Seven hundred elves

On the publication of ‘Fairies: A History’

Seven hundred elves from out the wood
Foul and grim they were
Down to the farmer’s house they went
His meat and drink to share…

A special post today, to celebrate the publication of Fairies: A History – my twenty-fifth book, my third book on the subject of fairies, and (so I believe), the most complete history of fairies that has yet been written. That may not be as bold and hubristic a claim as it sounds, as very few scholars have been foolish enough to write a complete history of fairy lore – with most sensibly confining themselves to one region or one era. But I have already written my sensible and focussed books about fairies (Suffolk Fairylore and Twilight of the Godlings, the latter about the origins of British fairy lore), and so in Fairies: A History I have attempted something a little more ambitious.

Fairies: A History is (as far as possible) a global history of fairies, but since an effort to distil entirety of all fairy lore everywhere into a single volume would make for a very tedious book, I opted instead to focus on the two aspects of fairy lore I find most interesting. The first is the human experience of encountering fairies (reports still pour in to this day); and the second is the way in which people have tried to rationalise fairies and fit them into makeshift folk-cosmologies. There are, of course, many other interesting aspects of fairy lore, but since I am a historian it is the human interactions with fairies that seem to me the most compelling aspect of the story. And since I am a historian of religion and belief I am fascinated by the foundations and structure of fairy belief. Others will be drawn, understandably, to wholly different aspects of the fairy phenomenon – the anthropological, the psychological, the literary, the artistic, and so on.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked on Times Radio whether I believe in fairies, and I suspect it is a question I will get asked a lot more now that Fairies: A History is published. It is hardly a question I can object to, but its implied premise irritates me – for in a post-Enlightenment world, most people assume that those who believe in fairies do so either because they are very credulous and believe everything they are told (like young children) or because they claim to have seen a fairy and therefore appeal to direct, empirical experience. For me, as for Robert Kirk, the issue is the existence of a world of spirit much larger and broader than the visible world of matter. For me, my belief in the world of spirit is secured by my faith in an infinite God, who created the world of spirit before He created the world of matter. And just as God’s lifegiving power overflows in the world of matter into the vast and bewildering variety of plant and animal life (much of which we still don’t know), I see no reason why there should not exist a similarly unfathomable variety of life in the world of spirit. While theologians have generally been preoccupied with spirits at the ontological extremes of the spiritual realm – those closest to God, and those furthest from Him in their definitive rejection of His sovereignty – that does not mean that spirits do not exist intermediate between those extremes. After all, one of those intermediate spirits is the human soul itself.

A few days ago I spoke at a conference on the Icelandic author Ólafur Sveinsson (1761-1845) whose Treatise on Elves has just been published by Matthias Egeler and Jón Jónsson. Ólafur took a very straightforward approach to the Hidden People. For Ólafur, doubting the existence of elves was tantamount to impiety because it meant questioning God’s power to create more than the human mind could imagine. In other words, to doubt the fecundity of the world of spirit is to limit God, and to me it seems rather astonishing that members of a puny species that has yet to fathom most of the forms of life that inhabit the oceans of its own home planet should have the confidence to assert that we have perfectly mapped the world of spirit and eliminated the possibility of fairies within it. And yet we are so often confronted with the false dichotomy between thoroughgoing unbelief in the realm of spirit on the one hand, and a circumscribed and prescriptive view of the spirit-world on the other. Both are approaches to reality that, to my mind, are both arrogant and myopic. The question ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ implicitly places the burden of proof on the believer to demonstrate the reality of the world of spirit in the face of a default assumption of its non-existence. I do not concede that default assumption; the evidence from all times, all places and all cultures is that spiritual reality is a form of reality with which human beings interact, and it is only since the late 17th century (at the earliest) that people have questioned its existence (and then only within a narrow, elite cultural range when viewed on a global scale).

On the other hand, while the existence of the world of spirit is to my mind a certainty, I am happy to avow almost complete ignorance of it. There may be more things in heaven and earth, but I am agnostic as to what they are – and therefore agnostic as to the veracity or authenticity of any specific claim of encounters with spirit-beings. For while fairies may exist, I am not bound to believe in them in the same way as my faith requires me to believe in God, in angels, and in fallen angels; and thus while sceptics may be alarmed by my openness to the possibility that fairies exist, the most enthusiastic believers will probably find me frustratingly reluctant to commit to wholehearted credence. I have never seen a fairy – or, for that matter, a ghost, an angel, a demon, or any other supernatural being. And I am unconvinced (and left cold) by esoteric systems that try to make sense of the spirit-world like an entomologist sorting butterflies. This is the kind of ‘organised woo’ I find rather tiresome. But something that I have come to learn by experience is that after all the theoretical huffing and puffing about abstractions, humans tend to give credence to the personal testimony of those we know and trust. A single testimony by someone you personally believe in can alter your perception of the limits of reality forever; because even if you are not sure you believe it entirely, the trust you place in that person will mean it lodges in your mind ever after as a niggling doubt.

But even in the absence of this kind of testimony, there is a supreme arrogance about dismissing the thought-worlds of uncountable indigenous cultures, past and present, whose ways of thinking may be tens of thousands of years old compared to the mere blip of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment rationality. In the longue durée of history, I am fairly sure that the burden of proof is on those who want to show that seeing and interacting with supernatural beings is not a natural part of the human experience of the world. And it remains to be seen how long we can survive as a species while some of us – and very influential groups of us – systematically deny and suppress that aspect of experience. The palaeoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak, whose book The Last Neanderthal I read while writing Fairies, suggests that human cultures die out when they experience a total collapse of their mythological worldviews – a kind of soul-killing evacuation of meaning that leads, in due course, to extinction. So perhaps it is not the fairies who die every time a child says they do not believe in them; perhaps, by emptying our world of diversity (both biological and spiritual), it is we who die a little.