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Fairy kings and queens in New England folklore
The purpose of this post is to answer the question: Do New England fairies have kings and queens? Or, to put it another way, did New England folklore inherit the European tradition of depicting some fairies as belonging to monarchical societies? References to fairy kings and queens in British and Irish folklore might lead one…
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What the Dutch can teach us about “goblin mode”
Note: Thank you to researchers Reem Kattan, Kerstie Frank, and Valmor Ildo Goulart who found sources on Dutch folklore, particularly gnome, kabouter, and goblin lore. In 2022, when the Oxford English Dictionary chose the term goblin mode for its Word of the Year, it defined the term as referring to: a type of behaviour which…
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Fairies walk through dry places: A reflection
In the spirit of the season (Lent and approaching Easter), I thought I’d offer the following reflection on the relationship between fairies and “dry places.” My inspiration comes from a New England saying found in the 1896 book Current Superstitions: Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk by Fanny D. Bergen. The book…
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When New England was (almost) an Elizabethan Fairyland
Before the Puritans arrived en masse in North America and changed this continent forever, an Elizabethan called Thomas Morton, who hailed from pixie-haunted Devon in South West England, landed on the shore near present-day Quincy. There, in 1624, he established a trading settlement called Merrymount, which would go down in history as representing a short-lived…
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Do fairies abduct people in New England folklore?
Fairy abduction is often mentioned in British and Irish folklore. Many people have read stories about fairies stealing men’s wives or taking women to act as midwives to a fairy baby. Sometimes people enter fairy mounds, enticed by the music, and dance the night away, only to find that, in the morning, they cannot leave.…
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Continuity between pagan and Christian water cults: A reflection
In summer 2018, I finally got to visit a location I’d wanted to see for a long time: St. Winifred’s Well in Flintshire, North Wales. The location is the site of a holy spring that attracted many pilgrims between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. In the early-sixteenth century, a local abbot built a palatial stone…
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Where do fairies fit in God’s Divine Plan?
NB. After reading this post, fairy folklore author Shaun Cooper pointed out to me that there are many instances in folklore of humans and fairies understanding each other in speech. Furthermore, not all fairies hate Christian symbols. With fairies, nothing one says about them exhausts the subject or applies in every situation. This post offers…
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Top 5 most fairy-haunted places in New England
The Native American tribes who inhabit New England—the Wabanaki in the north, and the Mohegans, the Wampanoag, and the Narragansett in the south—have always known the land they call Dawnland is a fairy-haunted land. After the seventeenth century, when people from Europe settled on the tribes’ lands, some of them also discovered a Land of…
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Intergenerational fairy belief in New England
As with most issues of faith, people’s belief in fairies tends to be passed down generationally. For centuries, people in Ireland and Great Britain passed the “fairy faith” from one generation to the next, usually via the medium of stories and sayings. Sometimes these sayings had a literal meaning, people claiming to have seen or…
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The problem with the pukwudgies of Massachusetts
Many authors on the Internet and in books on New England cryptids have taken to calling pukwudgies Massachusetts’ most famous magical “creature.” While I don’t doubt that pukwudgies are the most talked about Massachusetts fairy (in no small part due to J. K. Rowling’s inclusion of them in her Wizarding World), I think they’re a…
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Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests 