The Fair Folk - Television Tropes & Idioms

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
— Terry Pratchett, Lords And Ladies

Modern society has lived with the Disneyfied vision of Fairies for so long — the Fairy Godmothers of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, Tinkerbell in Peter Pan — that it seems hard to imagine that some would consider Fairies evil.

And yet, some of them were. The Fairies of old weren't cute little bewinged Pixies who fluttered happily around humans. At best, they would interact with humans with either no thought to the consequences of their actions (the Little People who end up putting Rip van Winkle to sleep) or delighting in the mess they're making of mortal lives (Oberon, Puck, and the rest in A Midsummer's Night's Dream). At worst, they're otherworldly horrors who abduct humans and send them to a horrible fate (Tam Lin). The original terms for these (at least, in Scottish lore) were the Seelie (vaguely goodish) and the Unseelie (Always Chaotic Evil). In Ireland, they were called sídhe ("shee") and would sour milk, kill animals, and swap people for changelings. Boys were dressed in girls' clothes until the age of 5, because otherwise the sídhe would steal them for their armies. Building anything near a fairy fort was very bad. Even if you were allowed to leave their kingdom, you could find that centuries have passed, and crumple into dust. Their dances would catch any human passerby and make him dance to exhaustion at best. And — well, an old meaning of "eldritch" as in Eldritch Abomination was "elvish".

A variety of superstitions developed to keep the fairies at bay, or to pacify them. Salt could keep a baby from being stolen. Iron, holy water, crosses, and holy words/names scared fairies away. Some people put out offerings of milk or food for them at night.

Then came Victorian Bowdlerisation, and suddenly, all Fairies got a lot more cute. (And acquired wings, which were unknown in older folklore.)

More traditional Fairies are a bit of an odd duck of a trope. Old as anything, long forgotten, they're starting to re-emerge in modern fiction with a vengeance. Fairies may present themselves as amazing, beautiful, graceful and magical— but underneath all the glamour, they're creepy little buggers for whom empathy is a concept as alien as the idea of blue as a number. They might take a shine to humans, but at best, it's the love a human feels for a pet... and you really don't want to see what it's like at its worst.

Their society and customs, if they even have the inclination to associate, are often extravagant and elegant but amoral and inscrutable, sometimes even for some unfortunate Fairies themselves. It's by far not certain what degree of loyalty or compassion they feel for their conspecifics.

The return of this trope to popular awareness can be traced back to at least 1988, when The Sandman, a Comic Book penned by Neil Gaiman, featured a number of Fairy characters who were often either outright malicious or self-centred to the point of sociopathy. Gaiman also used traditional Fairies in his novels and short stories as well as other comic books, and directly inspired authors such as Terry Pratchett (a friend of Gaiman's in long standing) and Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell. Ten years earlier, the artist Brian Froud did a series of illustrated books cataloging the Shee or bad fairies, and their close cousins, the goblins. His work was also the inspiration for the 1982 film The Dark Crystal.

These Fairies can sometimes share a world with Tolkienesque Elves, who, depending on the setting, may not themselves officially be part of Faerie. The principal distinction between the two, if there is one, is that Elves are a mildly superhuman longlived race living in the mortal world (or a distant corner of it), whereas Fairies are much more intensely magical, and live in a Fairyland outside the mortal world.

Ever wonder why Fairies are called "the Fair Folk" or "the Good Folk"? It's because calling them an unkind name is just cause for their wrath. Especially The Wild Hunt. On the subject of names, there's a 90% chance that a named fairy leader will be called Oberon, Titania or Mab. Other fairies are just as likely to have names drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Yes, I'm looking at you, Puck.

In a manner of speaking, the old version of the Faerie has been replaced with Alien Abduction. In both cases, you have creatures who are ineffable and don't understand humanity, who randomly abduct humans, play with them, and return them with Time Loss and occasionally strange powers/afflictions. Periodically, there are tales of those who have dealt with them and benefited, but for the most part, mundanes are merely their playthings.

Luckily, much like vampires, fey traditionally have a few weaknesses that can be exploited, including:

Iron - Sometimes it means striking them with iron weapons, or simply a frying pan or just exposure will do the job. In some settings where this would be too much of a Weaksauce Weakness, a more fantastic 'Cold Iron' is required.
- Driving an iron nail above your door may be enough to keep them out of your house. Depends on the tale.
Cannot Tell A Lie - Sometimes. Note that they will exploit and twist this for all manner of deception.
- Given that some stories (like Darby O'Gill, Aladdin, etc), are about humans exploiting these weaknesses to get power over them and use them to their own advantage, doesn't that make one suspect that humans are just as arbitrary in the other direction - that, in effect, from the point of view of The Fair Folk, humans are The Fair Folk?