For many decades British folklorists have been largely silent on the difficult question of where fairies come from. There has been a great deal of discussion of where fairies go – “always going, never gone” – why fairy belief declined, and the fairies’ modern and literary transformations, but when it comes to their origin scholars are usually content to report what people say about the origin of the fairies rather than to delve into this contested history. One exception to this was Diane Purkiss, who in her book Troublesome Things (2000) tentatively linked Europe’s fairies with the bogeys of the ancient Greek nursery; but this was more historical psychoanalysis than history. This reticence among modern folklorists contrasts with the confidence of earlier scholars like Walter Evans-Wentz, Lewis Spence and even Katharine Briggs, who were willing to wonder where the fairies came from. Indeed, Briggs’s conclusion that fairies were probably spirits of the ancestral dead has become a sort of folkloric orthodoxy, influential on Emma Wilby’s portrayal of early modern fairy lore as a kind of debased animism. However, there are two other major ideas about what fairies are that lurk in the popular consciousness, a kind of intellectual detritus left behind by the fossicking of an earlier generation of folklorists.
EUHEMERISTS AND DEGENERATIONISTS
The first of these ideas, and the least respectable, is the ‘euhemerist’ idea that fairy lore represents a folk memory of real people – a lost race, small in stature, who were driven to the hills, caves and wilds by later invaders and reverted to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, occasionally stealing the children of the settled farmers. This ‘pygmy theory’ of fairies, which is actually as old as thewe might term ‘degenerationism’, the idea that fairies were the degenerate, diminished remains of former pagan deities.
