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A potted history of fairies

Symonds Yat Faerie

Fairy origins

Fairy, faerie, fae, fay or fey all refer to the same family of ethereal beings. It is possible that Fay is linked to Morgan Le Fay, half sister of King Arthur and apprentice to Merlin. Faeries appear in the mythology of the Anglo Saxons and Celtic traditions in which they inhabited ’The Otherworld’, a place underground and in burial mounds.

Fairy is found in many forms including good and evil, living and spirit, helpful and mischievous, male and female, but whatever guise they manifest themselves they have haunted the imagination of popular culture in literature, art and music. The Victorians especially embraced fairy culture, artists painted works derived from Shakespeare’s ‘A midsummer nights dream’. The Pre-Raphaelites created some beautiful fairy paintings and Arthur Rackham’s illustrations are still as popular as ever.

Do Fairies exist?

In 1920 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Cottingley Faeries case believed the photos to be genuine. Though the girls who took the photos later admitted that they were fake, they always maintained throughout their lives that they had seen the fairies and that one of the images was not faked.

Fairy has been a part of our culture for as far back as we can trace. When Christianity arrived it tried to sweep away much of our pagan mythology and beliefs. Fairy became demonised as did most everything else, but fairy never disappeared, along with the Green Man and other spirits of the land they continued dwell in our imaginations, links between ouselves and nature. For something spiritual to exist we must first acknowledge it, perhaps as we enter a new age of awareness concerning the planet's ecology we will once again learn to share with nature and respect it and also return fairy to the status they are entitled.

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