The Fairies of Ireland
Fairies are nothing new in the cultural imagination of Ireland. However, the Fairies that likely come to mind when you hear that term have been in a constantly evolving state for centuries. For many, myself included, Fairies are small, mischievous creatures, and they most certainly are not good beings. Many have heard of how they would steal children away and bake them into pies who were then sold back to those children’s parents. These stories help explain the legend of the Irish fairy tree, a hawthorn, that you will find dotting the countryside of Ireland, often conspicuously in the middle of farmland. As legend has it, these trees guard the entrance to fairyland to protect us humans from the mischievous maliciousness of fairies.
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This particular rendition of fairies, small, mischievous trouble makers are a fairly recent cultural understanding. “(T)he Fairies of ancient Ireland belonged to a race known as Tuatha De Danaan, People of the God whose Mother was Dana, and they were of the size of mortals, or even larger (O’Connor, 1920).” These fairies were immortalized in the stories and legends of Ireland and yet they differ so drastically from the fairies of popular imagination that one is almost forced to ask, which the true fairies of Irish folklore are. But then again, we could just as easily ask ourselves, does it matter?
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Some may argue that this changing nature of tradition annuls the tradition itself because what is ‘true’ and what is ‘false’ become so interchanged that it is impossible to differentiate one from the other. Put another way, some may argue that if fairies are both of these things, no one can define what a fairy is which means that, ultimately, they are nothing at all. However, as Handler and Linnekin (1984) argue tradition is no less valuable if it is ‘reclaimed’ or less ‘pure’ that its original inspiration. This seems to be the stronger ground upon which to make a case, folklore is the act of practicing a set of beliefs, just because the beliefs change, just as times change, we should not invalidate the belief. In this case, just because the understanding of what ‘fairies’ are should not invalidate this belief. Fairies are folklore and just as with all folklore, it is what those practitioners believer and understand to be fairies, that should define what fairies are.
