While most studies of fairies believe they originated within Celtic mythology, Diane Purkiss makes a case for the harbingers of birth, marriage and death of ancient Greek and Mesopotamian cultures as the dangerous visitors that our idea of fairies grew from. The stillborn ghosts named Kubu, the childless Lamia that turns her loneliness to hunger and the Nymphs who would keep a boy ever young and in (a) paradise if he were to stay with her forever, never living his own life.
Fairies are tricky types to pin down and they next appear in medieval stories then onto two specific cases during the Scottish witch trials in the 16th and 17th centuries that continue to carry the weighty power of the taboos that fairies are used describe. The Good People are then absorbed into literature, the most famous example being, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream and on to further degradations. Spielberg, Shakespeare and his sanitised Puck and The Disney Corporation, along with most Victorian representations of fairies get a deserved drubbing.
One can see why, Purkiss has a real passion for the otherness of older fairy lore. In the beginning they inhabited the darkness of death and all the unknown places, they are the dead, the rich as seen by the poor and servant as seen by the rich, they are Catholics to the Protestants and the indigenous peoples to the imperial rulers. They wait at the edges of the unknown, be it older ruins, ancient forests and new lands but they also are at the borders of the emotional unknown - birth, sexual awakening and death. She points out constantly in the book that "fairy narratives always gather in whatever place is not home".
Briefly toward the end of the book the author makes the comparison between original fairy encounters and aliens abduction and she admits she is not the first to do so. She does, however, convincingly evoke the real horror and power that these encounters bring with them. She says at the beginning of the book "the human mind cannot bear very much blankness - where we do not know, we invent, and what we invent reflects our fears of what we do not know." Space is the biggest blank we so far know and the fairies have found their home there.
The tone can get over ponderous occasionally but the content is always thought provoking.
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