Fairies: A Dangerous History by Richard Sugg (review)

Richard Sugg's Fairies: A Dangerous History reflects upon the nature of fairies, their representation within oral tradition and popular culture, and humans' relationship to the fantastic. Sugg asserts in his introduction that his goal is not to claim that fairies are real, but rather "to get fairies into your head" (9). In this regard, he succeeds. His descriptions of fairy encounters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have the feel of folkloric retellings heard at the knee of an elder community member.

Sugg's introduction presents the first two of many fairy sightings throughout the book. He notes fairies' status as being the lowest in the "hierarchy of the irrational" (14). The first chapter, "Origins, Appearances, Locations," focuses on traditional and historical beliefs in fairies. Sugg presents several theoretical frames for the origin of fairies, including Christian tradition and ghost stories. He discusses where they live—in the air, in the water, and underground—and asserts that they are usually described as having no wings. From there, Sugg ruminates upon people's relationship with nature and how it affects their ability to hear and see fairies. This focus on humanity's connection to nature becomes a theme woven throughout the remaining chapters.

Chapter 2, "Sighting, Meetings, Signs," describes multiple fairy, leprechaun, and seal-women sightings. It also discusses fairy behavior as well as locations, animals, and artifacts associated with them. Sugg comments, "Time and again fairy encounters wriggle in this unsettling way across the borders of folklore and reality. Mingling qualities of either, they refuse to sit still in one stable category" (84). He also notes that when contemplating which narratives to include, he chose "from popular culture, from typical fairy territory, or from educated witnesses living in premodern Britain" (76) and mentions that "the majority of educated Britons had come to see disbelief in fairies as a marker of acceptable social status by about 1750" (77). When possible, Sugg names witnesses, but he does not always tell us how their accounts were collected and preserved. He does often comment on which elements of the stories feel folkloric and which seem realistic.

In the chapter titled "Fairy Dangers," Sugg emphasizes how education has shaped belief in fairies. He describes how fairies still serve as scapegoats in stories about changelings. The assertion that fairies would steal human children and leave a fairy child in their place was often applied to situations in which a child had a medical condition. Drawing upon the work of Carole Silver, Sugg notes that belief in changelings "shifted blame for the child's condition into a thoroughly separate, supernatural realm, beyond human control" (103). The reassignment allowed people to combat a perceived problem and gave "an otherwise frighteningly arbitrary condition a meaning" (105). This chapter also explores adult abductions and looks in more detail at fairy territories such as fairy trees, forts, and paths and at superstitions about such locations.

The fourth and fifth chapters may be the most appealing to those reading for scholarly purposes. In chapter 4, "Literature and Art," Sugg provides brief analyses of passages from The Odyssey and from Chaucer before going into more depth by commenting on some of the poetry and plays of Shakespeare, focusing most extensively on the supernatural elements in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sugg briefly touches on works from the seventeenth century before turning to the Romantic poets, most notably Keats. He then advances to the Victorian age and to paintings by Sir Joseph Noel Paton, Richard Dadd, and John William Waterhouse that capture fairies in the settings of earlier centuries. In this chapter, Sugg also attributes the addition of wings onto fairies to Alexander Pope.

Chapter 5, "Fairy Magic: 1800 to the Present," draws attention to the impact of audiences' reception of the stage production of Peter Pan. Sugg suggests that the request for the audience to clap to save Tinker Bell's life gave control to children, who rarely had such opportunities: "you—the little individual whose Edwardian life was a continual labyrinth of rules, errors, cautions...