Chapter 36. Fairies from Walter Map to European folklore

Abstract

Fairies feature widely in medieval literature, but their appearances in medieval Latin texts provide a special window onto belief in fairies. Since the Latin vocabulary for magical beings in general was largely borrowed from Classical sources, Latin can muddy the semantics of fairy taxonomy. But Latin provides a view that cannot be duplicated by vernacular texts: legal charges and historical accounts, largely in Latin, reveal how fairies were thought to be real, and people’s interaction with them worthy of sanction or of historical notice. Furthermore, many of the earliest attestations of influential themes and motifs first appear in Latin texts, and demonstrate the degree to which stories moved between Latin and the vernaculars, between genres, and between oral and written forms. Latin texts preserve the kind of fairy lore that underlies more modern treatments of fairies, while also serving as testimony to sophisticated ways of thinking about fairies that would otherwise have faded from view.