Fairies: The Myths, Legends, & Lore
by Skye Alexander
A pocket-sized hardcover field guide to the Good Folk, pulling folklore, myth, and poetry about fairies from across many cultures into one illustrated volume. Skye Alexander writes for working witches as much as for the curious, and this book sits where those audiences overlap: grounded in the stories people actually told, with enough history to know where those stories came from.
What you get
- Hardcover, 224 pages
- Published 2014 by Adams Media
- Roughly 7.6 × 5.7 inches, about three-quarters of a pound
- Illustrated throughout, with hundreds of illustrations per the publisher
- ISBN 9781440573057
What’s inside
Alexander gathers fairy accounts from traditional folklore, mythology, and literature, along with the poetry that kept those beliefs in circulation. The book covers the powers fairies were credited with, the trouble they were known for, and the history behind belief in them.
Two of the better-known threads it follows are the Cottingley fairies, a set of photographs taken by two English girls in 1917 that convinced thousands of people, Arthur Conan Doyle among them; and the fairy court of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Puck and his company shaped how English speakers have pictured fairies ever since. The Cottingley photographs were later admitted by the girls themselves, in the 1980s, to have been staged with paper cutouts. It is one of the clearest case studies anywhere in how belief, wishful thinking, and early photography collided.
Provenance & tradition
Fairy belief runs deepest in the folklore of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the rest of the British Isles, where the fae were less sweet garden sprites and more a neighboring people to be treated with caution: given milk and bread, never thanked carelessly, never followed off the path. Germanic, Scandinavian, and continental traditions carry their own close relatives in elves, land-wights, and household spirits. A book like this provides a doorway into that wider lore.
Skye Alexander is the author of more than thirty fiction and nonfiction books, including The Modern Guide to Witchcraft, The Modern Witchcraft Spell Book, and The Only Tarot Book You’ll Ever Need. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and she appeared in the Discovery Channel special Secret Stonehenge.
Who this is for
- Witches and pagans building a working relationship with the fae, land spirits, or garden spirits
- Readers of folklore and mythology who want a broad, readable overview
- Fans of Shakespeare, Victorian fairy painting, and fairy-tale literature
- Anyone curious about the Cottingley fairy hoax
- A gift for the person in your life who leaves offerings at the bottom of the garden
