Where Have the Fairies Gone?

“In th‘olde dayes... Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.”

Chaucer’s wife of Bath

Hello, what’s this, an unscheduled blog post? So it would seem :)

Lately some words shared between Peter and Wendy have been tumbling ‘round & ‘round my mind...

Peter Pan: There oughta be a fairy for every girl and boy.
Wendy: Oughta be? Isn’t there?
Peter Pan: Oh, no. Children know such a lot now. Soon they don’t believe. And every time a child says “I don't believe in fairies”, there’s a fairy someplace that falls down dead. ♥

If many children are in such a hurry to grow up, then surely many do not believe in fairies either. Is it any wonder why there seems to be so few fairies in the world?

Oh course, I cannot talk about fairies without mentioning the fairies in my home province of Newfoundland. As I talked about in a far earlier blog post the fairies of NL are different from what you might expect a fairy to be. They are often troublesome & it’d be best not to get involved with them. As Barbara Rieti’s explains in her book Strange Terrain, “The fairies are the ultimate strangers, and serve as metaphor for all that is strange, not only in nature but in other people.”

But where are all these fairies mentioned in tales of old?

I have heard that in NL it is believed by some that there are so few fairy sightings now because the fairies do not like all the lights that are on at night. The street lights, the car headlights, etc., they all have driven them away.

So maybe there are other issues with the world’s fairy population, other than disbelieving children. I take comfort though in the words of Rieti, “Always Going and Never Gone” the title for chapter one of Strange Terrain. This is a great way to look at the fairy beliefs and fairies themselves.

It seems each generation looks back at the one that came before & sees all that they had & how little they now have. But fairies are a sturdy sort who, I believe, cannot be gotten rid of so easily. It’s much like children, who always seem to be less and less like children, more anxious to grow up. Is childhood always going but never gone as well?

In closing, I’d like to share a little more about the picture used at the beginning of this blog post:

Bay Roberts, and all the Northern Avalon, is known for its Fairy Stories.
People tell of seeing mysterious lights - along the shoreline.
Once 'in the fairies,' the victim might be captured, experience fairy scenes, suffer mental and physical injury.
Fergus Island in top left.
Bay Roberts East Shoreline Heritage Walk.
4km Trail by the Atlantic Ocean on the Avalon Peninsula
Bay Roberts, Newfoundland and Labrador

What about the fairies in your area? Are they still about? What about other creatures and beings, are there still sighting?

Stay Spooky,
Alice Grimm