Some Late Accounts of the Fairies

FOR the past five hundred years the English Fairies have been described as vanished or vanishing creatures, familiar to each generation's grandparents but almost unknown to the modern man. Chaucer said so, Reginald Scot said so, and Corbet; Aubrey's tale of the Inkberrow Ting-tang is an early version of the Fairy Flitting told by Hugh Miller in the nineteenth century and repeated by Kipling in The Dymchurch Flit, a story probably founded on oral tradition. In Ireland and in the remoter Highlands of Scotland the fairies are contemporary characters still to be reckoned with, but even there the stories of their appearance are often some years old. It is not to be wondered at then that the modern accounts of the fairies date for the most part from before the first World War, though the narratives of them are still to be found in oral tradition. Some of these are variants of well-known fairy anecdotes, some descriptions of meetings with fairies or of uncanny experiences attributed to the presence of the fairies. There is, for instance, a Morayshire version of My Ainsel given me by Miss Charlotte Macdonald who now lives near Abingdon but who was told this story in her youth by an old man born in 1848 and brought up on the upper reaches of the Lossie, where there are both meal and wool mills

Art · Literature · Narrative · Oral tradition · Trickster · Uncanny · Classics · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History

• A History of the Fairy Investigation Society, 1927–1960

  Simon Young•Folklore•2013

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