The origins of our ideas about fairies

Most people in Europe have a mental image of what fairies look like and how they behave. These may have their roots in actual people and events 5000 years ago, during the Neolithic era.

Ask people today to describe fairies and you are very likely to be given a description of something similar to Tinkerbell from the book Peter Pan. A cute little thing about six inches high, wearing a white dress and with delicate, gossamer wings. Typically, such a being would be about the size of a Barbie doll. In short, something which would not look out of place perched on top of a Christmas tree. This idea of fairies, widespread and common though it is, dates only from the seventeenth century. Shakespeare is partly to blame. The sweet little creatures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with whimsical names like Cobweb and Mustardseed have had a great effect on our subconscious mind.  This idea of fairies as cute little girls grew to fruition in the Victorian era and by the dawn of the twentieth century, the image was firmly established. When, in 1917, two young girls set out to produce supposedly authentic photographs of fairies, they naturally thought that their productions should be no more than six inches high and with translucent wings. Fairies and elves, in this version of the myth, were essentially good-natured and exceedingly tiny people, who might at worst play mischievous tricks on unsuspecting humans. Fairies were of course almost invariably female, which explains why the word was used in a pejorative sense at one time as a term for male homosexuals. 

     These ideas about the Little People would have seemed quite bizarre to anybody living in Europe before about 1600. Up to that time, and for centuries later in more remote and isolated parts, fairies were feared and respected in equal measure. That they existed was beyond question and fairies were seen as being as much a hazard of forest and moorland as wolves and bears. A passage in Jane Eyre, written of course by a young woman living in a fairly remote part of Yorkshire in the early nineteenth century, gives some idea of how the Little People were still seen in rural areas at that time. It will be recalled that Mr Rochester’s first encounter with the new governess comes when she is walking to post a letter and his horse slips on ice; throwing the rider. Rochester pretends to think that Jane Eyre is a fairy and later that day the following conversation takes place;

     ‘And so you were waiting for your people when you sat on that stile?’

     ‘For whom, sir?’

     ‘For the men in green: it was a proper moonlight evening for them. Did I break

     through one of your rings, that you spread that damned ice on the causeway?’

One thing which we at once pick up from this snatch of dialogue is that the little people are not viewed in a very favourable light. Legends lingered on that fairies and elves could be dangerous if humans crossed their path unwittingly or uninvited. Although an educated man like Mr Rochester would not actually subscribe to such beliefs, he is certainly aware of them. Note too that he does not refer directly to fairies or elves, but instead uses the allusive ‘men in green’. This too was part of a very old tradition. They were seldom spoken of, other than in terms of great politeness, lest they be eavesdropping upon conversations. It was considered unwise to name them out loud and a taboo was attached to words such as ‘elf’ or ‘fairy’, They were instead referred to by a variety of euphemisms; ‘the good people’ or ‘the hidden folk’, for instance. If fairies were mentioned by name, it was considered wise to add, ‘Bless them!’ Angering them could lead to all sorts of evil consequences, up to and including the snatching a baby from her crib. It was dangerous to fall out with the Little People, and Rochester hints jokingly that he thinks that causing offence to the little people might have precipitated the fall from his horse.

     Fairies, elves, pixies, dwarves, brownies and leprechauns appear throughout European folklore and although at first sight the various races appear different, they have certain common characteristics which might allow us to make a few shrewd guesses about their origins. We saw in an earlier chapter that the eponymous central character in the folktale Rumpelstiltskin, the eponymous central character of which may be seen in Illustration 7, is one of the Little People and since this story probably dates back at least 3,000 years, it is obvious that such beings have been in our minds for almost as long as civilisation in Europe has existed.

     The first and most immediate thing which we observe about oldest tales of fairies is that they interact with the real world. In other words, they are not ghosts, angels or insubstantial spirits. This needs to be mentioned, because all three explanations have in the past been advanced to account for the legends about fairies. They can affect their surroundings physically and are able to talk to and hear humans. The next noticeable feature is the size of the so-called ‘Little People’. They are not tiny, the size of dolls. Certainly, they are smaller than the average human, but are at least as big as children; usually bigger. They are like stunted or very small humans. Some of the Little People, brownies for instance, are explicitly described as being dark-skinned and having a lot of hair on their bodies. My Rochester talked of ‘the men in green’ and this draws our attention to another point, that fairies almost invariably dress in green or brown. They avoid bright colours. Some wear little more than rags and go about half naked.

     What relations do the fairies or Little People have with us? This is not an easy question to answer. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of their dealings with humans is the indisputable fact that they seem to crave human babies. The entire plot of Rumpelstiltskin of course revolves around a plan to acquire a human baby, as does Rapunzel. There is too the recurring theme of the ‘changeling’. This is the idea that the fairies would steal away babies, usually those who had not yet been baptised, and substitute one of their own babies for the human child. The changeling, for so it was called, was invariably a sickly, wizened creature. A number of old stories tell how the baby could be regained and the changeling returned to its own people.

     The Little People sometimes undertook tasks around homes and farms, in exchange for gifts of food; typically dairy produce. At other times, they would steal food and tools from families living in isolated areas. Cows would be milked dry, orchards raided and portable objects like spades or sickles stolen. Then there were bits of minor vandalism, which the victims often understood to have been acts of spite carried out because they had spoken disrespectfully of the Little People or failed to make the correct offerings to them. From time to time, stone arrowheads would be turned up when ploughing and these were associated with the fairies. They were called ‘elf-bolts’ by country folk. The belief was that elves had fired flint-tipped arrows at those working in the fields.

     To go off at a slight tangent, in rural districts fairies were blamed for almost anything which broke or went missing. If a farm tool or implement could not be found, people might remark, ‘It’s those blessed fairies!’. Sometimes this was done half humorously, but also it was honestly believed that from time to time the Little People would make off with something useful. This whole scenario formed the basic premise of a hugely successful series of children’s books by author Mary Norton. The Borrowers were a family of, quite literally, little people, who lived beneath the floorboards of a large house. They raided the home belonging to the humans for anything they required; things such as needles and thread. This theft was disguised by the euphemism of ‘borrowing’. The first book in this series, The Borrowers, won the 1952 Carnegie Medal for the most outstanding children’s book of the year.

     Just as The Lord of the Rings appealed to the subconscious awareness of a forgotten world and so became popular, in the same way The Borrowers appealed to half remembered myths which tugged at the memories of those reading it. That this was wholly subconscious may be seen from the way in which those analysing the book’s appeal seemed unable to see the relevance of the story of the little people stealing the belongings of humans in anything other than modern metaphors. Author A.N. Wilson suggested that the story was an allegory of life in post-war Britain, with the small people living in a run-down old mansion as being symbolic of Britain in the years following the end of the Second World War. The actual source of the story and its attraction altogether eluded him.

     What are we to make of all this? For all the later legends which accumulated about the fairies, there does not seem to be anything in the earliest stories to indicated much that was supernatural about them. It is true that some could weave spells, but then so could some humans, wizards for example. All that we know of them from the very earliest stories suggest that they are limited and restricted by the same rules as ordinary humans. Gravity holds them to the ground, they need to eat and drink and they communicate not through telepathy or anything of that kind, but by speaking and listening just the same as anybody else.

    Wearing green clothing or brown makes it sound almost as though the ‘hidden people’ were adopting camouflage colours to make them less conspicuous as they moved about the countryside. Why should they wish to steal tools and so on from farms? What is it with the Little People that they should have it in mind to get hold of human babies? The overall impression one gains is that fairies and elves lived in communities which were separate from those of humans, but were perfectly able to interact with the material world. They could pick things up to steal them, for instance, not something that any ghost could do. And if they were the spirits of dead humans, as some have hypothesised, what could they possibly want with the farm implements which they made off with from time to time? What use would an axe be to a ghost?

     Here is a fable, or tentative account, which might perhaps offer a non-supernatural explanation for the origin of fairies and elves. About 5000 years ago Europe, including Britain, was home to a race of short, dark-skinned farmers. These Neolithic people had no metals and lived largely by subsistence-farming, supplementing their crops by fishing, hunting and the gathering of wild berries, mushrooms and so on. They were small and wiry because for much of the time they lived more or less on the edge of starvation. These aboriginal inhabitants of Europe spoke dozens, perhaps hundreds of different languages, just as in New Guinea today there are many mutually unintelligible languages, with people unable to understand even those living a few miles away in the next valley.

     Around 2500 BC, the quiet life of these Neolithic farmers was overturned as invaders from the east surged across the continent. The newcomers had wagons and metal swords, against which the flint weapons of the indigenous inhabitants were useless. All they could do was make hit and run attacks against the marauding tribes. These people were taller, stronger and paler than those living in Europe. They were bigger because they were better nourished. They drove their herds of cattle and sheep with them as they travelled. This provided them with a protein-rich diet of dairy products and meat, rather than the thin gruel made of wheat and barley which was the staple diet of the Europeans.

     As the years passed, the Yamnaya, for it was they and their descendants who were sweeping in from the Steppes, consolidated their grip upon the continent and established their own settlements. They disposed ruthlessly of the men they encountered, putting them to the sword, but some of the women they allowed to become slaves and concubines. Slowly, but inexorably, the original inhabitants of the land withdrew into the forests and mountains. There, they eked out a wretched existence, making guerrilla raids on those who had stolen their land. Sometimes they would fire flint-tipped arrows at men working in the fields. Hunger drove them to desperate action such as sneaking into barns at night and milking cows dry or stealing as much fruit from an orchard as they could carry away. For obvious reasons, these resistance fighters ensured that their clothes would not stand out at a distance. They dressed in material which had been dyed green with plant material and they would cover themselves in sprigs of heather, twigs and leaves, in an attempt to blend into the landscape. This led superstitious countrymen to mistake them for nature spirits.

     As the bands of those who fought back against the usurpers dwindled in size, inbreeding took place; cousin marriages or even coupling between brothers and sisters. This led to genetic defects and the birth of sickly and deformed babies. To improve their own stock, those who were now known as the ‘hidden people’ would sometimes find a way to exchange one of their own sickly babies for a robust and healthy one belonging to the invaders.

     As time passed, some of those in hiding gave up and came to work as servants for the new owners of the land. These small, stocky and dark-skinned men became known as ‘brownies’ and they worked around farms in exchange for food. Those who maintained the struggle though would come at night and take the metal tools which they were unable to make themselves. The question of metal is an interesting one for the Yamnaya were keenly aware that it was their mastery of smithing which had given them the edge over those who had once lived where they did. So it was that a piece of folklore arose that iron provided protection against fairies.

     As the decades became centuries and eventually millennia, the history of the invasion and occupation of Europe became forgotten. All that was recalled was that a small people had once lived here and could still be glimpsed from time to time. It was considered taboo to speal aloud of these little ones and so a number of euphemisms were devised, such as the ‘good people’. This hidden race could cause problems if one was not careful to placate them with gifts of food. They were quite capable of wreaking havoc at night and playing mischievous tricks. Although they seldom did so these days, at one time they fired arrows with stone points at people and these would sometimes turn up in ploughed fields.

     It is of course impossible at this late stage, 4000 years or more after the event, to say whether or not this scenario provides a real explanation for the stories which we have today about fairies and elves, but it does seem to cover most of the known facts. Looking at what we know of the world of the fairies certainly suggests a Neolithic origin, rather than a society from the Bronze Age or later. Fairies did not appear to have domestic animals or to ride horses. They did not use the wheel either and were distinctly opposed to the presence of metal. They existed in a state of, if not hostility towards, then at the very least suspicion towards humans. It was plain that relations between the Little People and the human race were tense and could erupt into open animosity at times. The best way of summing up the case, looking at old legends, is to say that a watchful truce existed between the two communities and it was generally agreed that it was best if both kept their distance from the other.

     Is it conceivable that folk memories could preserve events which had taken place thousands of years earlier in the way which is described above? Is it possible that stories could be handed down in this way over a hundred generations or more? We have seen a few examples of this happening, now let us look at two more cases, one of which involves stories of ‘little people’.

     Most of us are familiar with the Biblical story of Noah’s Flood, when the whole earth was supposedly inundated with water, leaving only Noah and his family alive. It will be remembered that they build a ship, known as the Ark, onto which they loaded livestock and so rode out the deluge. In 1872 Assyriologist George Smith addressed a public meeting in London at which he read out a similar version of this story, which he had translated from a cuneiform tablet from around 2000 BC. It seemed that the story of the great flood was a common one across the Middle East.

The narratives about the flood dated from two or three thousand BC and yet there was, until 1993, no archaeological evidence for such an event. True, there had been localised flooding from the Euphrates overflowing its banks during the rainy season, but this was hardly a catastrophic occurrence.

     Since few people today believe in a literally world-wide flood and evidence of such a thing cannot be found in the Middle East, some researchers began looking a little further afield for some dramatic climatic change which could have led to the legends of the Great Flood. They found it in the area which today lies between Turkey, Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria; the stretch of water known as the Black Sea. The geology of the area made it likely that what is now the Black Sea was once a large, shallow depression of fertile land surrounding a freshwater lake. This oasis was separated from the Mediterranean Sea by a ridge of land in what is now Istanbul. This rocky prominence acted, in effect, as a dam, preventing the waters of the Mediterranean from cascading down into the valley below.

     When the last Ice Age came to an end, the melting icecaps and glaciers ran into the ocean, raising the sea level across the whole world. As the level of the Mediterranean rose inexorably, pressure began to build on the tongue of land separating the area of the Black Sea from the rest of the Mediterranean. By now, the communities living on the shores of the lake in that warm and comfortable land were some 500 feet below sea level. Disaster was imminent. It arrived 7,500 years ago, when the dam finally burst and the Mediterranean began pouring over what is now the Bosphorus in what was one of the mightiest waterfalls ever seen. It was the equivalent of 200 Niagara Falls. Within a year, 60,000 square miles of land had been inundated and the freshwater lake and surrounding country was submerged to a depth of 500 feet in seawater.

     The sequence described above was confirmed in 1993 when two marine biologists from Columbia University in the Unites States took samples from the seafloor in the part of the Black Sea close to the Ukrainian coast. William Ryan and Walter Pitman found freshwater mollusc shells, the roots of land plants and other signs that dry land had once existed hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the sea. Six years later an expedition sent down remote-controlled cameras and found beaches, headlands and more freshwater shells. These were dated to 5,500 BC.

     Of course, those immediately in the path of that torrential waterfall would have been swept away and killed at once. But for those further away, the water would have risen and advanced at a rate of about a kilometre a day, plenty of time for people to gather up their belongings and flee to higher ground. Perhaps some built rafts on which some livestock might have been loaded; possibly a few goats and sheep. The sudden flooding of an area of warm ground in this way may well have precipitated extreme weather, heavy rain and thunderstorms, say.

     This is all a far cry from the universal deluge and a boat the size of a modern, ocean-going liner that we read of in the Bible, but then it happened 3,000 years before the invention of writing. Some of those refugees fleeing from what must have seemed like the end of their world would have ended up in what is now Turkey, from where they could have carried their stories of the flood to Babylon and Assyria. It seems highly likely that these stories were passed down by word of mouth before finally being set down in cuneiform 4,000 years ago

     The second example of what might be a long-lived folk memory concerns the people on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The Nage people who live on Flores have legends about a race of little people whom they call the Ebu Gogo. According to myth, these people are about a metre and a half tall and live in the forest. They are very primitive and their spoken language sounds like the noises which animals make. So backward are the Ebu Gogo culturally that they have not mastered the use of fire, eating all their food raw. In the Nage language, Ebu Gogo means something like ‘old person who eats anything’. This small race are apparently very swift runners, good at hiding and have hairy bodies. There are stories, eerily similar to those told by the Indo-Europeans, about the Ebu Gogo kidnapping small children. There are obvious parallels here with the story of the changeling. In the fairy tales of the Nage, the children who are captured in this way are taken because the Ebu Gogo want know the secret of fire and cooking. Because they are so slow-witted though, the children always manage to trick them and escape back to their families. There are echoes here of course with the familiar story of Hansel and Gretel.

     The stories about the Ebu Gogo which westerners heard over the years were generally assumed to be garbled versions of the dealings which monkeys had over the years had with the Nage. Flores is a large and populous place, almost two million live on the island, but much of it is wild and unexplored. In 2003 archaeologists digging in a limestone cave came across something remarkable. It was the partial skeleton of an archaic human, belonging to a species which had lived before the coming of Homo sapiens or modern humans. The remarkable thing about this discovery was that although clearly an adult, this was somebody who would have stood little more than three feet high; about half the height of people today. Since this discovery was made midway through the release of the trilogy of films based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, it was perhaps inevitable that this tiny person should be nicknamed ‘the hobbit’. This name has stuck.

    It was at first speculated that this discovery on Flores might be an atypical individual with some kind of disability, perhaps microcephalous combined with something else. Since then though the remains of nine individuals have been found, all of the same height. The most plausible explanation is that these are a descendent of Home erectus, the first human species to spread across the world. A community finding itself isolated on Flores might have succumbed to what is known as ‘island dwarfism’. This happens when a population of animals becomes restricted to a certain habitat and grows gradually smaller over the years.

    There is some debate about when the ‘hobbits’ of Flores died out, but it was certainly after the arrival of modern humans, whose descendants now live there, 40,000 years ago. In light of these recent findings, the idea has been mooted that the stories about the Ebu Gogo might be rooted in real memories of the little people who lived on the island before the bigger humans landed there. It is being suggested that the Ebu Gogo legends are folk memories of the sort at which we have been looking. Similar questions have been asked about the Orang Pendek, about which stories have circulated for years in parts of Indonesia. In the language of Indonesia Orang Pendek means ‘short person’ and is supposed to be a bipedal ape which walks the forests. Could this too be a folk memory of the earlier inhabitants? Recent research in the field of phylogenetic analysis of folk tales suggests that this is indeed possible.

     If it is true that some fairy tales today were circulating in oral form 6,000 years ago, before the Yamnaya tribes began moving out of their ancestral homeland, then it is far from implausible that others of which we know could have their origins just four or five thousand years ago. If true, and there is every reason to suppose that this is the case, then it shows with startling clarity just how long such oral traditions may last. These stories were not actually written down until about 500 years ago, which means that for thousands of years they were circulating by word of mouth, being told around the hearth or to children as they lay in bed before going to sleep.

     This slight diversion into the idea of folk memories has been necessary to provide some background for the apparently extraordinary idea that stories of what happened during the Yamnaya invasions of India and Europe might have survived in distorted and embroidered forms down to the present day. Specifically, it is suggested that the stories of fairies, elves and goblins might be such folk memories, albeit grossly exaggerated, of the interactions between the Indo-Europeans who settled in Europe and the indigenous inhabitants of that continent, who were all but wiped out. This would have happened between 5500 and 3500 years ago. The stories of Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast fall well within this timeframe.

     What this means is that a story like that of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a member of a hidden race with unknown and mysterious powers tries to acquire a human baby, could easily be part of the mythos surrounding the so-called ‘Little People’. The idea of fairies wanting to carry away a human baby may well be based upon and inspired by things which really happened 4000 years or so ago.

     It has to be said that this explanation of the origins of legends about fairies is not universally accepted; there are two other chief explanations, both of which were touched upon briefly above. One is that the fairies represent the spirits of the dead and the other that they are really nature spirits; the elemental life forces of trees or streams. Neither of these hypotheses is entirely convincing. If the fairies are no more than ghosts, then why would they go to the trouble of raiding orchards or milking cattle dry? What use would they have for apples or milk? Similarly, if they were supposedly entities such as dryads or other nature spirits, why would they need green clothes to camouflage themselves? Why would people have assumed that flint arrowheads had been fired by elves?

     That the fairies were in reality flesh and blood beings seems reasonably clear from a close examination of the legends surrounding them. That ordinary mortals were afraid of them or at least viewed them with considerable respect is also certain. We know that there was the apprehension that the ‘good folk’ or ‘hidden people’ could inflict physical harm, by stealing or sabotaging farming equipment, for example. They were also quite capable of kidnapping babies. None of these are activities commonly carried out by ghosts.

    There remains though the undeniable fact that fairies were regarded as skilled practitioners of magic. Some cast spells and enchantments and could cause all manner of mischief in this way. Here too, the possibility that they were the remnants of an earlier ethnic group, overwhelmed and all but obliterated by the arrival of tribes from the Yamnaya homeland, fits in very neatly with the traditional beliefs about fairies.

     Much of this book has been concerned with the ideas which the descendants of the Yamnaya brought to Western Europe 5,000 years ago. Some of these ideas though were hardly novelties to the peoples whom they supplanted. As we have seen, a preoccupation with horned animals such as deer and rhinoceros even pre-dates the emergence of our own human species. Such things run very deep in the psyche of all humans. The examples of the headdresses with antlers from Yorkshire and the cave painting from the French site of Trois Freres show that such traditions of magic were flourishing in Europe 10,000 years before the arrival of the Yamnayas.

     They might have seen themselves as the future, thoroughly up-to-date and modern people who wielded metal weapons, travelled on wheeled wagons or rode on domesticated horses; but even as they committed genocide against the farmers and nomads who they encountered, the Yamnaya knew that their victims were the inheritors of very old knowledge and traditions.  Modern DNA analysis shows that the Yamnaya themselves came originally, at least in part, from Europe. They were the descendants of hunter-gatherers who had wandered east into what is now Ukraine at some distant time in the past and settled in a new part of the world. Not unnaturally, they took with them the religious or supernatural customs of the Europe which they were quitting. On one level, psychologically, they recognised perhaps that those whose lands they were seizing were practitioners of the oldest form of their own magic and religion.

     One of the fascinating things about myths is that they have a habit of mutating and being adapted to new circumstances as the years past. It would have greatly surprised the Yamnaya settlers had they known that within a few thousand years, they themselves would have been regarded as the Little People! Nevertheless, it was to be the case. This new version of the legend of the Little People is, astonishingly, still going strong in parts of the British Isles.

     In the Introduction it was remarked that old stories about wizards, witches and fairies have a tendency to linger on in parts of Europe which are on the very edge of the continent. This happened in Scandinavia, partly because the peninsula which comprises Norway and Sweden is separated from mainland Europe by an arm of the Baltic Sea. This means that tales of goblins and trolls are still current there in more remote country districts. It is in the so-called ‘Celtic Fringe’ though that belief in fairies and fear of their supernatural powers has outlasted not only the Industrial Revolution, but even the advent of computers and smartphones.

     The Celtic Fringe is the outermost parts of the British Isles in the west, which provided a refuge for the Celts and later Romanised Britons who fled the encroachment of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who invaded Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire. This is why Welsh and Gaelic have remained living languages in those places. Cornwall is also part of the Celtic Fringe. Separated from the rest of the country by the River Tamar, Cornwall was practically an island until a few centuries ago. It is in those places, Ireland, Wales, the western coast of Scotland and Cornwall that belief in fairies lasted longest.

     Returning to the idea that the Indo-Europeans who settled in Europe four or five thousand years ago would one day come to be associated themselves with fairies, there are in Ireland and Cornwall locations known as ‘fairy forts’. These are ringforts, the remains of circular, fortified homesteads, the oldest of which date back to the Bronze Age. Often, all that remains of these structures is a ditch and bank, which once protected a farmhouse or hamlet. Drystone walls would typically have surmounted the bank and the family or families would have their homes within the circle. The remnants of most of these old dwellings are to be found in Ireland, but Cornwall and Wales also boast a few. Over the years the myth arose that these places are either former strongholds of, or entrances to the world of, the Little People.

     In Cornwall, the connection of the fortified settlements with the fairies is reinforced by the mysterious, man-made caves known as fogous. A few are also to be found in Scotland, most notable on the Orkney Isles. These short tunnels are built of drystone walling and then covered with earth. The reason for the construction and the purpose which they served are quite unknown today. However, it was one thought that the world of the fairies was underground and could only be reached through caves or deep holes and for this reason, the fogous found near the fairy forts supported the idea that such remains had originally been the homes of the Little People. Superstitious country folk in Cornwall and especially in Ireland, would give fairy forts a wide berth, lest they be carried off into the land of the fairies. It was thought to be very unlucky to tamper with, harm or attempt to remove these structures and farmers preferred to utilise them for agricultural purposes rather than to risk harm by damaging them in any way. Some, for example, were used as enclosures for livestock. So powerful were the superstitions surrounding fairy forts that as late as 1895, they resulted in a ritual murder being committed in Ireland.   

    In 1887 18 year-old Bridget Boland married a barrel-maker called Michael Cleary. The couple were both born and raised in the Irish county of Tipperary and it was only natural that it was in that part of Ireland that they should set up home after their marriage. They lived in the little town of Ballyvadlea. Bridget was very interested in fairies, which was not thought to be healthy at that time. She walked around the area selling eggs and on a nearby hill stood a fairy fort, which everybody else avoided, especially after dark. Bridget though would go out of her way to pass through the place and liked to linger there at dusk. This caused raised eyebrows. Nor was this her only connection with the Little People. Her father became ill and needed to be looked after. There was not room in their home, but because Patrick Boland, her father, had once been a labourer, it was arranged that they could move into a cottage which was specially reserved for labourers and their families. This was one of the best houses in the village, but nobody else wanted to live there because it had been built on the site of another fairy fort and was therefore seen as being an unlucky place to spend the night.

     The marriage between Michael Cleary and his wife Bridget proceeded without any great problems for eight years. The couple did not have any children, but apart from that there seemed little to distinguish them from any other working-class family in Tipperary at that time. On 4 March 1895 Bridget Cleary walked over to her cousin’s farm to deliver some eggs. It was a cold day, with snow on the ground, and she unwisely made a detour to visit the fairy fort on Kylenagranagh Hill. She came home late, and the next day was in bed with a chill.

     Bridget was ill for the next week and it was during that time that her husband became gripped by the genuine belief that the woman laying in bed was not actually his wife at all, but a changeling. He honestly thought that his wife had been carried off by the fairies and that they had sent a substitute who looked very similar to Bridget, but was not exactly like her. For instance, he claimed that the woman now in his house was two inches taller than his wife. Other relatives and friends agreed and hatched a plan to force the imposter to reveal herself. The sick woman was asked three times by Cleary to answer to the question, ‘Are you Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary, in the name of God?’ She stumbled on answering the third time, which was seen as a sign that she was not the genuine woman.

     After 11 days, Bridget Cleary was well enough to get up and asked for some milk. This aroused her husband’s suspicions again, because fairies were famous for having a liking for fresh milk; that’s why they sometimes milked cows dry in the night. There were a number of other people in the house, which made what happened next all the more shocking. Having, as he saw it, strong evidence that the woman in his home was really a changeling, a fairy trying to pass as human, Michael Cleary knocked her to the ground and grabbed a burning stick from the fire, which he held close to her mouth. Then he set fire to her clothes and, to make absolutely sure of the result, he poured lamp oil over his wife. She blazed like a torch. There were cries of horror from some of those present, but not one person attempted to help the burning woman and she soon died. Even her own father did nothing to save her.

     After burying her in a shallow grave, Michael Cleary spent the next few days haunting the ringfort at on Kylenagranagh Hill. He was convinced that now he had disposed of the fairy who was impersonating his wife, Bridget would return to him, riding on a white horse. After three days though, not only had his wife not returned to him but the police had heard some disturbing rumours. Michael Cleary and a number of other men were arrested and charged with wounding. Cleary was additionally charged with manslaughter. By this time, the dead woman’s remains had been found.

     It was ruled in court that murder was not a possibility because Michael Cleary genuinely believed that the person whom he was burning to death was not human. He was sent to prison for 20 years. Others who had been involved in the death received sentences ranging from six months to five years imprisonment with hard labour. To this day, children in that part of Ireland recite a nursery rhyme inspired by the dreadful events,

     Are you a witch or are you a fairy,

     Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?

     There is something ironic about the Indo-European invaders regarding earlier inhabitants of the land as fairies, only for later generations to view them and their works in that same light. The above case illustrates perfectly how those who really believe in fairies feel about them. There is nothing cute and mischievous about the Little People; they are a deadly menace. It may seem incredible, but these ideas have not yet died out, at least in Ireland.

     In 1992 Sean Quinn was the richest man in Ireland. He owned hotels, quarries and large cement business. That year, he wished to extend a quarry he owned, but a 4,000 year-old megalithic tomb stood in his way. His company, Quinn Cement, obtained permission from the Office of Public Works to dismantle the tomb and it was relocated in the grounds of an hotel owned by Quinn. Then his business problems began and they culminated int the richest man in Ireland being declared bankrupt. Local people were in no doubt that it was the revenge of the fairies upon a man who had disturbed one of their haunts.