Fairies: A Dangerous History
by Richard Sugg,
Reaktion Books, 279pp, £9.99/$16.95
Do you believe in fairies? Many of us would say no, then perhaps sigh and say, “But I wish…” Richard Sugg’s book provides dozens of stories of people encountering fairies, or at least accepting their existence as a given. A good number of the accounts are from Ireland, but others are from Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. Many are from the 18th and 19th centuries, but a few are from the 20th.
“Once, people really believed in fairies,” Sugg writes. “By the close of chapter three you should be able to see why, and you should … then find that fairies never look the same to you again.” And that’s because fairies, in folk memory and folklore, aren’t little gossamer-winged creatures dancing prettily in a meadow. Fairies may, on occasion, decide to be helpful to humans; but they have their own agenda. If you cross them, you can be sure they’ll let you know. There are numerous stories here of someone starting to build a house across a fairy path, only to have the foundations collapse over and over again.
