Imaginary Worlds - Don't Mess with the Fairies

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

Forget Tinkerbell or those Victorian paintings of spritely pixies with wings. Traditional fairy folklore is much darker and weirder. Irish storytellers Philip Byrne, Helena Byrne, Eddie Lenihan, and professor Martha Bayless explore how fairy folklore dominated Celtic culture for centuries, and why belief in fairies is not an unreasonable way of understanding the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. There's a pretty well-known news report from the BBC in the 1960s. It's about a roadway that's being built in Ireland. People who live nearby were upset because they believed that the road would go through a bush that had long been claimed by the fairies.

And the reporter does the whole thing with a straight face, although he probably thinks this is kind of absurd. And at one point he asks a woman, Have you ever seen a fairy yourself? No, I didn't, but my mother has saw one in our young days. She is now a woman of eight years of age, and she often tells us at the fireside at night that she was working a young girl in this house, and her master was an invalid sitting by the fire. She saw this little buddy coming up the road dressed in red, and she hid behind a door. She was frightened of it.

And if you're thinking, wow, people actually believed in fairies only 50 years ago? Well, in 2017, a member of the Irish Parliament named Danny Healy Ray told the Irish Times that continual problems on the roads in County Kerry were due to the fact that the roads went through ancient ferry forts. He was widely mocked, but in his defense, he said, quote, if someone told me to go out and knock a ferry fort or touch it, I would starve first. Eddie Lenahan is a professional storyteller. He lives in the west coast of Ireland. I reached him at home and you'll hear we did not have a great connection, but you can

still make out what he's saying. Now, Eddie has dedicated his life to collecting fairy stories because he's worried that they're dying out. Due to America. Due to America and American culture, which has infiltrated all aspects of life here and life everywhere, American television and American films for good as well as for bad, nobody can deny that.

And Walt Disney, of course, did an amazing amount of destruction to real fairy lore. Now, Walt Disney did not invent Tinkerbell or the idea of a fairy godmother. He just gave them a visual form that was very appealing to children. And he imprinted Tinkerbell onto just about every object that a kid could ever own and made her the corporate mascot dripping fairy dust all over the Disney logo. So, yeah, he kind of branded the fairies. all over the Disney logo. So, yeah, he kind of branded the fairies. But a lot of the really romantic notions of fairies actually came from the Victorian era.

I'm sure you've seen those old paintings and illustrations of adorable, tiny pixie women with wings. Traditional fairy stories were a lot darker and weirder. Many a time I have been told by old people now that when they were children, and stories were being told around the fire down below,

if there was ever a suspicion that they, as children, were listening above, they would quickly be told, you know, you're not supposed to be listening to this. Get out of bed. These days, adults aren't telling fairy stories around the fire while kids are trying to listen. Those stories are mostly just sitting in folklore departments. It's all very fine to have this in libraries, but it's no good there for academics. I go out and I tell the stories. The stories are no good unless they're told. I go out and I tell the stories. The stories are no good unless they're told.

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky, and today, fairy folklore. Why it's endured for centuries, and what these stories have to say to us now, in the 21st century? Imaginary Worlds is brought to you by Liberty Mutual Insurance. Everyone who owns a car or a house knows the importance of insurance. It gives you a peace of mind to know that you're protected. But you don't want to be overpaying for coverage that you're not using. Wouldn't you want an insurance provider that lets you customize

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about 12 frames for you. I found the process really easy. I liked all the frames that Home Try On suggested, and it was nice to see what these glasses would look like at home in the environment where I would normally wear them. To order your free Home Try Ons, head to warbyparker.com slash imaginary today. That's warbyparker.com slash imaginary for Warby Parker's free home try-on program. All right, so first I want to clear up a few things about fairies. As I said, they're not always these elvish little women with wings. They're usually human-sized. They could be male or female, beautiful or ugly, although they tended to go to

one extreme, either very beautiful or very ugly. They're also very capricious, and their powers are never clearly defined, which makes the punishments and the rewards that they deal out on human beings all the more surprising. And they don't exist in time and space the way that we do. Martha Bayliss is a professor of folklore at the University of Oregon, and one of her favorite stories dates back to a collection of folktales from the 12th century in England, although the story itself is probably much older. It's about a king named Hurla who was invited to a fairy wedding. And he went and it was glorious and there was feasting and light came from a place no one could see

and it was underground and everything. And then in the end, he was put on a horse with all his troops, and he processed out, and they gave him a small dog. And they 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 the fairy's wedding, which he thought was just a few days. And so he processed with his troop, and finally one person got impatient and got off his horse, and he crumbled into dust because he got off his horse before the dog jumped down. And so the tale says they're still riding around the English countryside.

They're called the Wild Hunt because the dog has not yet jumped down. And that perfectly expresses how it's beautiful in the fairy world and yet inexplicable. And the fairy had no grudge against Hurla, but yet they give you a dog and you have to stay on your horse until the dog jumps down. Why is that? I mean, why would you give someone a dog to sit on a horse? And why wait for the dog to jump down? It just doesn't make any sense. But that's what makes the fairies so intriguing and mysterious.

And so it's hard to let go of the story because you're still wondering about it. And also it means you still might see him. They're still out there in the countryside. When you see sort of waving in the trees or something, it might be King Hurla and his troop passing through. sort of waving in the trees or something. It might be King Hurla and his troop passing through. So how did fairy folklore evolve? And why did people think these stories were more than just stories? Well, Martha thinks it might have to do with the fact that Ireland has never been as heavily populated as, say, England. So a lot of the land was left undeveloped. say, England. So a lot of the land was left undeveloped.

I think one of the reasons that people thought of fairies is they saw these ancient features of the landscape, which were prehistoric tombs, which are big mounds, and you still see them in Ireland. In England, they did away with most of them. They plowed them under. But in Ireland, you can still see them. And they thought, these are obviously not natural landscape features. Who made these? And it must be a race of beings that came here before us. And they obviously had great power to make these amazing structures. Who were they? They must have been a supernatural race of beings. And that's why you have legends of fairies leading people into mounds, because they go back into the mounds. That's the entrance to the fairy world. Helena Byrne is a professional storyteller in Dublin, and she says it is very common for fairies to be deeply tied to the landscape. In fact, it's often usually a very specific mound or tree or bush. I mean, for example, there was a fairy

tree near my house and I used to go there and play now and again because the tree was really pretty in the springtime. It had lovely 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 and you can't interfere with the fairies because there will be desperate consequences if you upset them in any way. because there will be desperate consequences if you upset them in any way. Now, like many magical beings, stories of fairies often were meant to explain scientific phenomenon that people didn't understand back then. But Helena thinks the fairies can also craft a narrative that helps explain a lot of things about life or death that feel random or unfair. When I was growing up, I was told about the banshee,

the harbinger of death. She was a banshee in Irish, is a woman of the fairies. And she would inform you of a death coming up in the family by making a keening noise outside the house at night, which was like a screaming, wailing, grieving sound. And you didn't want to meddle with the banshee. And you certainly it wasn't something you wanted to hear because you knew that that meant somebody in the household was going to pass away now belief in fairies has been strong in other countries from england to

iceland to japan so why has fairy folklore been so resilient in ireland well philip burn is a storyteller in dublin and by the way, he's no relation to Helena Byrne, the Dublin storyteller we just heard from. And Philip says, you know, for most of Irish history, they didn't have well-funded cultural institutions or even news media. I mean, we only got television in Ireland in 1962. Anyone born before that would have come up with story and that was a traditional way of entertaining you. You know you went from house to house and people told stories. These were people that were incredibly important to Irish culture. They were almost like journalists. They would move from village to village and bring stories from the other town and as well we didn't have

electricity until the 1960s. So, like I always say, it's all well and good to say you don't believe in the fairies until you're walking down a dark country lane at night and you hear a strange noise in the bushes, and then you'll start to second-guess yourself. What she means by that, of course, is that electricity wasn't widespread. It was limited to people who could afford it. And she says that class is another reason why fairy folklore was so popular in rural areas. What was interesting about our relationship with the fairies was that usually the fairies were better dressed.

They had these incredible parties, these mad hoolies and incredible food, incredible wine. And these were things that Irish people generally didn't have. I guess it does reflect Irish society in a sense, but in the sense that the fairies had the opposite of what we had. We were the poor ones and they were the ones who had the grand, magnificent homes and lifestyles and food. And, Philip says, there is more to these stories than just lifestyles of the magically rich. And, Philip says, there is more to these stories than just lifestyles of the magically rich.

If you take any town where you or I live, and I ask you the question, what keeps you from doing wrong? Just, you're an honest man, you don't do things. But, you know, there's a police station and courts and jails just to make sure that you stay on the right path. Now, you go into very small rural communities. Those structures aren't there. So this belief in this fairy world actually provided a social control. If you did what the norms of the community were, whatever those norms happened to be, then either you'd be left alone by the fairies

or they might even look after you. But if you didn't go along, if you didn't observe those norms of that community, then, well, the fairies will sort you out. It was incredibly disrespectful to even refer to them as the fairies. You had to refer to them as the other folk or the good people.

The other kind, the good folk or the good people. The other kind, the good crowd, the gentle people. A lot of the stories of the fairy world had a very useful purpose. That's why Philip likes to tell this particular tale, which dates back to the early 19th century. And it is a story where the fairies are very small. For this one, you need to know that the days of the week in Irish. So starting at Monday, they loan, they marth, they caidin, they derdin, they hena, they saern, or they daunig, seven days of the week. By the way, this is a pretty long story,

but I'm going to play the whole thing because it gives a good sense of Philip's craft as a storyteller. So there was a chap called Larry Lushmore. And Larry Lushmore lived in Kerr down Tipperary. And he was a really nice guy. Good form all the time. Never bad form. He was a basket maker and suit gun chair maker by trade. And the unique thing about Larry

was that he had a very, very bad curvature of his spine. So walking was very difficult for him. And one night he was walking back from care to a place called Capa where he lived. On his

way he had to pass a fairy mound at Knock Grafton. So he stopped to rest for a while and just kind of you know you can imagine if you have that disability walking any long distance would be very tiring. And as he was lying up against the bank he heard coming from it seemed to be inside the mound, he heard, De Lund, De Mart, De Lund, De Mart, De Lund, De Mart, De Lund, De Mart, which is Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday. And he grabbed his way up to the side of the bank and got to the top and looking in, and there down in front of him

was this gathering of hundreds of thousands of the good folk. And they were all singing, And he kind of got into the rhythm of it. Decade in. No silence. The king of the fairies stood in front of him and said, You up there, get down here now. What have you done?

For centuries we've been singing our song, The Loon, the Mart, the Loon, the Mart. And you come in along and you add another day, Day 13, Wednesday. Oh, what are you at? And then the King thought for a moment and said, Actually, the Loon, the Mart, the Loon, the mark, the loon, the mark, the carian. That actually sounds better than what we were doing.

You obviously have a great appreciation of our culture. Thank you very much for improving on what we're doing. I'm going to reward you. And with that, 20 of the fairies jumped on his back. you and with that 20 of the fairies jumped on his back and before you could say before you could say

as fast as the march went the hump was taken off his back and for the first time in his life Larry began to straighten up slowly creakily higher, straighter straighter, straighter and straighter,

until for the first time in his life, he was able to look the world in its eye. And the king then gave him beautiful clothes, and the pockets were full of gold and jewels and riches of all sorts. And Larry Madoff didn't change his lifestyle one little bit. Still was a basket maker, but needless

to say, the story of his transformation, his cure, travelled the length and breadth of the country. And there was a chap down in Waterford in a place called Lismore, a fellow called Jack Madden. Now, the only similarity between Jack Madden and Larry Lushmore was that Jack Madden had a hump on his back.

He was a mean, miserable, bad form, lazy. Nothing was right in the world. Everything was wrong. And he just was a real pain in the butt but needless to say he heard what had happened to laurie lushmore so he said to himself if your man got all that for adding one day to the song just think what I might get by adding two or three days. So he made his way up to Knock Raft and the moon was shining and he nestled in under the shelter of the mound. And sure enough, he heard coming from the center of the mound,

from the centre of the mound Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar

Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar

Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar

Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar

Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar

Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar

Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar

Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dillun de mar Dill The loon, the mart, the cadon, Augusta Dairdain, Augusta Hina, Augusta Sauron. Silence. The king of the fairies said,

You up there, get down here now. Yes, the jackpot. Yes, your majesty. Yes, your majesty. I'm coming down now, best I can. Happier he knew he was going to get his reward. And the king of the fairies said to him, What have you done?

Adding on, Dairdain heen, day saithr. You have completely ruined ourselves. You clearly have no appreciation for our culture and our music. I know what's happened. You've heard about Jack Madden. And you think you're going to get your reward. Well, let me tell you, my good man, you are going to get your reward. And with that, 20 of the fairies took the hump that had been on the back of Larry Lushmore and added it to the hump that was on Jack Madden's back.

And he was sent on his way even more bent over than he had been beforehand. You can imagine that story being told to children. The lessons are clear. Your physical appearance is not important. What matters is what's in your heart and how you treat other people. And Philip says, you know, adults that did not believe in fairies understood that these stories were useful, not just in teaching lessons to children,

but these stories could also protect children as well. You know, there's so much in the media today about pedophilia and child abuse and all the rest of it. Rather than saying to someone, don't go near

that person because of what A, B, and C, if you make them a monster or they're from the fairy world and they're not good, you can keep the kids safe. Now, the main authority for most of Irish history has been the Catholic Church. And in the minds of most people, fairy folklore existed side by side with Christianity. Martha Bayliss says the church has not always been okay with that situation. Well, I think the bad news for the fairies

was the 1430s, because that's when the church really started feeling threatened by supernatural creatures. They'd always been kind of wary and disapproving, but at that point they decided, we've had enough of this. And it just sort of caught fire. And people thought, we've had a lot of bad luck. It's got to be fairies and it's got to be witches. And so that's when the witch persecutions began and also the fairy persecutions. People who believed in fairies, people who said they were fairies, people who talked approvingly about the fairies.

The good news about that is that a lot of villages tried to eliminate all their magic. And so they would identify some witch and they would kill her, which of course is horrific. But then their bad luck didn't go away and they said, you know what, this is hokum. This doesn't actually work. Witches probably don't even exist. Never mind. And we like the fairies. Eventually the fairy purges died out,

but there was an infamous story from 1895. There was a woman named Bridget Cleary. She'd gone through these very sudden mood swings. It's possible she had a nervous breakdown, we're not sure. But her husband and her brother thought that she couldn't possibly be Bridget anymore. She was a fairy changeling, impersonating Bridget. And so to get the fairy out, impersonating Bridget. And so to get the fairy out, they burned her alive.

Of course, the story of Bridget Cleary, essentially she was murdered by her husband because he believed that she was a changeling. And the only way to get his actual wife back was to push out the fairy, almost like an exorcism, essentially, which just went to the extreme. Now, one of the reasons why we know about this tragedy is because the trial was a sensation, and some British journalists and politicians used it as fodder to argue that the Irish should not

be given their independence, not to a people who still believe in fairies on the verge of the 20th century. But Philip is proud of the fact that this did not turn the Irish against their own folklore. Bridget Cleary actually became incorporated into a children's song with the lyric, are you a witch or are you a fairy or are you the wife of Michael Cleary? And in the 1930s, not long after Ireland finally gained its independence, the new government set aside money to create a folklore commission that's still active today. And I have no idea how much was actually used, probably not very much. But at a time when there was really no money for anything,

I just think it's a real underscore of the national importance that's attached to folklore. of the national importance that's attached to folklore. But it was modern media that finally made the fairies an endangered species. They say that when electricity came to the country, the fairies left. That's why Eddie Lenahan has been collecting fairy stories for decades, often from the oldest people that he knows. I visited an old man for over 26 years. He died 10 days ago, aged 100.

And he met them. He met them, he told me. And of course, my first question to him was, naturally enough, what do they look like? I said. And he sat a moment, and he looked at me. And he said, the person sitting beside you could be one of them and you wouldn't know it. Now, when you think about it, that's a frightening answer. Yes, you heard that right. Eddie believes that the other crowd, the good folk, are real.

Because I have always maintained, you see, that, illogical-ish, the theories can't exist. Well, then, God can't exist either, because they're both of the other world's faith. And sometimes people get angry with me when I say that. How dare you? Are you again foolish? No. I go to church every Sunday. But I would always say that, how dare you? Are you again foolish? No. I've got a church every Sunday. But I would always say that if you deny one,

you have to be logical then and deny the other. It stands to reason. If the fairies can't exist, well then, God can't exist either. Now, belief in fairies is on the wane, but there has been a resurgence of fairies in fantasy novels. I mean, my first introduction to authentic fairy folklore was in the 2003 novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark. And in the last 20 years, there's been dozens of other novels about fairies, with more and more coming out all the time. Now, it's not really clear why this trend is happening, but I did talk with a book editor who worked with writers like Susanna Clarke to get the fairy folklore right. And this editor

has a theory that fairies represent the natural world. And when we fear that nature is in danger from industrialization, like in the late 19th, early 20th century when all those fairy paintings were done by Victorians, or now with climate change, writing about fairies and imagining fairies can give the earth a voice. But what I like about fairy stories is that they're morality tales, but they're not always black and white. I mean, traditional fairy folklore allows you to be comfortable with the gray areas in life because the fairies are unknowable. So believing in them means that you can live with the idea that you're just never going to understand some things in the universe and you're not supposed to understand them. And if you look at a lot of these fairy stories, the lesson is usually be careful before jumping into situations that you don't understand.

Don't barge into foreign cultures thinking you know what's best for them. Just respect the traditions and the practices of the other crowd. That's a pretty good credo to live by. Honestly, I wish more people subscribed to that philosophy. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Eddie Lenahan, Martha Bayliss,

Helena Byrne, and Philip Byrne, who says that if you think the fairy stories are kind of edgy, you should check out the ancient myths that predate the fairies. I mean, when you try and follow

some of these classic Irish myths, the amount of intermarrying and bonking your sister's cousin's brother, whatever, I mean, it would make racy reading today. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and ImagineWorldsPod. My website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.