an undeniable fact that Tinker Bell from J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy has—for better or worse—greatly informed the modern understanding of fairies. The fairies in Peter and Wendy largely conform to the Victorian understanding of tiny winged beings with a magical aura or light surrounding them. Barrie’s fairies, like humanoid butterflies, wear magical “fairy…

  • A few hybrid Indigenous and European fairies

    In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when white American folklorists reported Little People stories they’d learned from Indigenous people, they often ended up creating what I call “hybrid fairies.” That is, they wrote about beings with characteristics drawn from both Indigenous and European folklore. It’s not entirely clear whether these stories about hybrid fairies…

  • “The Crystal Tower”: A prose poem inspired by two otherworld journeys

    My prose poem “The Crystal Tower” recently appeared in Rhode Island Bards Poetry Anthology 2024, so I thought I’d write a short post about some of the poem’s inspirations, which had a lot to do with fairies. The poem is about human interactions with a fairy “otherworld” (the “Crystal Tower” of the poem’s title) located…