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Transcript of Don't Mess with the Fairies

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Transcript of Don't Mess with the Fairies 1 There was a well-known news report from the BBC in the 1960s. A roadway was being built in Ireland. People who lived nearby were upset because the road would go a bush that had long been claimed by the fairies. And the reporter does the whole thing with a straight face, but he clearly thinks this is fascinating and absurd. At one point, he asks a woman: Have you seen a fairy yourself? No I didn’t but my mother did so, she’s a woman 80 years of age, tells us she was working in this house and her master was an invalid, she saw little body up the road dressed in red. She hid behind a door. She was frightened by it. That was 50 years ago. In 2017, a member of Irish parliament named Danny Healy-Rae told the Irish Times that continual problems on the roads in County Kerry were due to the fact that the roads went through fairy forts. He was widely mocked but in his defense, he said, quote “if someone told me to go out and knock a fairy fort or touch it, I would starve first.” Eddie Lenihan is a professional storyteller who lives on the West coast of Ireland. I reached him at his home. As you’ll hear we did not have a great connection but you can still make out what he’s saying. Eddie has dedicated his life to collecting fairy stories and beliefs because he’s worried that they’re dying out. EDDIE: And I will say due to America. Due to America and American culture which has infiltrated all aspects of life here and life everywhere. American television films and for good as well as for bad – nobody can deny that. And Walt Disney did an amazing amount of destruction to fairy lore. Now, Walt Disney didn’t invent Tinkerbell or fairy godmothers. He just gave them a visual form that was appealing to children, and imprinted Tinkerbell onto every object a kid could ever own – and made her the corporate mascot dripping fairy dust all over the Disney logo. But a lot of these very romantic notions of fairies actually came from the Victorians. I’m sure you’ve seen those old illustration of adorable, tiny, pixie women with wings. 2 Personally that version of the fairies never appealed to me. I became fascinated by traditional fairy folklore when I learned that it was much darker, and weirder EDDIE: Any time I have been told by old people now when they were children and stories were told by the fire down below, if there was a suspicion that children were about, they were quickly told – get to bed! You’re not to be listening to this! Get to bed! These days, adults don’t tell fairy stories around the fire while kids try to listen. Those stories are usually just sitting in folklore departments. That’s why Eddie Lenihan became a professional storyteller. EDDIE: It’s all very fine to have this in libraries, in folklore departments but it’s no good there for academics. I go out and I tell the stories; the stories are no good unless they’re not told. Every time I tell one of these stories, I think of the person who told me that story and that person is not dead because I’m telling their life. You’re listening to imaginary worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky. Today fairy folklore: why it endured for centuries, and what these stories have to say to us now, in the 21st century. BREAK First, a few things about fairies. As I said before, they’re not always spritely little ladies with wings. They’re usually human sized. They could be male or female, beautiful or ugly – although they tended to be either very beautiful or very ugly. They’re also very capricious. Their powers are never clearly defined, which makes the punishments and rewards they deal out all the more surprising. And they don’t exist in time and space the way that we do. Martha Bayless is a professor of folklore at the University of Oregon. A favorite story of hers dates back to a collection of folk tales from 12th 3 century England – although this story is probably much older. It’s about a king named Hurla who was invited to a fairy wedding. MARTHA: And he went, it was glorious feasting light from place no one could see, underground and in the end put on horse with his troops and they gave him a small dog and said don’t get down from your horse until the dog jumps down. And so he traveled out and he found that 200 years had passed since he had gone into fairy wedding which he thought was a few days, and so he processed with troop and finally one person got impatient got off his horse and he crumbled into dust because he got off his horse before the dog jumped down. The tale says they’re still riding around the English countryside; they’re called the Wild Hunt because dog has not yet jumped down. And that perfectly expresses how it’s beautiful in the fairy world but inexplicable, the fairy had no grudge against Hurla, but yet they give you dog and you have to stay on horse until the dog jumps down. Why is that? Why would you give someone a dog sit on a horse? And why wait for the dog to jump down? It doesn’t make any sense. But that’s what makes the fairies so mysterious. MARTA: And so it’s hard to let go of the story because you’re still wondering about it and you still might see him, they’re still out there in the countryside, when you see waving in trees, might be King Hurla and his troops passing through. So, how did fairy folklore evolve? And why did people think these stories were more than just stories into the modern age? Martha thinks it has to do with the fact that Ireland has never been very heavily populated, so the land is less developed. MARTHA: I think one of the reasons people thought about fairies is they saw these ancient featuring of the landscape which were prehistoric tombs which were big mounds, and you still see them in Ireland, in England did away with them, but in Ireland see them, these are obviously not natural landscapes, who made these? And they obviously must be a race of beings that came before us, and they had great power to make these amazing structures, who were they? They must have been a supernatural race of beings. They must have been the fairies. And that’s why you have legends of fairies leading people into mounds; they go back into mounds because that’s the entrance to the fairy world. 4 Helena (hel-EE-na) Byrne is professional storyteller in Dublin. And she says another common factor with fairies is that they’re always tied to the landscape, and usually a very specific mound, tree or bush. HELENA: There was a fairy tree near my house, and I used to go there and play now and again because the tree was pretty in the Spring, it had white blossoms on it, and when I told my mother where I had been going she had a heart attack, and said you can’t go there, that’s a fairy tree, you can’t interfere with the fairies because there will be desperate consequences if you upset them in any way. Like many magical stories of fairies were often meant to explain scientific phenomena that people didn’t understand back then. But Helena thinks the fairies also explain the randomness of life – and death. HELENA: When I was growing up, I heard about the banshee, the harbinger of death. Banshee in Irish is a woman of the fairies, and she’s inform you about a death in the family by making a keening noise outside house at night, screaming, wailing, grieving sound, you didn’t want to meddle with banshee, didn’t want to hear because it meant someone in the household would pass away. Belief in fairies has been strong in other countries from England to Iceland to Japan. So why has fairy folklore has been so resilient in Ireland? Philip Byrne is a storyteller in Dublin – he’s no relation to Helena Byrne the other storyteller in Dublin. And Philip says, for most of Irish history, they didn’t have well-funded cultural institutions or news media. PHILIP: We only got television in Ireland in 1962. Anyone born before that would’ve come up with story. And that was the traditional way of entertaining, you went from house to house and people told stories. HELENA: These were people that were incredibly important to Irish culture, they were almost like journalists. They would move from village to village and move to the other town. And as well, didn’t have electricity until the 1960s, I always say it’s well and good to say you don’t believe I the fairies and you’re walking down a dark country road at night and you hear a noise in the bushes and you start to second guess yourself. 5 Of course she means electricity wasn’t widespread. Until the ‘60s, it was limited the people who could afford it.
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