Fairies and fae and the like

[ratherastory]

Hey flist,

Anyone here know what they're talking about WRT fairies/the fae/etc? I am looking for some good reference books (or websites, that works too) that can give me more than a bare-bones overview of the various different types of small folk out there. The whole seelie/unseelie thing, everything from brownies to the hierarchies in the courts. All that stuff that I sort of know about but only enough to get myself into trouble.

Help?

Comments

[ratherastory.livejournal.com]

Yay, thank you!

[bellatemple]

Okay, so, still at work, so I can't peer directly at my folklore collection, but here are some I can think of off the top of my head:

I got started on Abbey Lubbers, Banshees, and Boggarts by Katharine Mary Briggs. That one's out of print, I think (I have a very old copy I stole from my parents), and Amazon has a range on it from $195.00 to $0.01, so availability might be iffy. It's more of an encyclopedia of fairy beings than a collection of stories or a narrative of any kind, but it's useful information. Katharine Briggs did a lot of British Isles (and possibly European) folklore work and publishing in the seventies and eighties -- you might be able to find them at a library.

W.B. Yeats is one of the earlier reputable collectors of BI folklore that I've heard of. He relied on the legends of Oisín for some of his epic poetry, and also published just a flat out collection of Irish folklore. You can find these retold in pretty much any "Irish folktales" or "Irish Wonder Tales" anthology out there on the market, but I have a soft spot for Yeats, and I suspect much of the modern retellings are based on his work.

Brian Froud is one of my favorite "less hardcore" folklorists -- he does fantastic illustrative work, and his book "Faeries" is what I primarily based my big bang on. It does well as a very loose, general overview of some of the lore, providing geographical context and citing examples from earlier folklore texts and stories as he goes along.

Jane Yolen has done a lot of work in folklore -- these are less about fairies, particularly (those are a very European concept, though a lot of cultures have myths about household spirits and creatures like brownies or boggarts or gnomes) than they are about specific folk narratives (ie. Jack tales and the like), but I love Jane Yolen, so she gets a mention.

For online resources, Wikipedia actually does very well on folklore, and providing overviews of different legends for the more popular characters and races of fairy and fairy-like creatures. There's also Encyclopedia Mythica, though I've had limited success in navigating that one when I was looking for something very specific, and I don't know how well it'll work for general perusal.

And, of course, one cannot neglect works of fantasy in fiction. There's a fine tradition of using another author's work as a jumping off point for research -- I wouldn't know anywhere near as much as I do about Russian folklore, for instance, were it not for Esther Freisner and her Gnome Man's Land trilogy. Tanya Huff does some interesting work with this, too -- those two both work as just general "fun books to read" if you're looking for something more academic.

I frequently find myself in the mythology and folklore section at my local bookstore just picking up random things to flip through, and this can be a great way to pick up general knowledge, though as I said in my earlier comment, the books are not terribly likely to agree with each other. That's part of what makes Wikipedia as good as it is on this topic -- they tend to collect the different versions in one spot, for you to compare and pick out the details that work best for you.