Rebellious, fallen angels, who were expelled from heaven to earth populate the mythologies and religious texts of the three main Abrahamic religions. However, the term ‘fallen angel’ appears neither...
In normal times (and the year 2020 is definitely not normal times) the Christmas holiday season is the point in the year when, in the United Kingdom, the annual pantomime theatre shows get underway...
“One day you will be old enough to read fairy tales again!” – CS Lewis All my life I’ve been fascinated by faeries, as I grew up with European fairy tales, Walt Disney’s Tinker Bell and movies like...
Born in 1644 in Aberfoyle, a parish of Perthshire, Scotland, Reverend Robert Kirk is remembered for apparently making great strides in bridging the gap between the human and faery realms. He was the...
When we think of fairies many of the more popular tales tend to have an almost playful nature but it would be wrong to assume that this is means that fairies are always benign. Many accounts within...
Once upon a Time, they all lived happily ever-after. In the 1891 publication The Science of Fairy Tales , the folklorist Edwin Sidney Hartland devoted three chapters to ponder over ‘The Supernatural...
Faeries may be just figments of our imagination, but they may have deeper roots of Celtic origin embedded in oral narratives and serve to remind us of a long-forgotten belief system that embraced a...
“There are also others who say that they see women and girls dancing by night whom they call elvish folk, or faeries, and they believe that these can transform both men and women or, by leaving...
The worldwide stories of faerie changelings come under a group of motifs recorded in the Aarne-Thompson folklore index as F321: ‘Faerie steals child from cradle and leaves faerie substitute.’ The...
The Leprechaun is a much-loved and sometimes feared magical creature of Irish folk legend. Short in stature and with a long-beard and pot of gold, leprechauns were once believed to pervade the Irish...