When Tinker Bell followed Peter Pan to Hollywood in the 1950s, fairies
vanished into the realm of child-lore. Yet in 1923 30-yearold J.R.R.
Tolkien’s visit to his aunt’s house Bag’s End inspired a story
about hedgerowfairies or ‘Hobbits’, and three years earlier
Sherlock-Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle published the Cottingley
fairy photographs. In Ireland, a generation before, family members had
torched a woman to death thinking she was a fairy, while William
Butler Yeats met a fairy queen in a coastal cave. Today British and
Irish fairy-interest has recovered its old lustre, and gathered here
is the latest learning from leading folklorists and historians. A
tidal-wave of new fairy sightings has been uncovered by the
digitisation of British and Irish newspapers and ephemera. There are
fairy sightings in urbanised locations and remote rural areas;
characters and means to ward off evil fairies vary radically from
place to place. In Sussex, there is the helpful ‘Master Dobbs’ or
Dobby, while in Ireland fairies may be the dead, and Scotland harbours
the terrifying Whoopity Stoorie. In addition, Magical Folk includes
findings from The Fairy Census, the first scholarly survey of modern
fairy sightings in Britain and Ireland, demonstrating that the
connection with the past continues unbroken. Another new discovery is
that fairies travelled across the Atlantic well before Tinker Bell
made it onto the silver screen. The most homesick fairies may have
been the ones who dunked one Roderick repeatedly in the Atlantic Ocean
as they dragged him to Ireland and back to his Canadian home!
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781783341030
Publisert
2017
Utgiver
Vendor
Gibson Square
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter