In mythological literature and folklore, a fairy is a living (not ghostly), supernatural humanoid, often small in size and typically associated with the countryside. There is no part of Europe that did not have its fairy traditions: from Ireland with its sidhe to Sicily with its donas da fuera (“the outside ladies”). In some cases, fairies lived together in groups (the so-called “trooping fairies”). In other cases, fairies were solitary and had monstrous qualities: banshees, boggarts, nisser, red-caps, and many others. European immigrants brought their fairy beliefs to the New World, where fairies from different ethnic traditions mixed with each other and also encountered and perhaps competed with indigenous fairy beliefs. During the last century, fairy beliefs in North America have evolved, and a number of modern Americans claim to have had fairy experiences or even follow a fairy religion. American fairylore is, in fact, very much alive in the twenty-first century, but it has little in common with its pre-Columbian or colonial precursor.
A lithographic plate from the Book of Gnomes, which was published in New York City around 1890. Such images of fairies indicate a New World rebirth of ancient folk figures from the Old Country. Fairies and many of their otherworldly kin came to the United States from Europe with immigrants from the cultures which generated them, and now are an important aspect of American folklore in their own right. (Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)
European fairies are common in folklore throughout all of North America. There are, for example, references to bogles and pixies in colonial Massachusetts. The pixies of Marblehead in that state were very similar to Devon pixies: they were described as brown and mischievous creatures that misled travelers. However, they could be discouraged by garment turning. There was a strong fairy tradition in Newfoundland and, more generally, in Atlantic Canada among both the English-speaking and the French-speaking communities there (Rieti 1991). In Pennsylvania and many other mining regions in the United States, stories of tommyknockers, mine fairies who alternatively helped and hindered miners, were quite common. In the Appalachian Mountains there are early twentieth-century references to elf-shots, dancing fairies, and even changelings, which folklorist Katharine Briggs traces back to Scotland. There are also occasional one-off references, perhaps restricted to individual families or small communities. These include a tradition of a New Hampshire inn haunted by Irish fairies dating from the first half of the nineteenth century, references to Irish banshees (and their cousin, “the woman in black”), and accounts of trolls in twentieth-century Iowa (solitary fairies from Scandinavia).
Despite this evidence (which has not been systematically gathered), many folklorists and historians have dismissed or downplayed Euro-American fairylore. The great American folklorist Wayland Hand, for example, claimed that fairies were “considerable” but “not decisive” in North America, while more recently, Owen Davies has written of the “failure of fairy traditions to survive the Atlantic crossing” (Hand 1981, 141; Davies 2013, 37). As we have seen above, fairies did cross the Atlantic, but as Davies points out, witches and ghosts did so in much greater strength. One explanation for this phenomenon is that fairies were tied in the Old World to the European landscape and could not just shift and relocate, while ghosts and witches had no such anchor. Another possibility is that European fairies had already disappeared in many parts of Europe by the period of migration.
Certainly, when fairies do appear in North America they were understood to have originated from conservative, rural regions of Europe. So in America one cannot find the pucks and pharisees of southeastern England around London, but there are the Scottish bogles and the Irish banshees. Fairylore seems to have been weaker in the southeast of England during the peak of seventeenth-century English immigration than it was in, say, Highland Scotland or Ireland during the great migrations associated with the eighteenth-century Highland Clearances and the nineteenth-century potato famine (1845–1852). The great failure of traditional fairylore was not that it did not survive the crossing to America, but that so many fairy traditions in the lowland regions of Britain, France, and Germany did not persist into modernity. There is an additional discriminating factor that explains the discrepancy between Old and New World fairylore: migrant populations from rural areas did not bring fairies with them to American cities. With the exception of the banshee (perhaps the single most common fairy in the New World), Irish emigrants in Chicago and New York left their fairylore behind when they crossed the Atlantic.
Two other categories of New World fairylore must be added to the traditional European fairies. First are the Native American fairy traditions. Natives often believed in supernatural fairy-like beings living parallel existences to the people of the tribes. The Cherokee had the Yunwi Tsundi, while the Arapaho of the Midwest suffered the depredations of cannibal dwarfs. The Passamaquoddy of Maine recognized two fairy peoples, the Nagamwasuck and the Mekumwasuck, the latter of which were traditional guardians of the Passamaquoddy’s Catholic church! Given this wealth of indigenous fairy traditions, it should come as no surprise that Lewis and Clark came across a great mound on the Missouri River (Spirit Mound, South Dakota) named the Mountain of the Little People, inhabited by “little devils in human form, of about eighteen inches high, and with remarkably large heads” (Hill 2004, 114–115). It was, they discovered, a place of terror for the local Native American tribes, who refused to accompany them to the place. There is not much evidence of mixing between European and native fairies in North America, in contrast to Bigfoot or Sasquatch folklore, which so clearly mingles native and immigrant traditions.
Second, some contemporary fairy beliefs in North America have no connection to either traditional European or Native American beliefs. For instance, the Tooth Fairy emerged as a custom likely created in North America. There is the notion that “orbs” on photographs or films, particularly on digital cameras, are manifestations of fairies; many modern fairies are imagined as shining lights. Finally and most importantly, some believe that fairies are elementals, or nature spirits that take part in natural processes such as a flower’s blooming or a tomato’s ripening. These influential ideas come out of Neoplatonism and have been reformulated in modern times by practitioners of theosophy, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century esoteric philosophy. The most important modern reflex of theosophical fairylore is the incredibly successful Disney Tinkerbell cartoons, which envision fairies as living cogs, turning the natural world through the seasons.
Contemporary fairy beliefs may not be “traditional” but they have naturally shaped the surprisingly frequent fairy experiences of children and adults in North America in recent decades. In the early to mid-twentieth century a small boy claimed to be able to see fairies in Balboa Park, San Diego, California. He mentioned “especially one whom he called ‘Tinkle-Star’ because she was ‘all sorts of shiny colors’ and tinkled when she moved” (Johnson 2014, 88). Tinkle-Star, it need hardly be said, has little to do with traditional European fairies, let alone the Native American variety. But she fits into a pattern of fairy sightings across North America in the last century and demonstrates an evolving view of what fairies do and what they look like. Contemporary fairy beliefs animate a bustling modern fairy community. Fairy believers flock every summer to the Fairy and Human Relations Congress in Twisp, Washington, for three days of interaction with the region’s elementals. Indeed, book-buyers spend thousands of dollars each year on the dozens of fairy spirituality books now on the market, books that mix theosophy and European and Native American folklore.
Simon Young
See also Crichton Leprechaun; Gremlins; Nin-am-bea; Tommyknocker; Tooth Fairy; Woodcutter and the Fairy, a Korean American Folktale
Further Reading
Briggs, Katharine. 1976. “American Fairy Immigrants.” In A Dictionary of Fairies. London: Penguin.
Davies, Owen. 2013. America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft and Salem. London: Oxford University Press.
Hand, Wayland D. 1981. “European Fairy Lore in the New World.” Folklore 92: 141–148.
Hill, William E. 2004. The Lewis and Clark Trail: Yesterday and Today. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Press.
Johnson, Marjorie. 2014. Seeing Fairies. San Antonio: Anomalist.
Muise, Peter, and Simon Young. 2015. “Pixylore in Massachusetts?” Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries 41: 205–207.
Rieti, Barbara. 1991. Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland. St. Johns, NL: Institute of Social and Economic Research.