IF YOU had asked your great-great-grandmother if she believed in fairies, she would have looked at you askance. Believe in fairies? Of course she did!
Ninety-five per cent of Scots continued to believe in fairies right up until the middle of the 19th century. These were not the diminutive, be-winged fairies of 1800s children's books. No, these were strange folk who bewitched you, killed your cattle and kidnapped your wives and daughters.
Fairy lore flowed through the centuries, their presence acknowledged in ballads, poems and stories. They came in all shapes and sizes and different parts of Scotland had different myths. Even today they are remembered in the fairy glens and fairy hills found in every part of Scotland.
This belief in fairies extended beyond Scotland; there was almost universal acknowledgement that they existed.
"Fairy folklore was world-wide," says Dr Lizanne Henderson, a lecturer of history at the University of Glasgow's Crichton Campus. "They filled a need to explain the unexplainable. It was easier to look for a rational explanation for things that happened, and back then fairies were the rational explanation."
Yet for all that was written on the subject, there was no consensus about what the fairies were. Earlier writings speak of them as being dead souls or fallen angels. When a more "rational explanation" was needed, there was a move away from describing fairies as mystical and an attempt to place them within the human world.
[Source] I have been kicking around a book on fairys for my girlfriend Princess...one more thing to add on to my list of UN-dones!
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