Land of Faerie

aka: Fairyland

Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold... The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.

— J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories"

Faerie, also known as Fairyland or Elfland, is a very specific version of Magical Land. Though Faerie is almost always a Magical Land, not all Magical Lands are examples of the Land Of Faerie.

The Land of Faerie must have at least two of the following qualities:

• It is named Faerie or Fairyland or it is named after one of the Otherworlds that Faerie is based on, such as Alfheim ("Elfhome"), Tír na nÓg ("Land of the Young"), or Avalon.
• It is Another Dimension separate from the Earth. It can be accessed in a number of ways. The most typical ways are that the person accidentally wanders through an unseen or disguised portal — a Fairy Ring is common — or they are taken there by a Faerie, willingly or unwillingly.
• It is populated by The Fair Folk or Elves who may or may not be benevolent.
• The Faeries are ruled by a monarch, usually a queen. See Faerie Court.

Faerie commonly provides examples of the following:

• There are other mythical creatures, either as a Fantastic Nature Reserve or because All Myths Are True (or at least one is).
• It is stuck in Medieval Stasis or, potentially, some earlier time.
• Nature is often wilder and more vivid than in the human world. Mountains are taller, trees more majestic, flowers more fragrant, and mythical and fantastical creatures roam the land. The Enchanted Forest is a common sight in Fairyland, if the entire setting isn't one such forest to begin with.
• Time moves differently within Faerie, so that, when the character returns to Earth, hundreds of years have passed by in their absence, or else they return many years older and wiser, only to find that only a day or two had passed.
• Food Chains are used by The Fair Folk to keep people from leaving once they have entered.

See also: Spirit World.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Tír na nÓg is mentioned in The Ancient Magus' Bride when Titania and Oberon appear to meet Elias and Chise. They later visit it, and lose several months of "outside" time over a period of days.
• In Aura Battler Dunbine, the world of Byston Well has three layers with the top being the "Land of the Ferario" which is home to various types of fairies who are ruled over by their Queen, Jacoba Aon.
• The Astral Plane in Berserk is a realm of existence generated by the subconscious beliefs of humanity, and is populated by supernatural creatures ranging from pixies to the demonic Godhand and various unnamed eldritch things. The layer of existence between the Astral Plane and the human world, where such creatures can manifest, is called the Interstice, and functions more like a traditional fairyland.
• The MMORPG ALFheim Online that appears in the second story arc of Sword Art Online counts, if the name didn't tip you off. It's called ALFheim, the players are various races of Faerie, and the ultimate goal of the game is to meet the Faerie King and Queen.
• The Demon World of YuYu Hakusho is a borderline example. The qualifying standards are that it is a separate dimension, which can be reached either through portals or random weak spots in the barrier; and it is originally ruled by three kings, and later one. The Youkai who dwell there skirt close to The Fair Folk, but tend to show more human characteristics than expected.

Comic Books

• All-Star Comics: The Justice Society of America find themselves dealing with faeries in their own land which apparently exists in another dimension and intersects with Earth every thousand years.
• I Hate Fairyland has the eponymous Fairyland. For some reason, humans can't age physically, but they can age mentally in Fairyland.
• In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it's mentioned that Faerie and England were united under Queen Gloriana. Both sides remained close until Oliver Cromwell came to power and declared war against what the Puritans saw as "heathen abominations." Thus the land of Faerie was closed forever.
• The Mighty Thor:
  • Fairyland is identical with Svartalfheim in Norse Mythology and can be accessed through the Cotswolds; the Fair Folk are actually Malekith the Accursed and his legions of Dark Elves.
  • The light and fluffy variant is Alfheim, which is intentionally almost unbelievably saccharine in recent comics (less so in some adaptations), and the inhabitants are pretty much defenseless against the likes of Malekith.
• A decaying version features in the Hellboy-verse. It's introduced in "The Corpse" (Hellboy's version of the Changeling Tale). In "The Right Hand of Doom", Hellboy's mind visits there while his body is imprisoned, and the fae convince him to continue fighting. In Darkness Calls a fairy with a grudge against Hellboy sets events in motion which result in a fairy coup d'etat; in The Storm and the Fury, this culminates in the battle for the fate of the world occurring on the fields of fairyland.
• The Multiversity lumps all DC's "whimsical" magic realms, and most of the magical realms seen in The Sandman (1989) into the Dreaming. Naturally, this includes the Faerie Court, which is both. The symbol for the Dreaming on the official Map of the Multiverse is a winged fairy sitting on a toadstool.
• The Sandman (1989) retells A Midsummer Night's Dream and other Fairyland adventures. The same (or a very similar) Faerie is also visited in The Books of Magic.
• Subverted in Seven Soldiers, where "Frankenstein in Fairyland" reveals Fairyland and the Sidhe/Sheeda to be the parasitic dregs of the human race from the Bad Future of One Billion A.D.; the Year Outside, Hour Inside effect is a side effect of being abducted by a race of time travelers.
• During The Golden Age of Comic Books Wonder Woman visited an extra-dimensional kingdom populated by faeries and leprechauns ruled by a queen. While usually she'd have to get there via Paradise Island's dimension hopping technology in Wonder Woman (1942) she once ended up there when she, Steve Trevor and Etta Candy chased a Nazi spy into some caves, and to their surprise they ended up exiting the caves into the magical kingdom rather than the forest they started in.

Fairy Tales

• In "Childe Rowland", the eponymous hero ventures into the "land of Fairy", also called Elfland, to rescue his sister who has been kidnapped by the wicked King of Elfland.
• The Icelandic fairy tale "The Story of King Odd" involves an exile from the "Nether World", the Icelandic variant of Faerie.

Fan Works

• Vow of Nudity: One story chronicles Spectra being forcibly teleported to the Faewilds by her celestial patron to complete a mission for him. It's portrayed as a dangerous and otherworldly forest plane populated with mischievous fairies and giant mushrooms.

Film — Animated

• Most of the movie Faeries (1999) takes place there.
• In Song of the Sea, Tír na nÓg is mentioned but never actually shown in full. It's said to be located across the sea, and the Daoine Sídhe who still live in Ireland are waiting for a selkie to sing the titular song that will send them home.

Film — Live-Action

• Labyrinth gives us the Goblin Kingdom, a surreal Otherworld inhabited by goblins and fairies (both of whom show traits of The Fair Folk) and ruled over by... well... a Goblin King played by David Bowie.
• The Moors in Maleficent fulfill two of the requirements listed above: It is home to The Fair Folk, and ruled by a queen (Maleficent at the beginning, Aurora at the end). It coexists alongside a human kingdom, whose king wishes to conquer it and expand his dominion, even if it means killing the (mostly) benign creatures who inhabit it.
• Maleficent: Mistress of Evil introduces an underground cavern where Dark Fey from all over the world hide from humans. By the end of the movie Phillip's kingdom has integrated with the fairy kingdom from the first movie with all three races living in peace.
• The Underworld from Pan's Labyrinth has pixies, fauns and fairy-tale race Ofelia secretly belongs to.
• Riddle of Fire: Faery Hill Forest is a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane version. Most obvious is the name. The Enchanted Blade Gang go there on a vaguely magical hunt for the "King of the Forest." While there, Petal claims to a Fire Fairy. The main characters stop in a campsite that is filled with large, red-and-white mushrooms.

Literature

By Author:

• Lewis Carroll created two of these. Wonderland from the Alice books is, of course, the most famous and influential Fairyland in English Literature. He expanded on the concept in Sylvie and Bruno, with Fairyland and the Outland.
• J. R. R. Tolkien
  • In Smith of Wootton Major, Smith travels to Faery because he swallowed a star at the Feast of Good Children as a child. The star somehow attaches itself to his forehead at age ten and allows him to travel to the land of Faery. He goes there to adventure throughout his life and meets the Queen of Faery.
  • Tolkien's Legendarium: The land of Aman (or more specifically Eldamar) could be thought of as the land of Faerie, also. After the world is changed and Aman is removed from the Earth, only the Elves know the way back by a path over the sea. There only the Valar (functionally gods, but technically archangels) and the elves live (plus Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, and Gimli).
    • The Hobbit: One of the facts the narrator gives about the Wood-elves is that they "were descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West", suggesting that Faerie is a distant land across the sea. It is also mentioned that the elves who went to Faerie "grew fairer and wiser and more learned" than the Wood-elves.
    • The History of Middle-earth adds more detail: Elvenhome isn't really like The Fair Folk ideas of Fairyland, but is often mistaken for such by Men with incomplete accounts of it (particularly after all the Elves leave, which is implied to be where our ideas of The Fair Folk come from).
    • Lothlórien bears many of the traits of Land Of Faerie, being a place no evil creatures can enter, where time passes more slowly inside than outside, and is ruled by the most powerful elves still on Middle Earth, one of whom possesses a Ring of Power. It is also feared by dwarves and men.

By Work:

• While many works by Holly Black deal with The Fair Folk, The Folk of the Air trilogy is so far the only one that takes place almost entirely within Elfhame and focuses on the dangers a human faces while living in the Faerie Court there.
• The elves in White Trash Warlock live in a specific dimension of the Other Side called Alfheimr.
• The Bordertown series (aka the Borderlands series), a Shared Universe of three novels and five anthologies of stories written by various authors and edited by Terri Windling, revolves around Bordertown which lies on the border of the Elflands and the World. The basis of the series is that Faerie has returned to the world and the area around Bordertown is a place where magic and technology only work half the time and with unpredictable outcomes.
• Narnia, the titular Fairyland from C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Prythian is separated from the human realm by a magical barrier. The land is broken into various courts, ruled over by fae High Lords.
• Discworld has the parasite universe of Fairyland ruled by the Queen of the Elves. There the flow of time has stopped while time on the Disc flies by. Fairyland is a bleak place caught between day and night where creatures of myth are stolen from other dimensions or even people's minds and dreams. The section ruled by the Queen is stuck in everlasting winter while the King's world is steaming hot.
• In Doc Sidhe, the protagonist ends up on the fair world in the course of foiling his ex-girlfriend's kidnapping.
• In The Dresden Files, Faerie is the region of the Nevernever (parallel magical reality encompassing pretty much every mythological location ever) closest to the material world. It is mostly ruled by the Summer and Winter (Seelie and Unseelie) Courts of the Sidhe, though there are also the Wyldfae (which are mentioned to be considerably more numerous than the Courts), who belong to neither Court and are occasionally organised into other polities, such as the Tywlwyth Teg and the Erlking's goblins. Summer and Winter, however, are by far the most powerful Faerie states. With a great deal of caution it can be used as a shortcut to travel between distant points in the material world, but the laws of physics and the flow of time are flexible there, and it's entirely possible to spend more (or less) time there than expected.
• The Faerie Queene has Faerie land ruled by the Queen Gloriana, whose knights are humans that were Switched at Birth with Changelings.
• Diana Wynne Jones has a typically Jones-y interpretation in Fire and Hemlock: The Fairy Queen as a London socialite who eats the life and soul of a musician every nine years, after taking a short trip to Fairyland on a local train line.
• In Julie Kagawa's The Iron Fey, most of the books are set in it.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell featured Faerie as one of the four domains of creation (the others being Heaven, Hell, and Earth), and quite a lot of the story took place there, as several characters were repeatedly taken there for various lengths of time.
• Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter has Elfland, the realm of The Fair Folk where time does not pass and the world works very differently.
• The Land of Oz, from L. Frank Baum's books, is another of the most famous and influential examples. The rule about what happens when you eat the food in a Fairyland has been suggested by fans as the reason Dorothy must keep returning to Oz on a regular basis, ultimately moving there, permanently.
• In the Magic Kingdom of Landover series of novels, Faerie is a sort of inter-dimensional nexus between universes.
• In The Mortal Instruments is mentioned that there is this kingdom. In fact, the heroes visit it twice on their adventures. In the sequel, The Dark Artifices, the heroes experience an adventure there.
• October Daye has the Summerlands, the last of the Faerie realms accessible to most fae after Oberon closed Deeper Faerie. There are also numerous knowes, Pocket Dimensions in between the Summerlands and the mortal world.
• Neverland, created by J. M. Barrie for his Peter Pan stories.
• Phantastes by George Macdonald, considered by many to be the original modern fantasy novel, and credited by some with inspiring C. S. Lewis to write The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis was a great admirer of Macdonald). It details the journeys of young man venturing through Fairy Land upon his twenty-first birthday, and both the sights he sees and the stories he is told. Macdonald called it "a fairy tale for adults."
• In Algernon Blackwood's A Prisoner in Fairyland, Fairyland is the unseen, spiritual reality behind everyday reality. It is accessible to anyone who can remember how to get there (Astral Projection is involved), adults as well as children. Visitors must take something from Fairyland, bringing it to the earth world. Philanthropist Henry Rogers relearns this from his little cousins as they collect starlight to share with loved ones, helping them to de-stress and become less "wumbled" with everyday cares.
• Robert Rankin's Raiders of the Lost Car Park "explains" that Fairyland consists of the parts of the world that exist on flat maps but not on globes, which in fact has nothing to do with Mercator's projection or anything like that, don't be silly.
• Rivers of London: In Foxglove Summer, Peter gets taken into Fairyland from Herefordshire. It has the same basic landscape, except there are no villages, the old English forests still stretch as far as the eye can see, and even the Roman road is just a slight scar on the landscape. The Fair Folk, who seemed impossibly perfect inhuman beings in the real world, seem more human and "real" on their own turf... which only makes them more scary.
• A rare science fiction example of this is found in the planet Faery from Sentou Yousei Yukikaze. It is accessible only through a hyperspace portal that mysteriously appeared out of nowhere in Antarctica. The planet itself is a bizarre place and even has an alternate version of itself as an Eldritch Location. The inhabitants of Faery, the JAM, are completely shrouded in mystery and their motives are alien to humanity. There are times when the main character feels like being on Faery is like being in a dream.
• In The Spearwielder's Tale, by R.A. Salvatore, Gary Leger travels to the land of Faerie after he is captured by a leprechaun. Faerie is home to many races: elves (who live in the forest of Tir na Nog), leprechauns, dwarves, gnomes, humans, dragons, etc, etc.
• The Staryk King's land in Spinning Silver. It is a land of Endless Winter, because the Staryk themselves are ice elves who can't bear heat. They follow an incredibly rigid code of I Gave My Word dealmaking, and Miryem the mortal becomes able to do magic by thrice achieving an impossible task. When Miryem asks about the lands beyond the Staryk mountain, it's implied that there are even greater and more dangerous creatures in the wilderness beyond. The only way into the kingdom are through the ice roads laid by the Staryk (which shift to whatever part of the mortal world they need to access) and the abandoned cottage of a long-ago witch who used to escape there when she needed a vacation from people seeking favors.
• In Stardust, Tristran Thorn travels to Faerie by passing through a gap in the Wall in order to find a fallen star for the girl he loves. There he encounters unicorns, fairies, witches, and more. The people of Stormhold may or may not be elves.
• Diane Duane puts an interesting spin on Faerie in Stealing the Elf-King's Roses. Here, it is called Alfheim and an Alternate Universe version of Earth, but not medieval at all. Actually, of all the seven known parallel universe earths, Alfheim is one of the two most technologically advanced ones next to Xaihon. It is ruled by a king, accessed by high-tech gating facilities and no one really trusts the elves, who are as open, transparent and welcoming of visitors as, say, North Korea. Turns out, for good reason. When they allow some visitors, it eventually comes to light that they heavily employ Glamours over whole cities (though they, in turn, have understandable reasons for their deception). Also, Alfheim is somewhat sentient, allows everyone, depending on their talent and lineage, to be Reality Warpers to varying extents (enabling the Glamour) and the king is a downright Fisher King. Plus All Myths Are True applies for several of the parallel worlds, but particularily for Alfheim and Midgarth.
• Perpetua in Tales from Netheredge is a half-legendary mountainous region ruled by a cruel and fickle fey queen, which only a select few humans have visited (and at least one was eventually killed by the fey).
• In Ruth Frances Long's The Treachery of Beautiful Things, this is where Jenny's brother went, and where she is looking for him.
• In Arthur Machen's The White People the titular white people dwell in the Deep Dendo, an Eldritch Location that is completely white with monuments depicting horrible things and a swirling sky that may or may not be underground.
• The third and fourth books of Wicked Lovely are set predominantly in Faerie, in the "otherworld" of the High Court, where time moves at only 1/6 of the pace of Earth's and the Fae are ruled by the logical and emotionless Unchanging Queen, Sorcha.

Live-Action TV

• Briarwood Forest of Power Rangers Mystic Force may qualify. No actual faeries are seen (the closest is that the Pink Ranger has one as her symbol), but it is an alternate dimension inhabited by magical beings.
• In Supernatural, fairies (a term that includes fairies, elves, leprechauns, and redcaps) live in another dimension called Avalon ruled by Oberon.
• In True Blood, Sookie finds out that she is part-fairy and travels to the (as of yet) unnamed land of the fairies. Despite the beauty of the fairies and their land, it turns out that it is an illusion to lure in humans and that the fairies are more like The Fair Folk.

Music

• The Fair Folk by Heather Dale refers to the strange time in Faerie at one point.
  Seven years spent out of time
  And all is lost that once was mine
  I tarried once and listened long
  To echoes of the fair folks' song.
• This is the primary theme of the French blackgaze band Alcest.
• Steeleye Span's Thomas The Rhymer is an old Scottish ballad about Faerie.
  Don't you see yon bonnie bonnie road, that lies across the fernie brae?
  That is the road to fair Elfland, where you and I must go this day

Mythology and Religion

• Alfheim of Norse Mythology was the land of the Light Elves. Carried over into Scottish and English ballads as Elfhame or Elfland.
• The otherworld of the old Welsh poem the Preiddu Annwyn contains one of the legendary treasures of the fairies of Celtic mythology and has some features of a fairyland (albeit crossed with elements of the Orphic journey). It seems to be a prototype of the Grail legend, to boot.
• Thomas the Rhymer, best known now as a Child Ballad, is about Thomas's journey to Elfland and the prophetic gifts he receives there. Interestingly, Elfland is portrayed as a third option between Heaven and Hell.
• Tír na nÓg of Irish Mythology was a land of supernatural beings that was not easily accessed by mortal man. Mag Mell and Avalon are similar places associated with the Sidhe, despite being Valhalla-like afterlives.
• The story of Urashima Taro from Japanese folklore resembles that of Thomas Rhymer, and features a fisherman who spends time in the fairyland-like court of the dragon-god Ryujin and suffers various supernatural effects upon returning to the real world.
• In Iceland, there are the Hidden Children — children of Adam and Eve who never fell, and were hidden inside mountains. Sometimes a mortal gets lost in the mountains and sees one, and falls in love...

Puppet Shows

• South African series Die Liewe Heksie was a TV childrens' show based on the adventures of a witch who dwells in the summer country of Bloemmieland (Land of Flowers) combatting the schemes of the barren winterland of Gifappeltjieland (The Poisoned-Apple Country). These are the two opposing sides of Faerie.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: Arcadia is the sort of Faerieland you'd get if you mixed folk mythology to get a cross between Shakespearean fairies, the Celtic Otherworld, and Norse "Aelfheim" (Elfland). It's a pretty dangerous place, despite being almost always beautiful. It has four directions: Dark, Light, Summer and Winter; if you went towards any of them long enough, you would either die or lose your mind.
• Changeling: The Dreaming has Arcadia and the Dreaming, two bizarre worlds inhabited by faerie entities and largely shut off from mortals and even from other supernaturals. Arcadia is the homeland of the fae, but was cut off from Earth once disbelief got too strong, forcing the fae left on Earth to take refuge in human bodies. Something not good is going on there in recent years, but the details are Shrouded in Myth thanks to the clouded memories of the sidhe who have been returning to Earth.
• Likewise, the successor game, Changeling: The Lost, has Arcadia/Faerie and the Hedge, which bridges the gap between Earth and Faerie. Whereas Arcadia was somewhat pleasant in the last game, however, here it's a swirling tide of chaos where the Gentry desperately try to stand out in order to avoid getting swallowed by the maelstrom. As they can't exactly make anything new, though, they often kidnap humans to serve as their proxies/slaves/agents, who are then twisted into changelings by the sheer nature of Faerie.
• Dungeons & Dragons has long had an... uncertain relationship with this trope.
  • In BECMI and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, whilst there were definitely fey around, they were never given their own concrete world. The closest they got was in the Planescape setting, where it was clarified that the gods of the fey races inhabit a mobile demiplane that shifts across the several of the Chaotic upper planes.
  • In 3rd edition, the Plane of Faerie was presented an optional plane in a sourcebook titled "The Manual of the Planes". Here, it is described as a realm of untamed nature under an eternal twilight, where the relatively benign Seelie Fey and the malevolent Unseelie Fey clash and struggle for dominance.
  • In 4th edition, the traditional "Great Wheel" cosmology was replaced with a new one, called the "World Axis", as part of its new base setting, the Nentir Vale. Here, the Land of Faerie is known as the Feywild, and is described as a realm of untamed nature mixed with raw magic and intensified emotion, creating a place of physical, emotional and spiritual extremes. It is a "mirror plane" to the mortal world, created at the dawn of creation when the Primordials discarded motes of creation-stuff that were "too bright" as part of creating the mortal plane. This makes it very easy to travel between the two planes. Many fey races live here, including new and old ones, with elves and gnomes in particular being given new backstories that presented them as races native to the Feywild that have partially colonized the realm of mortals. The ruling powers of the Feywild are the Archfey, who are loosely organized into a collective known as the Court of Stars, and the dominant civilizations are the eladrin (ur-elves) ruled over by their Sidhe Lords, who represent a relatively benign faction of fey, and the fomorions, hideously deformed and incurable insane giant-kin marked by their Evil Eyes. Designer notes state that the Feywild was literally built from the ground up to give fey a more solid place in the D&D multiverse and to make it easier to evoke classic fairy lore and stories in D&D games.
  • Whilst 5th edition reverted back to the Great Wheel cosmology, the Feywild proved popular enough that it was maintained as a part of the cosmology. It was given a very Alice in Wonderland and other fairytale spin (unsurprising, as 1st edition had the genuine Wonderland appear) with the addition of such races as Owlfolk and Rabbitfolk and whimsical, but still deadly, inhabitants.
  • In the Eberron setting, the fae typically hail from Thelanis. It's the plane that's easiest to access from Eberron itself, allowing for fairy-portal stories, and is dominated by archfae that embody story tropes such as a jealous, scheming second son, an inventor who never quite delivers what you asked for and a wicked witch.
• Rakshastan in Exalted 1st edition was almost named Fairyland but got a de-clicheification at the last moment. It is the domain of Fair Folk or Raksha, places where primordial chaos erodes the stability of the world and Reality Is Out to Lunch. Generally not a nice place to be due to a variety of factors, starting with random mutations, through randomly inhospitable shifts of landscape and finishing with Raksha themselves, colloquially known as soul-eating Cthulhu fairies.
• Faërie is a "shiftrealm" (a land that moves between universes) in the GURPS setting Infinite Worlds. It's ruled by Oberon and Titania, and resembles Western European countryside on a perfect spring afternoon. It has "trods" (faerie roads) linking it to various Earths and other magical shiftrealms.
• Fey creatures in Pathfinder are native to the First World, an alternate dimension filled with natural beauty and unpredictable laws of physics. It was originally created as the gods' first prototypes for the material world, where they tested out possible laws of physics, laws of magic, geographies, ecosystems and creatures as they perfect their grand project. When they were finished, they simply "painted over" their original drafts and created the Material Plane from scratch, leaving their first creations to their own devices. This is why the First World is as chaotic as it is — its unpredictable natural laws are caused by all the possible laws of physics that it was used to test out, its weird and varied creatures are the countless prototypes and abandoned designs for the physical world's inhabitants, and its being cut off from the flow of souls to the realms of the gods makes even death inconstant there.
• In Nomine:
  • Faerie, also called Arcadia, Avalon, Hy Brasill, Lyonesse, and the Fair Lands of the West, is an Ethereal domain — one of the constructed realms made by powerful spirits in the Ethereal realm, the world of dreams and manifest archetypes — that serves as a refuge for the various Anglo-Celtic fey, nature spirits and gods that were driven into the Far Marches during the Purity Crusade.
  • The Country of the Teind is a dark reflection of Faerie, populated by fey who have been given as tribute to Beleth and corrupted by the influence of Hell. Fires give no warmth there, light is cold and cast by neither sun nor stars, and the shadow of Beleth's Tower looms forever in the sky; the landscape itself is bleak and forbidding, scarred with harsh mountains, tangled forests, cold lakes and dark cities home to the twisted fey that serve Beleth and her demons.
• Scion: The Scion Companion features Tír na nÓg, the otherworldly home of the Tuatha de Dannan, the Irish pantheon. The Seelie aes sidhe came to live there after their departure from the mortal world (the Unseelie aes sidhe live in the Tuatha's Underworld instead).
• Warhammer has the Forest of Loren — the magic-saturated woodland realm of the Asrai (Wood Elves), which follows this trope very closely. While not, strictly speaking, another dimension, time does run strangely there, and it is entirely possible for outsiders to wander in, lose themselves for centuries and crumble to dust upon leaving a day later. It is ruled by Queen Ariel and Orion, King in the Woods, who are immortal shape-shifting avatars of the elven mother goddess and her consort the hunting god. It is inhabited by ancient treemen, unicorns, great stags, dryads, forest dragons, warhawks and many other mythic beasts, as well as millions of tiny fairy-like sprites (the most aggressive of which are called Spites and go to war alongside the Wood Elves). The Wood Elves also have a habit of capturing beautiful human boy-children from surrounding lands, to keep as un-aging servants for their feasts, among other unsavoury faerie activities. Most of Loren is beautiful and unspoilt, if filled with capricious otherworldly beings and hidden dangers to outsiders, but the twisted deepwoods of the south-east are known as the Wildwood, where the trees are corrupt, the dangers are nightmarish and even the Wood Elves fear to go.

Theatre

• William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream refers to it as fairy land. It is ruled by Oberon and Titania.

Video Games

• In Dragon Quest V, Faerie Lea is the place where faeries live. It's also a separate world from the regular one, having its own world map, and not usually accessible by humans, most of which can't see faeries. You have to visit it two times during the plot. The first time is as a child through a magical staircase/portal, during which it's noticed that only children can see the fairies. The second time is much later, and as the plot mentioned, only your children can actually see the fairies initially. The only reason that you could actually find the Fairy World the second time around is because you're following your children, who in turn follow one of the fairies back to her own world.
• Fate/Grand Order has Faerie Britain, the location of the sixth Lostbelt. Its Alternate Timeline properties mucked about with time travel courtesy of Morgan le Fay has given it far stranger properties than any other Lostbelt in the game. It runs on Year Inside, Hour Outside whereas every other Lostbelt was in sync with normal Earth time, has a far stranger barrier than the other Lostbelts with a wall of light, and actively has a connection to Proper Human History as things and people from regular human history just somehow drift into this different timeline permanently with no way back. It's populated primarily by faeries who rule over humans, which are treated as livestock, and there is a Faerie Court ruled by Queen Morgan and the six clan heads who frequently squabble and grasp for power under her iron fist. The nation is frequently interchangeably referred to as Faerieland (in prophecy) and Faerie Britain (by various characters). It runs full tilt into Fantasy Kitchen Sink as it treats beastmen, dwarves, elves, insects, centaurs, English pictsies and the like, and typical winged faeries all as different variations of the same species. Because of how humans are generally treated, the human protagonists run into many issues with faeries who tend towards capriciously violent, starting with how the initially friendly faeries who take in some of the amnesiac heroes after getting split up in the Nameless Forest and lost their memories sees them as a delicious source of food to sustain themselves.
• Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers has Il Mheg, a fairy kingdom where several tribes of fae live in isolation from the rest of the world, under the rule of their monarch King Titania. It’s not located in Another Dimension, as it’s actually the former site of an abandoned mortal kingdom that the fairies repurposed for themselves. The local fae tribes range from helpful (the Nu Mou), to capricious (the Pixies), to malicious (the Fuath).
• Fire Emblem Heroes features two fairy realms that also mixes with the Dream Land trope. Ljósálfheimr is the realm of dreams, inhabited by the light elves, and is ruled by the Dream-King, Freyr. Dökkálfheimr on the other hand, is the realm of nightmares, inhabited by the dark elves, and is ruled by the Lady of Nightmare, Freyja. Book IV takes place in both realms, as the Order of Heroes becomes involved in the conflict between the two realms, and wake up from their neverending nightmare.
• The Chinese MMORPG Little Flower Fairy takes place on the magical continent of Labelle, which is inhabited by fairies who love flowers. Labelle also appears in the game's cartoon adaptation, but typically not as the main setting since it focuses on Xia An'an and later Xiaoai, both of whom live in the human realm.
• The Fairygrounds from Ni no Kuni.
• The fairy world of Popples in Panel de Pon.
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker, based on the Tabletop game of the same name, features this heavily, and it's eventually revealed that the "veil" between the Stolen Lands and the First World is shockingly thin, thus explaining why The Fair Folk are so numerous there.
• Runescape's Lost City of Zanaris certainly qualifies. Located on Gielinor's moon, the place is a hub of sorts for portals to other realms and provides the Fairy Ring Network for players. In addition to the densely packed forests, bluish grass and giant mushrooms, Zanaris hosts a number of oddities such as extremely intelligent barnyard animals and bands of frogs or choirs that will randomly show up next to the player. Players themselves are prone to sudden outbreaks of dancing, or turning into pigs or chickens.
• Summoners War: Sky Arena's dimension of Ellunia is a beautiful misty forest full of waterfalls and giant trees, and home to monsters like the Fairy, Pixie, Dryad, and Undine. It's also presumably ruled by a Faerie Court judging by the presence of the Fairy King and Fairy Queen monsters.
• Touhou Project's Gensokyo, the "Land of Illusions", has shades of this. Subverted in that the actual fairies present are near the bottom of the hierarchy of power.
• The Underground depths of Mt. Ebott from Undertale definitely counts, where the "Monsters" were banished to live in from the rest of the world, and which is filled to the brim with curiosities and oddities alike from their influence.
• World of Warcraft: Ardenweald in the Shadowlands is this, with benevolent faeries led by the Winter Queen who nurture dead nature spirits until they're ready to return to their world.

Web Animation

• Volume 9 of RWBY takes place in the Ever After, the show's counterpart to Wonderland from Alice in Wonderland. The residents of this land can be anything Lighter and Softer Disneyfied versions of fairy tales to the very worst of The Fair Folk to something from a Mushroom Samba, and where the rules governing everything from interpersonal relationships to life and death itself are very different from anything that Team RWBY know.

Webcomics

• The Feyn kingdom in City of Somnus is ruled by a Queen and King (she seems to be the one wearing pants in this relationship). It's technically part of Dream Land, but doesn't follow the normal Dream Land rules, and it can be accessed by special sort of portals. It's home to the Feyn, who ste... rescue children from the waking world, because they're sustained by human creativity.
• In Code Name: Hunter there are a number of RSCI agents operating in Faerie who were trapped by Food Chains and try to rescue mortals captured for the tithe to hell, including the agency's founder "Spooky" who hasn't aged in sixty years.
• Dragon Sanctuary has The Mist, home of the fairies and source of all magic on the Pearl. Humans who wander into it can be stuck there anywhere from a few hours to several weeks as time does not work there and the fairies (and any demons who happen to be there as well) love playing tricks on people. Some still go in willingly as it acts as another way to forget your problems.
• In Hexenringe, Xanadan is another dimension also known as Otherworld and is home to Xili and Unxili (based on Seelie and Unseelie). This strip shows the first glimpse of Xanadan and the Xili.
• One arc of Tales of the Questor involved dealing with an Unseelie. Meanwhile, some kids he had captured escaped from his castle in Faerie.
• Whither has at least two levels of Faerie — where Finn comes from and "the hills".

Web Original

• In the erotic Faeophobia setting, this is known as Faerie and it becomes connected to Earth in the backstory, in an event known as the Celestial Conjunction. Its inhabitants prefer to go to Earth rather than stay, because they really, really like having sex with humans.
• Faerieland from Neopets. Originally, Faerieland was located high up in the clouds, but since being subjected to a Colony Drop it's become a forest realm.
• Phantasia's Outerworld bathes in light, and has no ground.
• The SCP Foundation has the unnamed SCP in slot 4000, an extradimensional forest inhabited by strange creatures, with a complex series of rules to follow if you wish to escape alive and unchanged. The main ones are to not use or speak any name (including your own), don't be rude to any of the natives, and Stay on the Path.

Western Animation

• Xadia, the eastern side of the continent in The Dragon Prince, is where the elves and other magical beings live. They're currently ruled by the Dragon Queen due to the Dragon King's death a few months before the main story, and the passage between Xadia and the Human Kingdoms has been deliberately cut off due to conflict with the humans.
• Fairy World in The Fairly OddParents!. It's more or less a Fluffy Cloud Heaven, connected to Earth via a rainbow bridge (though, as once Lampshaded, fairies can teleport and thus rarely use it).
• Gargoyles has the island of Avalon, which seems to exist as a Pocket Dimension accessible from any body of water if you know the right spell. One hour spent there takes up a whole day in the "real" world, which is how some of the clan's old friends and family are still alive. It's the homeland of the Third Race, though when we first see it they're not around; their king, Oberon, exiled everyone for 1,001 years, a term which ends during the series. King Arthur is also sleeping there, though Elisa wakes him to defend the island from the Archmage.
• Hilda: Season 3 introduces Fairy Country; another dimension that can be entered through a Fairy Mound. The heart of this world is Fairy Isle, which is where the fairies themselves actually live and from whence all magical creatures came.
• The Kingdom of Tir Nan Og in Winx Club. It is the home of the fairies of Earth, who are ruled by Queen Morgana.

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