Post by Clovis Merovingian on Jul 16, 2018 2:24:56 GMT
When you hear the word "fairy" what do you imagine? Odds are that think of the Victorian image of a fairy like Tinkerbell from Peter Pan. A small pretty, cute, winged creature made from children's wishes who grant wishes and are generally the domain of little girl's fantasy dreams. Or maybe you think of a homosexual or a effeminate man. I absolutely despise this misconception because it is the bastardization of one of the most interesting creatures from folklore. The original folkloric fairies are not cute, and they are NOT harmless. In Ireland fairies were called the Aos Sidhe or the Daoine Sidhe which translates to the "people of the mounds". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aos_S%C3%AD The Daoine Sidhe according to Irish legends were the pagan gods of Ireland, the Tuatha De Danann, who were defeated by the Irish's iron weapons and driven to the underworld beneath the burial mounds of Ireland. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuatha_D%C3%A9_Danann The fairies lived in a bunch of underground kingdoms and had a society very similar to prechristian Gaelic society. The faeries of Irish lore did not have wings and they were not until later times small and instead looked like impossibly beautiful human beings. The fairies of Irish lore were immortal, that is they did not age and could only die through violence, they could shape shift, turn invisible, and possessed immense magical powers that could help or more often times hurt humans.
The fairies were beings that were considered very frightening to the Irish. They soured milk, killed cattle, kidnapped children and replaced them with deformed or mentally deficient babies called changelings. They murdered people in gruesome ways, abducted them as wives or slaves (either manual labor or sex slaves) in their kingdoms, and generally caused much harm in the realm of mortals. They were beings which were to be placated and you were supposed to take care not to offend them at any cost. Because of this people didn't call them fairies or the Sidhe out loud as it was thought to offend them and bring down their wrath. Instead people called them the fair folk, the kindly ones, or the good people as a form of flattery. As fairies could turn invisible and move about they could be standing near you and you wouldn't know it. Building a house on a fairy path or an area where fairies were said to frequent was a bad idea as it would offend them and there are many tales of fairies killing whole families for doing so. To prevent faires from abducting their children people would dress their baby boys in girls clothing until the age of five to confuse the fairies. Often times in the days people believed in fairies children who were mentally deficient, or had autism were believed to be changelings switched in the place of their abducted child at birth and there was one instance in Wales where a woman believed her child to be a changeling and threw it in the oven to burn alive (and got away Scott free for doing so as the people in charge believed her.) It was said that if you toss a changeling in the oven the fairy will return the child and take the changeling back.
The fairies were supposed to possess a morality very alien to our own. For one thing the fairies never lie however one must be careful when dealing with them because they like a lawyer will take the words they say literally and trick you in this manner. For instance there's this song by Heather Dale about a woman who could not conceive a child so she went to the fairies asking for a baby. The fairies obliged but as the years passed the child would not grow any older remaining a baby forever. The woman asked the fairies for a baby and a baby she got. Fairies also don't accept thank you as a valid way of repaying kindness. If a fairy gives a gift to someone or out of the kindness of their heart help them it expects a gift or help in return. If you didn't oblige in this manner something bad would happen to you. It has also been suggested in some folkore that fairies had to pay a tithe to hell. Basically they had to give a person to the devil every year and thus they abducted people for this reason.
There were also suppossedly two courts of fairies the seelie and unseelie court. The seelie court were sometimes helpful to humans and sometimes not (they were unpredictable), the unseelie court were monsters which were always harmful to humans. The way to kill a faerie in folklore was to use iron, hence why the irish were able to defeat them with their iron weapons. Also if you poured salt on the ground the fairy had to count each grain of salt.
Anyways I could go on all day about this folkloric creature but it irks me that they've been bastardized and disneyfied in today's society.
Heres another good description of these beings from TV tropes and Idioms. tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/TheFairFolk
The fairies were beings that were considered very frightening to the Irish. They soured milk, killed cattle, kidnapped children and replaced them with deformed or mentally deficient babies called changelings. They murdered people in gruesome ways, abducted them as wives or slaves (either manual labor or sex slaves) in their kingdoms, and generally caused much harm in the realm of mortals. They were beings which were to be placated and you were supposed to take care not to offend them at any cost. Because of this people didn't call them fairies or the Sidhe out loud as it was thought to offend them and bring down their wrath. Instead people called them the fair folk, the kindly ones, or the good people as a form of flattery. As fairies could turn invisible and move about they could be standing near you and you wouldn't know it. Building a house on a fairy path or an area where fairies were said to frequent was a bad idea as it would offend them and there are many tales of fairies killing whole families for doing so. To prevent faires from abducting their children people would dress their baby boys in girls clothing until the age of five to confuse the fairies. Often times in the days people believed in fairies children who were mentally deficient, or had autism were believed to be changelings switched in the place of their abducted child at birth and there was one instance in Wales where a woman believed her child to be a changeling and threw it in the oven to burn alive (and got away Scott free for doing so as the people in charge believed her.) It was said that if you toss a changeling in the oven the fairy will return the child and take the changeling back.
The fairies were supposed to possess a morality very alien to our own. For one thing the fairies never lie however one must be careful when dealing with them because they like a lawyer will take the words they say literally and trick you in this manner. For instance there's this song by Heather Dale about a woman who could not conceive a child so she went to the fairies asking for a baby. The fairies obliged but as the years passed the child would not grow any older remaining a baby forever. The woman asked the fairies for a baby and a baby she got. Fairies also don't accept thank you as a valid way of repaying kindness. If a fairy gives a gift to someone or out of the kindness of their heart help them it expects a gift or help in return. If you didn't oblige in this manner something bad would happen to you. It has also been suggested in some folkore that fairies had to pay a tithe to hell. Basically they had to give a person to the devil every year and thus they abducted people for this reason.
There were also suppossedly two courts of fairies the seelie and unseelie court. The seelie court were sometimes helpful to humans and sometimes not (they were unpredictable), the unseelie court were monsters which were always harmful to humans. The way to kill a faerie in folklore was to use iron, hence why the irish were able to defeat them with their iron weapons. Also if you poured salt on the ground the fairy had to count each grain of salt.
Anyways I could go on all day about this folkloric creature but it irks me that they've been bastardized and disneyfied in today's society.
Heres another good description of these beings from TV tropes and Idioms. tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/TheFairFolk