Explore Fairy Traditions

Explore Fairy Traditions examines fairy belief through legends, ballads and testimony from Britain and Ireland. Jeremy Harte considers changelings, brownies, household familiars, demon lovers, the fairy host and abduction into the Otherworld, tracing how these motifs change across time and place. Accounts associated with W. B. Yeats and Sir Walter Scott appear alongside older and less familiar traditions.

The book also asks how people learned about fairies, where such beings were believed to dwell and whether the stories reflected experience, imagination or inherited belief. Its thematic chapters consider marriage, work, illness, death, rejection, seduction and anger, presenting fairy lore as a body of traditions bound closely to domestic life, social tensions and the landscape.