‘Elves and Fairies’ by Matthias Egeler review

Matthias Egeler is one of the leading scholars of Icelandic elf belief writing in English, and his history of elves and fairies accordingly starts and ends in Iceland, an island that has become indelibly associated with belief in elves in German and other European cultures, in much the same way as Ireland is associated with belief in fairies in the anglophone world. Since the publication of Diane Purkiss’ Troublesome Things (2000) it has become apparent that writing a complete history of fairy belief is virtually impossible; not only does such an endeavour run up against questions of definition (what is a fairy/elf, anyway?), but the geographical range of such beliefs is too large for a comprehensive approach to be successful (Purkiss’ book concentrated largely on Britain). Egeler’s approach is to use the phenomenon of Icelandic elf belief, ancient and modern, to frame an account of the cultural history of fairies. This is a refreshing approach, since it is all too easy for such works to fall into the trap of being little more than a history of fairies in Britain and Ireland.

The reason for this is the vast volume of material on British and Irish fairy belief compared to other nations, the intense attention that has been paid to fairies in this region, and the huge cultural success of British and Irish fairies as global cultural exports. It can thus be difficult for writers less discerning than Egeler to see past the monumental influence of the British and Irish fairy to the fact that belief in them is a broader, older, and more complex phenomenon than the images initially conjured by the word fairy might suggest. Wisely, Egeler chooses not to get bogged down in questions of definition, although he is clear that the huldufólk (‘hidden people’) of Icelandic folklore are supernatural co-inhabitants of the landscape. These inhabitants might be in possession of a little enchantment and a bit more wealth than their human counterparts, and they can be horribly vengeful; but they are essentially just neighbours who only occasionally become visible. The question at the heart of Egeler’s book is how these elves of folklore came to be transformed into the Icelandic ‘tourist fairy’ now found in the average Reykjavík giftshop, who is likely to be a tiny, cute figure with wings and perhaps a hat made of petals. Answering that question takes Egeler to medieval, early modern, and modern Britain and Ireland and then, finally, back to contemporary Iceland.

A key theme that emerges is the movement from the rural to the urban fairy, which is not so much a shift of location (for, after all, fairies largely remain associated with wild places and the countryside) as a shift in the status of the people talking about fairies. Whereas the rural fairy is the proletarian fairy of folk belief, the urban fairy is the fairy of the bourgeois (or indeed aristocratic) imagination of folklorists, artists, and writers. This shift is accompanied by another transition: from the fairy as an experience to be feared to the fairy as a character in fantasy fiction – and, again, to the fairy of alternative spirituality, who largely arises from fantasy fiction rather than from folklore. This new fairy may also be met and experienced, but its appearance is benign, and usually welcome. In Egeler’s telling of this history, the folkloric rural fairy essentially faded from view once the folklore collectors of the 19th century did their work, to be replaced by the urban fairy of imagination. In Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and elsewhere the folkloric fairy existed, in Egeler’s view, for certain specific purposes: to make sense of, and psychologically process, infant mortality or disability (for instance), or simply to people an empty landscape with neighbours in order to mitigate feelings of loneliness.

Egeler’s functionalist approach is, for this reader, the most problematic aspect of his book. I do not think that functional explanations of what fairies ‘do’ in a community can possibly account for the richness of belief surrounding them. Something more is going on than just a mechanism for making sense of certain difficult aspects of the world. However, Egeler’s is a line of interpretation with a long and distinguished pedigree. Elves and Fairies is rich in its account of the fairy theme in British and Irish art and literature, right up to the present day, and it is surely the best account since Purkiss’ Troublesome Things. It is a shame – as Egeler himself acknowledges – that the book does not range further afield than Britain, Ireland, and Iceland.

Elves and Fairies leaves us with some valuable insights. One of these is Egeler’s observation that a current of unpleasantness in cultural portrayals of fairies lingered for longer than most people think – and certainly into J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and its spin-offs. Egeler rightly identifies the Theosophists, not artists or writers, as the culprits in de-fanging the fairies, by portraying them as tiny, insect-like beings primarily responsible for tending to plant-life. However, he makes an especially astute observation when he notes that the fightback against the 20th-century ‘twee-ification’ of fairies created its own problems. J.R.R. Tolkien successfully brought back elves from the brink of ‘flower fairy’ banality, but at the cost of making them characters in fantasy fiction. Whatever his own views, Tolkien’s fightback only served to push fairies further from reality.

Elves and Fairies leaves the reader with the lingering question of whether the traditional fairy of folklore is gone forever – or could it ever be recoverable? Have fairies become stock characters of literary and artistic fantasy with no hope of breaking back into reality? I suspect that Matthias Egeler would take a pessimistic view: the fairies of folklore really are gone. Again, I am not sure I agree; but this book is the first to grapple seriously with the question for a number of decades, and makes for worthwhile and engaging reading.

• Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld
  Matthias Egeler
  Yale University Press, 256pp, £20
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Francis Young is a historian of religion and folklore.