A Word on Fairies

Are fairies good Christians?

Many say they are not; that they are in fact shrunken pagan gods, still worshipped into later ages by the people living in more remote places, the “heathen” or “pagan.” This, after all, is where fairies are to be found: in the woods and dells, on the margins of human settlement. Max Muller, the great nineteenth century scholar of religions, promoted this opinion. W.B. Yeats cites “Irish antiquarians” maintaining that fairies are “The gods of pagan Ireland … who, when no longer worshipped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination, and now are only a few spans high.”

Superficially plausible; yet this fancy runs afoul of the fact that there are already such “little people” in pre-Christian lands, and they are not gods: the nymphs, naiads, and dryads of Greece; the yakshas, gandharvas and apsaras of India. Korea has its dokkaebi; the Philippines have their engkanto. The Quran, too, has its djinn, who function just like fairies in the Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Some djinn, at least, are good Muslims. 

Muslim fairies

But, writing in the early 17th century, the Anglican bishop of Oxford saw fairies as specifically Catholic:

By which we note, the fairies
Were of the old profession,
Their songs were Ave Marias,
Their dances were procession.

But now, alas! They all are dead,
Or gone beyond the seas;
Or farther for religion fled;
Or else they take their ease.

Most by now perhaps have left for Canada. My Irish-Canadian grandmother would agree. They were always hiding things in her kitchen.

Poet Yeats endorses this view, and notes that fairies remained a stronger tradition in Catholic Ireland than in Protestant England. Fairies perhaps earned their reputation as being pagan for the same reason many other aspects of Catholicism were declared pagan, in an England turned Puritan. Fairies, after all, loved beauty, and music, and dance.

Fairies do seem to find enduring accommodation in the Catholic imagination: fascinating such Catholic or “high church” authors as Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Among the church fathers, Origen seems to argue for their existence:

“We indeed … maintain with regard not only to the fruits of the earth, but to every flowing stream and every breath of air that the ground brings forth those things which are said to grow up naturally,—that the water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams,—that the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians; but we deny that those invisible agents are demons. (Origen, Contra Celsus, Book 8, ch. 3).”

The simple, obvious conclusion is that “fairy” is a class of angel. This, indeed, follows from St. Augustine’s definition: “’Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit,’ from what they do, ‘angel.’’ The “fairy godmother,” the most familiar fairy in the tales, is functionally equivalent to a guardian angel. In some of Grimms’ collected fairy tales, like “The Maiden without Hands,” she is expressly an angel.

Why do our fairy tales not more often make this clear? Perhaps because angels are a bit too frightening to young and many adult minds. While, as Chesterton has observed, fairyland is resolutely moral at all times, it tends to follow Bishop Barron’s advice, and lead the uncertain in the proper path not with appeals to morality, but to beauty.

For there are also fallen angels. These are the trolls. A Danish legend implies their true identity:

One night as a priest was going from Hiorlunde to Rolskilde, he passed by a mound in which there were music, dancing and other merriment.

At this moment some trolls sprang forth from the mount, stopped the priest’s vehicle, and said, “Whither art thou going?”

“To Landemode,” answered the priest.

They then asked him whether he thought they could be saved; to which he replied that he could not then inform them. They then appointed him to meet them with an answer in a year.

In the meantime it went ill with the coachman, who the next time he passed by the mound was overturned and killed on the spot.

When the priest came again at the end of a year, they again asked him the same question, to which he answered, “No! You are all damned!”

Scarcely had he uttered the words before the whole mount was in a blaze.

“A fairy tale,” as Laura Cready says in her 1916 Study of Fairy Tales, “is a poetic presentation of a spiritual truth.”