“Bab Ballads,” where an airy fairy madly loves a mortal curate. This type is much encouraged by the traditions of the operatic stage, where she “hangs in arsenic green from a highly impossible tree,” and even by Shakespeare, who ought to know better. As a matter of fact, this species of fairy is unknown to serious folk-lore, and her existence is founded on a misunderstanding, which, according to Skeat, had crept into the English language before “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was written. The little human creatures, in wings and skirts, which Sir Herbert Tree has taught us to think of as all clothed in a delicate shimmer of sunset gold, are really not fairies, but fays. It is pleasant to be able to point to anything, however small, that Shakespeare did not know.
A fairy is, in fact, any supernatural creature of the imagination. It is a being evolved, contrary to the laws of nature, by enchantment. In the correct sense, a hobgoblin or a giant (if large enough) or a mermaid, or even a dragon, is a fairy, and there is no evidence whatever that ballet-skirts are worn in the recesses of the forests of fairyland. Piers the Plowman says in his “Prologue”:
As on a May morning, on Malvern hills.
Me befell a ferly of fairy, methought.
A “ferly” is a wonderful experience; Piers means that he had a strange adventure, which he attributed to “fairy,” that is to say, to enchantment. If he had meant a tiny woman, seated in a bluebell, he would have said an elf or a “fay” a fay being one kind of fairy out of many—but he used “fairy” in its essential and original meaning. This is what we propose to do here, and in collecting fairy-tales from our own stores and those of our Allies, we are so far from confining ourselves to the conventional term that throughout all our volume we shall scarcely find, in Titania’s sense, one venturous fairy.
