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

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  • Irish American fairy lore in New England

    The first large-scale collection of Irish American fairy lore in New England appears to have been compiled quite late. Unlike in New York, where the folklorist Louis C. Jones collected Irish Little People stories in the 1940s, it wasn’t until the 1980s that folklorist E. Moore Quinn began to collect a great deal of Irish…

  • A “black fairy” story from Northern Maine

    In my book New England Fairies, I offer some French Canadian fairy stories from Aroostook County in Northern Maine. Aroostook was a destination for many French Canadian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so the county’s fairy lore is particularly rich. The fairy stories in the book all concern the lutin (a…

  • A troll in New England? The story of the “Somerville Troll”

    Yesterday I went to Ninigret Park in Southern Rhode Island to see the giant trolls that Danish artist Thomas Dambo has constructed out of recycled wood. Two trolls are on display at the park: “Greta” and “Eric.” Six other Dambo trolls can be found in New England, five in Maine at the Coastal Botanical Gardens…

  • Why do fairies become attached to humans?

    At the weekend, I gave a talk on New England fairy lore at the Fortean Fest in Sanford, Maine. After the talk, a woman with clairvoyance came up to me and told me that while I was speaking, she anticipated every word I was about to say. More importantly, she claimed that one of the…

  • “A mischievous fairy called Hob”: The story of Hob’s Hole in Plymouth, Massachusetts

    I recently wrote about Hob’s Hole outside Hartford, Connecticut, and the possibility that its name, which arose sometime in the seventeenth century, derived from a supernatural being called a hob. In that post, I explained that the English tradition of incorporating the word hob into the names of natural formations (such as holes, caves, and…

  • Did a hobgoblin live in a hole north of Hartford, Connecticut?

    In 2019, folklorists Simon Young and Chris Woodyard published a survey of North American place names containing the word hob. Hob denotes a supernatural being most often found in Yorkshire, England. As mentioned recently on this blog, a hob was a solitary spirit that entered farmhouses to perform good deeds for the family who lived…

  • Literal fairies, figurative fairies: A reflection

    I started watching Bodkin this weekend, a new Netflix show set in the fictional town of Bodkin in County Cork, Ireland. I was fascinated to hear one of the main characters, an Irish journalist, offer the following response to two older gentlemen talking about fairies: It’s not literal. No one actually believes there are tricksy…

  • Robin Goodfellow: Demon or Merry Jester?

    I’ve become increasingly interested recently in how, throughout history, folkloric characters once deemed evil are rehabilitated as figures of fun and how figures deemed good sometimes become threatening or evil. British fairy folklore specialist Francis Young drew attention to this phenomenon (in his book Twilight of the Godlings) when he pointed out that: the devil…

  • My visit to H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dark Swamp”

    I’ve just returned from the wilds of Rhode Island’s Durfee Hill region, where I found “Dark Swamp,” a strange location that appears on an 1851 U.S. Geological Survey Map. The Swamp is famous today because cosmic horror writer H.P. Lovecraft set out to find it with a friend in 1923 and failed. The story of…

  • Fairies in “The Water-Babies”

    This post is focused on the fairies of Old England rather than New England, as I’ve recently been reading the classic Victorian children’s novel The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley. I’m interested in the book’s depiction of fairies, because they’re very Victorian fairies, which makes a change from the fairies I usually think about. Whereas fairies…