A fantastical history of fairies

Speaker 00:00

[on-hold music] What do you picture when you imagine a fairy? Most probably a childlike creature with wings, perhaps perched on a flower. But this is a far more modern image than we might think. As Matthias Egler explains to Lauren Good in this episode of the History Extra podcast, fairies didn't get their wings until the 1780s, and long before that, they were viewed, along with their elven counterparts, as much more human than other. Matthias traces the history of how we've perceived these creatures, and why these perceptions can reveal so much about the society that dreamt them up.

Lauren Good· Host0:39

Hello, Matthias. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Matthias Egeler· Guest0:43

Hello, Lauren. It's great to be here, and thank you very much for your interest in my work on that most obscure of topics of fairies.

Lauren Good· Host0:52

Most of those listening, I'm sure, will picture these elves and fairies as lovely, almost childlike creatures. But as your book points out, they haven't always been like this, have they?

Matthias Egeler· Guest1:03

Indeed, they have not. If you read traditional stories from nineteenth century Iceland, their fairies are almost impossible to distinguish from human beings. So the typical way how an encounter is described is that Person X meets a person on the road, assumes that's probably the farmhand from the neighboring farmers, and later on it turns out that that farmhand had been somewhere else entirely, and inquiries are made and nobody