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Discover the
emotions, personalities, and motivations of the most compelling
characters in Fairy Tales. Fairies are some of the most compelling characters in fairy tales, yet few people understand them. From fairy refugees to blood thirsty vampires take a journey to discover what drove these characters, where they came from, and what they wanted.Using folk belief and lore to explore the first fantasy stories, which are likely far stranger and more astounding than you ever imagined. |
Rain sweeps over the dusty fields, causing the people who work the land to breathe a sigh of relief; their crops will continue to grow. Although many will still go to bed so hungry that it stunts their growth, the fear of outright starvation has been alleviated, for now. A few weeks before, when people had started to become desperate for rain to keep their crops alive, they'd gone to the rivers, or into the forests. There they'd offered either bits of cloth, votive statues, tablets, oatmeal, bread, or even animal sacrifices to the fairies in hopes that the spirits would make it rain.
This was the world of the people who told fairy tales, a
world filled with constant fear and dependence on the forces of
nature. People once believed everything was controlled by the
spirits of nature and the ghosts of the dead, the magical
beings we now call fairies. At its root, the word fairy roughly
means “those that control fate” (Narvaez, 1997). It was the
fairies who made it rain or storm, who caused the plague or
the years of bountiful harvests. Fate in ancient Europe wasn't
some abstract concept; it was something fairies made happen.
What this means is that fairies were very often those beings
that cared about humanity, for good or for ill. Jacob Grimm
stated that:
Destiny itself is called orlog, or else nauor (necessitas),
aldr (aevum); the norns have to manage it, espy it,
decree it, pronounce it. It was only when the goddesses
had been cast off, that the meanings of the words came
to be confounded, and the old flesh and blood causes
disappeared. (Grimm, 1835)
The word “fairy,” then, refers to a whole host of beings
who control the fate of humanity. Throughout this work, we
will discuss many beings from many lands, yet I refer to each
of these as fairies because the word is meant to designate
those who control the fate of humanity and who share certain
traits in common. The word “fairy,” like the word “deity” or
“animal,” is just a definition, one that crosses many cultures.
This book is not, however, an encyclopedic discussion of
fairies, but rather it is a discussion of the emotions and
personality traits that people assigned to them. After all, when
humans believe their lives and happiness depend so
completely on something – as people once believed they
depended on fairies – they ponder its nature, they worry about
its moods, and they constantly concern themselves with it. So,
for thousands of years, people worried about the nature of
fairies. Shaman figures, such as witches and cunning, would
enter the spirit realms to gain a better understanding of the
metaphysical world of fairies. People would consider carefully
what would make fairies happy and what might make them
angry. In his memoirs, one Breton man muses that;
At that time, with no education, the peasants, laborers,
and fishermen had no other topics to talk about; they
(fairies, ghosts, and spirits) were the sole matter for
conversation, for chatting, whenever a few people found
themselves together with nothing else to do. But I, who
already knew well those tales and legends from my
father and mother, and especially from the great
weaver…. (Dequiqne 2011)
He goes on to say that people oftentimes argued about stories
from distant places:
But, when it came to local lore, there was not of that
wrangling. Those legends, or rather accounts – for they
were always real-life stories-were about personal
incidents that every man would tell and that no one
would want to dispute. In those times, everyone had
seen ghosts, miserable souls caught in some swamp, or
in a nook of some old house, or in a hollow tree trunk,
or out on a moor; everyone had seen fairies, night washerwomen, night-screamers, and the elfin couriquets… (Dequiqnet, 2011)
So, to a large extent, people assigned some level of
personality to various fairies, despite the fact that fairies often
make only small appearances in fairy tales. This also means
that fairies were much more than just prancy, dancy little
creatures that lived in crystal palaces beneath lakes and hills.
Rather, fairies were often complex beings about which people
would have nightmares or tell horror stories, and to whom
people would give offerings in hopes that the fairies would
leave them alone. Because of this, it's easy to picture fairies as
a little like gangsters, demanding that people pay them for
protection and certainly some fairies were very much like this.
Most, however, were generally caring and kind, going out of
their way to help humanity, yet capable of having horrible
tempers.
Reading about fairies, one quickly realizes that they are
complex, conflicted beings. Take the Rusalka, for example. The
Rusalka is a young girl – one who can never grow up, never
mature, never find true love. Yet, at the same time, she is
always wise and ancient, and very lustful; she was a nature
spirit, who taught humans how to create civilization. Thus,
she is caught forever between many opposite extremes. It is a
maddening moment in time in which fairies live; between dark
and light, between youth and maturity. They are forever
caught betwixt and between. It's no wonder, then, that when a
fairy tells someone they love them and makes an offer to allow
someone to come away with them to a land of beauty where
they can be immortal, it sounds both lovely and at the same
time a little like a threat.
Despite the threatening nature of fairy abductions,
Fairyland could oftentimes be likened to Heaven, for many
humans were comforted by the idea of going to Fairyland when
they died. In Rome, when a girl drowned, people took comfort
in the knowledge that she got to play with the nymphs forever
(Larson, 2001). Starving peasants who heard tales of fairy
dances and of eternal parties must have, at times, hoped that
they too would become a fairy who got to participate in these
dances when they died. They must have longed for the day
when they could be free of the suffering and toil of their
station in life. Again, looking at the Rusalka, we see that she lives a life that is, in many ways, a girl’s dream; for Russian
girls were truly second-class citizens. They often gave birth
while working in the fields, and the harshness of the
experience caused them to develop age spots on their faces
while they were still barely twenty. Their husbands would
spend their money on vodka, leaving them to starve. Then, the
drunken husbands would come home and beat them. At
times, their husband would grab them by the braids and beat
their heads against a wall or drag them up and down the
stairs (Ranset, 1993).
Rusalka, who were often said to be the spirits of dead
girls, had no braids; their hair was free just like they were.
They were all beautiful and sexy so that men longed for them,
but the Rusalka were in control. They could not only refuse
men, they could kill them if the men became too cruel. No one
dared to walk on the Ruslakas' laundry when they laid it out
to dry; no one dared to mock or abuse them. The Rusalka
danced all evening and lived in crystal palaces, while human
girls were forced to continue working (Rappoport, 1999). At the
same time, in order to become a Rusalka, a person had to die,
and there were no guarantees, which explains why people both
feared and longed for the fairy world.
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