On The Origins Of Fairies

Abstract In 1846, WILLIAM JOHN THOMS, who contributed the term folklore to the English language, commented in The Athenaeum that “belief in fairies is by no means extinct in England” (Merton, p. 55). Thoms was not alone in his opinion; he was merely echoing and endorsing the words of others such as Thomas Keightley, the author of The Fairy Mytholo BJ. For believers were not limited to gypsies, fisherfolk, rural cottagers, country parsons, and Irish mystics. Antiquarians of the romantic era had begun the quest for fairies, and throughout Victoria’s reign advocates of fairy existence and investigators of elfin origins included numerous scientists, social scientists, historians, theologians, artists, and writers. By the r88os such leading folklorists as Sabine Baring-Gould, Andrew Lang, Joseph Jacobs, and Sir John Rhys were examining oral testimony on the nature and the customs of the “little folk” and the historical and archaeological remains left by them. At the be ginning of the twentieth century, eminent authors, among them Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Machen, swelled the ranks of those who held the fairy faith and publicized their findings. In a remarkable “trickle up” of folk belief, a surprisingly large number of educated Victorians and Edwardians speculated at length on whether fairies did exist or had at least once existed.